Planet Igalia WebKit

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #65

Igalia WebKit Team — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:39:42 +0000

Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from May 11 to May 18.

For this week we have quite a collection of news! Ranging a variety of improvements to dialog.requestClose(), rendering fixes, the new Skia-based compositor enabled by default, and proper versioning and improvements to the WebKit Container SDK, there's news for everyone.

Cross-Port 🐱

Update the closeWatcher.requestClose() function to no longer require user activation, aligning with the spec.

Implement actually moving the node in the DOM when moveBefore() is called.

Fix handling of nested calls to dialog.requestClose().

Add missing preliminary checks to dialog.requestClose().

Graphics 🖼️

Fixed an issue where background images were unexpectedly stretched, primarily affecting the reCAPTCHA checkmark image.

The new compositor using Skia API instead of TextureMapper is now enabled by default.

Infrastructure 🏗️

Added opt-in auto-enter for the WebKit Container SDK - the GTK/WPE wrapper scripts (build-webkit, run-webkit-tests, run-api-tests, etc.) now relaunch themselves inside a pinned wkdev-build podman container when WEBKIT_CONTAINER_SDK_ENABLE_AUTOENTER=1 is set. A new .wkdev-sdk-version file at the repo root pins the SDK image, so the image can be bumped in a PR and validated through EWS. Without the flag, wrappers run on the host exactly as before.

Introduced a proper version scheme for the wkdev-sdk image provided by the WebKit Container SDK so consumers can pin to a known revision. The :latest tag, the WKDEV_SDK_TAG/--tag override and the tag/* branch mechanism are replaced by a single machine-checkable format <major>.<minor>-v<count>-<gitsha> (e.g. 2.53-v1-916f9ef), where <major>.<minor> tracks the WebKitGTK/WPE release cycle, v<count> is the per-cycle SDK build counter, and <gitsha> traces the image back to its source commit. wkdev-create gains a --version switch (full or bare <major>.<minor>). wkdev-update supports updating from latest tag to the new versioning scheme, just run it on your host to update to the latest SDK.

Switched the wkdev-build container from a persistent container to ephemeral podman run --rm --init per invocation. This removes the manual podman rm step necessary whenever container creation arguments changed (which the tooling was not handling by itself), the first-run recursive-chown cost, and the podman start step after host reboots.

That’s all for this week!

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #64

Igalia WebKit Team — Mon, 11 May 2026 20:04:43 +0000

Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from May 4 to May 11.

This week we have a bag of exciting updates, such as fixes to crashes, better YouTube playback, a handful of advancements to WebXR, and the development releases of WebKitGTK and WPE WebKit 2.53.2.

Cross-Port 🐱

If the filesystem runs out of space while the NetworkProcess is writing into its network cache, the process will crash with SIGBUS. This would surface to users as the "Internal error fired from WebLoaderStrategy.cpp(559) : internallyFailedLoadTimerFired" error, and would be handled by re-spawning another NetworkProcess that would similarly fail.

This was addressed by using fallocate, if available, to reserve the required size. If fallocate fails to reserve, the NetworkProcess will skip caching, avoiding the crash. If fallocate is not available, the existing behaviour is preserved.

Networking 📶

Networking support, including the libsoup HTTP library.

libsoup now supports the zstd compression encoding.

Multimedia 🎥

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.

getUserMedia() and getDisplayMedia() support should work better thanks to a couple PipeWire related fixes.

Playback of some YouTube videos (usually at low framerate) has been fixed. Eventually a better solution will involve supporting edit lists in the GStreamer MSE backend.

Graphics 🖼️

A crash when accessing the diagnostics webkit://gpu page was fixed, making sure we handle the case where libGL.so.1 or libOpenGL.so.0 are missing.

Fixed missing glyph before ZWJ/ZWNJ if no font is found for the cluster.

The WebXR implementation based on OpenXR has gained support for quad, equirect and cylinder layers.

Releases 📦️

The second unstable releases for the current development cycle have been published: WebKitGTK 2.53.2 and WPE WebKit 2.53.2. Development releases are intended is to gather early feedback on upcoming changes, and as such issue reports are welcome in Bugzilla.

That’s all for this week!

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #63

Igalia WebKit Team — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:05:47 +0000

Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from April 8 to April 28.

After a short hiatus, we return with a galore of releases, more Web Platform improvements, tricky tweaks to thread scheduling, new niceties in the Web Inspector, and new build options to take advantage of compiler optimizations.

