Advancements in GTK+-flavored Web Engines

Already back from the Berlin GTK+ Hackfest (managed to not blog even once from there, a bit lame). All the awesomeness that happened has been covered by our fantastic hackers, so I’ll focus an what happened in the ”Web Room”, where hacking on webkit/gtk+ and epiphany with tko, alp and chpe went on all week long.

We did some great advancements that week: we landed the pango font backend, the soup http backend, more progress on the plugin patch (first time I personally see youtube working on webkit/gtk), plans for glib-based unicode management, better windows support for the GTK+ port, a long nice chat with Company about native flash integration with swfdec… we also had some long discusions about the future of Epiphany, and an announcement will be made soon 🙂

By the end of the week I decided to get started with the cookies support for the soup backend. When I had a working parser (based on code from the old gtk-webcore, really nice) I decided to contact Dan Winship to talk about my plans. As it usually happens, he already had most of the work done, which he kindly published on a branch (see the bug). Around this point I got hit by libc ‘happenings‘ in Ubuntu, and I spent most of the remaining hackfest time restoring my laptop.

Anyway, already on lovely Finnish soil and while waiting for a movie in a nice cafeteria near Kamppi I fixed some bugs in the libsoup code for cookies, massaged some APIs and added enough glue in WebKit to get this going:

I Has Cookies

When we finish and commit this and get authentication going (integrated with GNOME Keyring of course!) I think I’ll switch to it as main browser; brave souls from all over are of course welcome to do the same so we can find and fix as many bugs as possible before 2.24. Exciting times ahead!

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5 Responses to Advancements in GTK+-flavored Web Engines

  1. Kalle Vahlman says:

    Yay for webkit-ephy!

    I’ve been using it as my “main” browser already (ie. it’s the default browser for launched links and I only switch back to beta-ff3 when flash or something else missing forces me to).

    It’s rocking! I only wish I can find some time in the near future to help out with it.

  2. knipknap says:

    What I find way more interesting than a browser’s rendering backend is it’s Javascript component. I am wondering whether there is an equivalent to Mozilla’s “Screaming Monkey” project, that will make it possible to use other languages, such as Python or C++, to replace Javascript.

  3. anon says:

    Cookies! Talk about innovation.

    Wow. I can’t wait for the next major leap.

    Bookmarks FTW!

  4. Awesome! Nice to see Dan’s hard work to clean up the mess I left him in libsoup finally get some credit 😉

  5. Pingback: Iocane powder » Blog Archive » Epiphany ♥ WebKit

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