Cross-Port 🐱

Delivered a number of changes that have strengthened WPE WebKit and WebKitGTK's behaviour around real-time thread promotion and demotion:

Real-time soft and hard limits are now set both when sched_setscheduler or D-Bus based paths are taken (i.e. through rtkit or the corresponding XDG portal), with the soft limit set at 80% of the hard one.
This means WebKit now has time to gracefully handle SIGXCPU, and will do it in an async-signal-safe manner.
Additionally, the NetworkProcess' Cache Storage thread is now defined as QOS::UserInitiated on Linux, which no longer maps to real-time priority. Its earlier mapping to real-time was previously reported as a NetworkProcess crash in the logs (it was in practice a kernel-delivered SIGKILL, but WebKit doesn't make any distinction while logging). After limits were adjusted, this thread was successfully demoted, and now that the mapping has changed, this is no longer promoted to real-time to begin with.

Finally, logging around portal-related failures has been updated to reduce noise.

Implemented the connectedMoveCallback() for custom elements to react to moveBefore().

Implemented the scaffolding for the moveBefore() DOM function. This is the first step towards implementing the full feature and is currently behind a runtime feature flag.

The Web Inspector now highlights the layout root element by hovering over a Layout event in the “Layout & Rendering” timeline view and reveals it in the element tree by clicking a little “go to” arrow button.

Releases 📦️

WebKitGTK 2.52.2 and WPE WebKit 2.52.2 have been released, which include a number of fixes. In particular, building for some less tested configurations should now be possible, and the WPE port includes fixes for input event handling in the Qt API bindings.

The releases were quickly followed by WebKitGTK 2.52.3 and WPE WebKit 2.52.3, with further fixes including an important patch for crashes in JavaScriptCore on architectures other than x86_64, support for the scrollbar-color CSS property, and a fix for rendering certain emoji glyphs. Additionally, the WPE port also gained a new setting to disable overlay scroll bars and use always-visible ones, fixed focus handling for touch input in the built-in Wayland platform implementation, and a build fix for the Qt one.

In addition to maintenance for the stable branch, the first unstable releases for the current development cycle are also available: WebKitGTK 2.53.1 and WPE WebKit 2.53.1. These are the first published versions that remove the option to use Cairo for 2D rendering—only Skia will be supported going forward. On the additions front, there are graphics subsystem improvements, a few API additions, and initial support in the CMake build system for builds using Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO, needs Clang for now). The goal of development releases is to gather early feedback on upcoming changes, and issue reports are welcome in Bugzilla.

Infrastructure 🏗️

PGO (Profile-Guided Optimization) builds with Clang are now supported by the CMake build system.

That’s all for this week!

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #62

Igalia WebKit Team — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:07:37 +0000

Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from March 31 to April 7.

Support for iOS dialog light dismiss, a new API to obtain page icons, WebKit nightly builds for Epiphany Canary produced by GNOME GitLab, and more conservative checks for MPEG-4 Audio object types are all part of this week's edition of the WebKit periodical.

Cross-Port 🐱

A new API to obtain page icons (a.k.a. “favicons”) has been added to the GTK port. The new functionality reuses the recently added WebKitImage class and provides access to multiple page icons at once through the added WebKitImageList type, allowing applications to better choose an icon that suits their needs. Changes to the WebKitWebView.page-icons property are guaranteed to be done once per page load, when all icon images are available to be used. This new API has been also enabled for the WPE port, and the plan is to deprecate the old page favicon functionality going forward.

Added iOS support for dialog light dismiss, part of the experimental closedby attribute implementation.

Multimedia 🎥

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.

canPlayType() is now more conservative regarding MPEG-4 Audio object types. This primarily affects AAC extensions: In the past, as long as there was an AAC decoder installed, WebKit was accepting any codec string that started with mp4a. Now it only accepts codec strings that correspond to object types that have widespread support. This can prevent accidental playback of newer formats like xHE-AAC, which many decoders don't yet support — for example, as of writing, FFmpeg support for xHE-AAC is only very recent and still incomplete.

canPlayType() now also reports support for Dolby AC-4 in systems with a decoder capable of handling it.

The GStreamer WebRTC backend now rejects SDP including rtpmap attributes in the disallowed range of 64-95 payload types. Compliance with RFC 7587 was also improved.

Infrastructure 🏗️

The WebKitGTK nightly builds for Epiphany Canary are now handled entirely by the GNOME GitLab infrastructure, many thanks to them! The previous approach was not optimal, producing release builds without debug symbols. With the new builds, it is now easier to get crash stack traces including more information.

That’s all for this week!

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #61

Igalia WebKit Team — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:46:57 +0000

Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from March 23 to March 30.

This week comes with a mixed bag of new features, incremental improvements, and a new release with the ever important security issue fixes. Also: more blog posts!

Cross-Port 🐱

Implemented initial support for closedby=any on dialog elements, which adds light dismiss behaviour. This is behind the ClosedbyAttributeEnabled feature flag.

Added the remaining values for the experimental closedby attribute implementation.

MiniBrowser now has a --profile-dir=DIR command line option that can be used to specify a custom directory where website data and cache can be stored, to test, for example, behavior in a clean session.

Multimedia 🎥

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.

Video decoding limits had been enforced on HTMLMediaElement.canPlayType() so far, but they are now also enforced in MediaCapabilities queries.

Graphics 🖼️

Fixed several OpenGL state restoration bugs in BitmapTexture . These could cause a mismatch between the GL state assumed by Skia and the actual one, leading to rendering artifacts with certain GPU drivers and configurations.

The SKIA_DEBUG CMake option has been enabled for Debug builds, enabling Skia's internal assertions, debug logging, and consistency checks (e.g. bounds checking, resource key diagnostics). It remains off by default for Release and RelWithDebInfo builds, and can still be explicitly configured via -DSKIA_DEBUG=ON|OFF.

WPE Platform API 🧩

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.

The new WPE_SETTING_OVERLAY_SCROLLBARS setting is now available, and disabling it will use a more traditional, always visible scrollbar style.

Releases 📦️

A new USE_GSTREAMER build option may now be used to toggle the features that require GStreamer at once. This can be used to effectively disable all multimedia support, which previously needed toggling four CMake options.

WebKitGTK 2.52.1 and WPE WebKit 2.52.1 have been released. On top of a small corrections typical of the first point releases in a new stable series, this one includes a number of fixes for security issues, and it is a recommended update. The corresponding security advisory, WSA-2026-0002 (GTK, WPE) has been published as well.

Community & Events 🤝

Simón Pena wrote a blog post showing how to create a minimal WPE launcher, which uses a Fedora Podman container with pre-built WPE WebKit libraries and a launcher with barely 10 lines of code to display a web view. This complements Kate Lee's custom HTML context menu blog post from last week.

That’s all for this week!

Simón Pena: Getting started with WPE WebKit: a minimal launcher

Simón — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My colleague Kate recently demonstrated on her blog how simple it is to write a WPE Platform-based launcher, and did so by building it side-by-side with MiniBrowser, inside the WebKit tree.

This entry takes one step back, and demonstrates the same concepts assuming you are not building WPE WebKit yourself, but rather getting it from your distribution. Many of the steps below would apply if you were using a Yocto/OpenEmbedded-based image, but that can be the focus of another post.

Getting WPE WebKit

Get WPE lists a number of options to get WPE from your preferred distribution. At the moment of writing, Fedora, Debian and ArchLinux are your best choices to get a recent version of WPE:

2.52 on Fedora
2.50 on Debian Forky, 2.52 on Debian Sid
2.50 on ArchLinux

However, since WPE Platform hasn’t officially been released, we need to use Fedora, where my colleague Philippe maintains a Copr repository with it enabled.

sudo dnf copr enable -y philn/wpewebkit
sudo dnf install wpewebkit-devel

Alternatively, you can use a container. Here is a Containerfile based on Fedora 42:

FROM fedora:42

RUN dnf install -y \
    dnf-plugins-core \
    && dnf copr enable -y philn/wpewebkit \
    && dnf install -y \
    gcc-c++ \
    cmake \
    pkg-config \
    wpewebkit-devel

WORKDIR /src

Build and run it with:

podman build -t wpe-dev .
podman run -it -e WAYLAND_DISPLAY=$WAYLAND_DISPLAY \
-e XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$(id -u) \
-v $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/$WAYLAND_DISPLAY:/run/user/$(id -u)/$WAYLAND_DISPLAY \
-v /dev/dri:/dev/dri \
wpe-dev bash

The build system

Kate’s post builds the launcher as part of the WebKit tree using WebKit’s own CMake infrastructure. For a standalone project, we need a self-contained CMakeLists.txt that finds WPE WebKit through pkg-config:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.16)
project(wpe_sample CXX)

set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 17)

find_package(PkgConfig REQUIRED)

# The Wayland WPE Platform already depends on wpe-platform-2.0
pkg_check_modules(WebKitDeps REQUIRED
    IMPORTED_TARGET
    wpe-webkit-2.0
    wpe-platform-wayland-2.0
)

add_executable(wpe_sample main.cpp)

target_link_libraries(wpe_sample
    PRIVATE
        PkgConfig::WebKitDeps
)

The launcher

Here is a minimal launcher — the smallest amount of code needed to display a web page with WPE WebKit:

#include <wpe/webkit.h>

int main(int argc, const char *argv[]) {
    g_autoptr(GMainLoop) loop = g_main_loop_new(nullptr, false);
    g_autoptr(WebKitWebView) view = WEBKIT_WEB_VIEW(g_object_new(WEBKIT_TYPE_WEB_VIEW,
        nullptr));
    webkit_web_view_load_uri(view,
        (argc > 1) ? argv[1] : "https://wpewebkit.org");
    g_main_loop_run(loop);
    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

This snippet relies heavily on default behaviours: it will create a default WPE view, with default top levels, with the default display selection behaviour (Wayland), default context, settings…

Again, Kate’s post does a more realistic job at showing how the various pieces are created and connected together.

Building and running

cmake -B build
cmake --build build
./build/wpe_sample https://wpewebkit.org/

Display backends

WPE WebKit can render to different display backends depending on your environment, which you can select through environment variables:

# Wayland (e.g. desktop, Weston).
WPE_DISPLAY=wpe-display-wayland WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1 ./build/wpe_sample https://wpewebkit.org/

# DRM/KMS (e.g. embedded, no compositor)
WPE_DISPLAY=wpe-display-drm ./build/wpe_sample https://wpewebkit.org/

# Headless (e.g. testing, CI)
WPE_DISPLAY=wpe-display-headless ./build/wpe_sample https://wpewebkit.org/

You can take a look at wpe_display_get_default() in WPEPlatform/wpe/WPEDisplay.cpp to understand how the automatic selection takes place in the absence of an explicit WPE_DISPLAY request.

(In our example, we are only listing Wayland as a CMake dependency. If libwpewebkit was compiled without DRM or headless support, the environment variable approach would not work.)

Next steps

This is all for now. The next entry in the series will cover classic kiosk features: preventing navigation to unwanted sites, controlling whether new windows can be opened, and intercepting requests through policy decisions.

For a more complete example that includes a custom HTML context menu and JavaScript injection, see Kate’s post.

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #60

Igalia WebKit Team — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 19:46:56 +0000

Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from March 10 to March 18.

The big ticket item in this week's update are the 2.52.0 releases, which include the work from the last six-month development period, and come with a security advisory. Meanwhile, WPE-Android also gets a release, and a number of featured blog posts.

Last week we added support to WPE MiniBrowser to load settings from a key file. This extended the existing --config-file=FILE feature, which previously only loaded WPEPlatform settings under the [wpe-platform] group. Now the feature uses webkit_settings_apply_from_key_file() to load properties such as user-agent or enable-developer-extras from the [websettings] group as well.

Releases 📦️

WebKitGTK 2.52.0 and WPE WebKit 2.52.0 are now available. These include the results of the effort made by the team during the last six months, including rendering improvements and performance optimizations, better security for WebRTC, a more complete WebXR implementation, and a second preview of the WPEPlatform API for the WPE port—among many other changes.

More information about the changes and improvements brought by these major releases can be found at the blog post about WebKitGTK 2.52, and the corresponding one for WPE WebKit 2.52.

Accompanying these releases there is security advisory WSA-2026-0001 (GTK, WPE), with information about solved security issues. As usual, we encourage everybody to use the most recent versions where such issues are known to be fixed.

Bug reports are always welcome at the WebKit Bugzilla.

WPE Android 0.3.3 has been released, and prebuilt packages are available at the Maven Central repository. This is a maintenance release which updates the included WPE WebKit version to 2.50.6 and libsoup to 3.6.6, both of which include security fixes.

Community & Events 🤝

Kate Lee wrote a very interesting blog post showing how to create a small application using the WPEPlatform API to demonstrate one of its newly available features: the Context Menu API. It is rendered entirely as an HTML overlay, enabling richer and more portable context menu implementations.

WebXR support for WebKitGTK and WPE has been reworked and aligned with the modern multi-process architecture, using OpenXR to enable XR device integration on Linux and Android. Sergio Villar wrote a blog post that explains all the work done in the last months around it.

That’s all for this week!

WPE WebKit Blog: WPE WebKit 2.52 highlights

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The WebKit team at Igalia is happy to announce a new release series of WPE WebKit. This is a summary of the most noteworthy changes from the latest release cycle.

Graphics improvements

WPE’s graphics support has seen numerous improvements with a positive impact in rendering performance, resource usage, and better rendering. Let’s have a look at some of the most significant changes:

Compute the layers tile size, using a different strategy depending on whether GPU rendering is enabled. This optimizes resource usage depending on both hardware and software rendering mode.
WPE now uses run-loop observers to properly schedule layer flushing and composition, which results in snappier and better performing rendering and animation.
2D-canvas acceleration has now improved performance, as operations are recorded for batched replay.
Text rendering has better performance too.
In non-composite mode, it’s now also possible to use damage propagation.
Asynchronous scrolling has also seen performance improvements.

On top of this, as usual, many rendering issues have been fixed, making this release of WPE one of the best in terms of graphics support.

Multimedia improvements

WebRTC

When using GstWebRTC, WebRTC network access has been moved to the network process. This also requires librice, and building with the CMake USE_LIBRICE option. When this is enabled, it is still possible to choose the older libnice-based implementation at runtime by setting WEBKIT_GST_DISABLE_WEBRTC_NETWORK_SANDBOX=1 in the environment.

Having WebRTC network access in the network process is a security improvement, as it reduces the surface of attack in other more sensitive processes.

Other multimedia improvements

Videos with BT2100-PQ colorspace are now tone-mapped to SDR, ensuring colours do not appear washed out.
Support for the Audio Output Devices API, which allows Web content to enumerate audio devices and decide which one to use for output. This feature is disabled by default, and may be previewed using the ExposeSpeakers, ExposeSpeakersWithoutMicrophone, and PerElementSpeakerSelection feature flags.
Many code improvements to the GStreamer backend that will result in a more stable multimedia experience.

WebXR

WebXR support through OpenXR has seen substantial development this cycle:

New API has been added in order to support WebXR session permissions, querying whether a session is active and requesting to leave a session.
Support for WebXR Hand Input module has been added for ports using OpenXR.
Support for WebXR Hit Test Module is added with testable status, so it can be enabled at runtime (--features=+WebXRHitTestModule) or at build time passing -DENABLE_WEBXR_HIT_TEST=ON.

API Changes

The future of the WPE API

The traditional libwpe-based API remains in WPE for this release cycle, but we are planning to sunset it starting with the following one (2.54). This applies to Cog, which is no longer in active development and won’t have any more stable releases beyond the 0.18.x series. While both libwpe and Cog will remain available, we encourage developers to transition to the new WPEPlatform API, which will be considered stable by then.

This means that it is the perfect time to test the WPEPlatform API and provide feedback, as it’s still possible to make changes to it to better suit users’ needs.

WPEPlatform API changes

New platform APIs include:

wpe_display_create_toplevel(). This way it’s possible to create a toplevel using the common API which allows the inspector to work when the application is handling toplevels.
A new WPEDisplay::disconnected signal has been added, which allows platform implementations to notify when the native display gets “disconnected” and thus no longer usable. Applications can handle it to attempt recovery, or to know when they may free resources.
A new WPEView::buffers-changed signal, alongside the associated WPEViewClass.buffers_changed virtual function, have been added. These may be used to know in advance which graphics buffers will be used for rendering the content for a given web view. This feature is mainly useful for platform implementations which may need to perform additional setup in advance, before updated web view contents are provided in the buffers configured by WebKit.
Two new functions, wpe_clipboard_content_get_text() and wpe_clipboard_content_get_bytes(), allow applications to obtain the contents held in the clipboard.

The public API has received the following changes, which might require changes to existing platform implementations:

Multiple callbacks are now supported for WPEScreenSyncObserver, the API has changed from wpe_screen_sync_observer_set_callback() to a pair of wpe_screen_sync_observer_add_callback()/_remove_callback() functions. The functions to start/stop the observer are no longer available, and instead the observer will be activated automatically when there are one or more callbacks attached to it.

The WPEPlatform API can now be used on Android.

Legacy API

The legacy libwpe-based API can be disabled at build time, by toggling the ENABLE_WPE_LEGACY_API CMake option. This allows removal of uneeded code when an application is exclusively using the new WPEPlatform API.

New WebKit API

WebKitImage, an image abstraction that is used when taking snapshots of webviews.
webkit_webview_get_snapshot() and webkit_webview_get_snapshot_finish() can be used to fetch a snapshot of a webview contents.

Web Standards support

As usual, this list is not exhaustive as WebKit continuously progresses in its support for new standards. Some of the highlights for this release are:

Largest Contentful Paint is now enabled.
Pointer and Touch Events now use more precise fractional coordinates.
The Fetch API now accepts local connections.
The Navigation API is now enabled.
The Event Timing API is now enabled.
The CSS random() function (in draft status) is now available.
CSS field-sizing is now available.
The Keyboard lock API is now available.
The Origin API is now available.
The Readable Byte Streams API is now available.
Enabled CSS grid-lanes (a.k.a. Masonry layout), part of CSS Grid Layout Module Level 3.

Other notes

The Flatpak-based development SDK has been removed. Developers are encouraged to use the WebKit Container SDK instead.

Sergio Villar: Implementing WebXR in WebKit for WPE

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 08:46:59 +0000

Since 2022, my main focus has been working on the Wolvic browser, still the only open source WebXR-capable browser for Android/AOSP devices (Meta, Pico, Huawei, Lenovo, Lynx, HTC…) out there. That’s an effort that continues to this day (although to a much lesser extent nowadays). In early 2025, as a consequence of all that work in XR on the web, an opportunity emerged to implement WebXR support in WebKit for the WPE port, and we decided to take it.

Hironori Fujii: Async Scrolling Improvements

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

WPE WebKit and WebKitGTK support async scrolling for wheel events. I landed several improvements for the upcoming 2.52 release.

Bug 305451 – wheel event async scrolling doesn’t start while the main thread is blocked
Bug 305560 – rendering glitches for unpainted tiles
Bug 305561 – Paint scrollbars in the scrolling thread for async scrolling

Here are videos of before and after the changes. This is the test content.

There is still room for further improvement.

The scrollbar hiding animation timer is still running in the main thread.
- It can use CoordinatedPlatformLayer::setAnimations.
- Or CoordinatedPlatformLayer::setOpacity.
Add the showing animation and transition animations of mouse hover states like GTK Adwaita theme
Support touch and gesture events async scrolling

Kate Lee: Building a Custom HTML Context Menu with the New WPEPlatform API

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

WPE WebKit is a WebKit port optimized for embedded devices — think set-top boxes, digital signage, kiosk displays, and in-vehicle infotainment systems. It is developed by Igalia and powers web experiences on millions of devices worldwide, from set-top boxes to smart TVs and beyond.

WPE WebKit has recently introduced a brand-new platform API called WPEPlatform, which replaces the legacy libwpe + wpebackend-fdo stack. In this post, I will walk you through building a minimal WPE browser launcher using only the new WPEPlatform API, and demonstrate one of its newly available features: the Context Menu API — rendered entirely as an HTML overlay.

Why a New API? #

The legacy stack (libwpe + wpebackend-fdo + Cog platform plugins) had several pain points: nested Wayland compositor complexity, dependency on Mesa’s now-deprecated EGL_WL_bind_wayland_display extension, rigid C function-pointer tables, and platform code scattered across three libraries.

The new WPEPlatform API replaces all of this with a single, clean GObject-based layer — providing automatic backend creation, DMA-BUF direct buffer sharing, unified window management (fullscreen, maximize, resize, title), and easy language bindings via GObject Introspection.

Timeline: The stable release of WPEPlatform is planned for September 2026. At that point, the legacy API will be officially deprecated. We strongly recommend new projects to adopt the WPEPlatform API from the start.

WPEPlatform Launcher: A Minimal Browser in ~250 Lines #

To demonstrate the new API, I built WPEPlatformLauncher — a minimal but functional WPE WebKit browser that uses only the WPEPlatform API. No legacy libwpe, no wpebackend-fdo, no Cog — just the new API.

The full source code is available at: kate-k-lee/WebKit@aed6402

How Simple Is It? #

Here is the core of the launcher — creating a WebView with the new API:

/* WPEPlatform backend is created automatically — no manual setup needed */
auto* webView = WEBKIT_WEB_VIEW(g_object_new(WEBKIT_TYPE_WEB_VIEW,
    "web-context", webContext,
    "network-session", networkSession,
    "settings", settings,
    "user-content-manager", userContentManager,
    nullptr));

/* Get the WPEPlatform view — this is where the new API shines */
auto* wpeView = webkit_web_view_get_wpe_view(webView);
auto* toplevel = wpe_view_get_toplevel(wpeView);

/* Window management: fullscreen, resize, title — all built-in */
wpe_toplevel_fullscreen(toplevel);
wpe_toplevel_resize(toplevel, 1920, 1080);
wpe_toplevel_set_title(toplevel, "WPEPlatform Launcher");

/* Input events: just connect a GObject signal */
g_signal_connect(wpeView, "event", G_CALLBACK(onViewEvent), webView);

Compare this with the legacy API, which required:

Manually creating a WPEToolingBackends::ViewBackend
Wrapping it in a WebKitWebViewBackend with a destroy callback
Creating a C++ InputClient class and registering it
Having no window management (no maximize, minimize, title, etc.)

The new API handles backend creation, display detection, and input forwarding automatically.

Keyboard Shortcuts #

Handling keyboard events is straightforward with the WPEPlatform event system:

static gboolean onViewEvent(WPEView* view, WPEEvent* event, WebKitWebView* webView)
{
    if (wpe_event_get_event_type(event) != WPE_EVENT_KEYBOARD_KEY_DOWN)
        return FALSE;

    auto modifiers = wpe_event_get_modifiers(event);
    auto keyval = wpe_event_keyboard_get_keyval(event);

    /* Ctrl+Q: Quit */
    if ((modifiers & WPE_MODIFIER_KEYBOARD_CONTROL) && keyval == WPE_KEY_q) {
        g_application_quit(g_application_get_default());
        return TRUE;
    }

    /* F11: Toggle fullscreen via WPEToplevel */
    if (keyval == WPE_KEY_F11) {
        auto* toplevel = wpe_view_get_toplevel(view);
        if (wpe_toplevel_get_state(toplevel) & WPE_TOPLEVEL_STATE_FULLSCREEN)
            wpe_toplevel_unfullscreen(toplevel);
        else
            wpe_toplevel_fullscreen(toplevel);
        return TRUE;
    }

    return FALSE;
}

WPE WebKit is designed for embedded environments where there is no native UI toolkit — no GTK, no Qt. This means features like context menus (right-click menus) that desktop browsers take for granted need to be implemented by the application.

The approach: intercept WebKit’s context-menu signal, read the menu items, and render them as an HTML/CSS overlay injected into the page DOM.

The Architecture #

User right-clicks
  → WebKit emits "context-menu" signal
  → onContextMenu() handler:
      1. Reads menu items via webkit_context_menu_get_items()
      2. Gets position via webkit_context_menu_get_position()
      3. Builds JavaScript that creates DOM elements
      4. Injects via webkit_web_view_evaluate_javascript()
      5. Returns TRUE (suppresses default menu)

User clicks a menu item
  → JS: window.webkit.messageHandlers.contextMenuAction.postMessage(actionId)
  → C: onContextMenuAction() receives the action ID
      → Executes: webkit_web_view_go_back(), execute_editing_command("Copy"), etc.

User clicks outside the menu
  → JS: overlay click handler removes the DOM elements

The Context Menu API provides everything we need:

static gboolean onContextMenu(WebKitWebView* webView,
    WebKitContextMenu* contextMenu, gpointer /* event */,
    WebKitHitTestResult* hitTestResult, gpointer)
{
    /* Save hit test result for link-related actions */
    savedHitTestResult = WEBKIT_HIT_TEST_RESULT(g_object_ref(hitTestResult));

    /* Iterate through menu items */
    GList* items = webkit_context_menu_get_items(contextMenu);
    for (GList* l = items; l; l = l->next) {
        auto* item = WEBKIT_CONTEXT_MENU_ITEM(l->data);

        if (webkit_context_menu_item_is_separator(item)) {
            /* Render as a horizontal line */
            continue;
        }

        const char* title = webkit_context_menu_item_get_title(item);
        auto action = webkit_context_menu_item_get_stock_action(item);
        /* Build HTML element with title and action ID */
    }

    /* Get position for menu placement */
    gint posX = 0, posY = 0;
    webkit_context_menu_get_position(contextMenu, &posX, &posY);

    return TRUE; /* Suppress default menu */
}

The context menu is rendered with a dark theme CSS, designed for embedded/kiosk displays:

#__wpe_ctx_menu {
    position: fixed;
    min-width: 180px;
    background: #2b2b2b;
    border: 1px solid #505050;
    border-radius: 6px;
    padding: 4px 0;
    box-shadow: 0 8px 24px rgba(0,0,0,0.4);
    font-family: system-ui, sans-serif;
    font-size: 13px;
    color: #e0e0e0;
}

.__wpe_ctx_item:hover {
    background: #0060df;
    color: #ffffff;
}

Handling Actions via Script Message Handler #

Communication between the HTML menu and the C application uses WebKit’s script message handler mechanism:

/* Register message handler */
auto* ucm = webkit_user_content_manager_new();
webkit_user_content_manager_register_script_message_handler(
    ucm, "contextMenuAction", nullptr);
g_signal_connect(ucm, "script-message-received::contextMenuAction",
    G_CALLBACK(onContextMenuAction), nullptr);

// In the generated HTML menu item:
item.addEventListener('click', function() {
    window.webkit.messageHandlers.contextMenuAction.postMessage(actionId);
});

/* Handle the action in C */
static void onContextMenuAction(WebKitUserContentManager*, JSCValue* value, gpointer)
{
    int actionId = jsc_value_to_int32(value);

    switch (actionId) {
    case WEBKIT_CONTEXT_MENU_ACTION_RELOAD:
        webkit_web_view_reload(webView);
        break;
    case WEBKIT_CONTEXT_MENU_ACTION_COPY:
        webkit_web_view_execute_editing_command(webView, "Copy");
        break;
    case WEBKIT_CONTEXT_MENU_ACTION_OPEN_LINK:
        webkit_web_view_load_uri(webView,
            webkit_hit_test_result_get_link_uri(savedHitTestResult));
        break;
    /* ... more actions ... */
    }
}

Demo #

Here is the WPEPlatformLauncher in action, showing the HTML context menu with various actions:

Right-clicking shows the HTML context menu. Clicking “Reload” triggers an actual page reload.

Right-clicking a link shows link-specific actions like “Open Link” and “Copy Link Address”.

Building and Running #

I built and ran the WPEPlatformLauncher inside a container using the WebKit Container SDK, which provides a pre-configured development environment with all the dependencies needed to build WPE WebKit.

The WPEPlatformLauncher integrates into the WebKit build system:

# Build WPE WebKit with the launcher
Tools/Scripts/build-webkit --wpe --release

# Run
./WebKitBuild/WPE/Release/bin/WPEPlatformLauncher https://wpewebkit.org

# Run in fullscreen (kiosk mode)
./WebKitBuild/WPE/Release/bin/WPEPlatformLauncher --fullscreen https://your-app.com

The full source is a single main.cpp file (~600 lines including the context menu), integrated into the WebKit tree alongside MiniBrowser:

WebKit/Tools/
├── MiniBrowser/wpe/          ← Existing (supports both old + new API)
├── WPEPlatformLauncher/      ← New (WPEPlatform API only)
│   ├── main.cpp
│   └── CMakeLists.txt
└── PlatformWPE.cmake         ← Modified to add WPEPlatformLauncher

Summary #

The new WPEPlatform API makes building WPE WebKit applications significantly simpler:

No manual backend setup — the platform is detected and configured automatically
GObject-based — signals, properties, and ref counting instead of C function pointers
DMA-BUF direct sharing — no dependency on Mesa’s deprecated EGL extensions
Unified window management — fullscreen, maximize, minimize, resize, and title
Language binding friendly — works with Python, JavaScript, and more via GObject Introspection

For embedded browser developers building kiosk UIs, set-top box interfaces, or digital signage with WPE WebKit — now is the time to adopt the new API. The stable release is coming in September 2026, and the legacy stack (libwpe, wpebackend-fdo, Cog) will be deprecated at that point.

Resources #

Hironori Fujii: Building WebKit and libsoup with AddressSanitizer (ASan)

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I built libsoup and WebKit with ASan today. It works almost out of the box. I used Clang. GCC also supports ASan, but WebKit has a problem with it. WebKit Container SDK is based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS at the moment. It contains clang 18 by default.

Installed required packages.

sudo apt install libclang-rt-18-dev llvm-18-dev

Set env vars.

export CC=clang CXX=clang++

Passed some flags to libsoup.

--- /jhbuild/webkit-sdk-deps.modules.orig
+++ /jhbuild/webkit-sdk-deps.modules
@@ -149,7 +149,7 @@
     </dependencies>
   </meson>

-  <meson id="libsoup" mesonargs="-Dtests=false">
+  <meson id="libsoup" mesonargs="-Dtests=false -Db_sanitize=address -Db_lundef=false">
     <branch repo="github.com"
             checkoutdir="libsoup"
             module="GNOME/libsoup.git" tag="3.6.6"/>

Then, build and install libsoup.

jhbuild buildone -f libsoup

Then, build WebKit with ASan.

./Tools/Scripts/build-webkit --gtk --release --cmakeargs=-DENABLE_SANITIZERS=address

WebKit has a lot of memory leaks by design. Don’t detect leaks.

export ASAN_OPTIONS=detect_leaks=0

For run-webkit-tests, I had to modify a script a bit.

diff --git a/Tools/Scripts/webkitpy/port/driver.py b/Tools/Scripts/webkitpy/port/driver.py
index eb12801a455b..c9f74eeab4e2 100644
--- a/Tools/Scripts/webkitpy/port/driver.py
+++ b/Tools/Scripts/webkitpy/port/driver.py
@@ -482,7 +482,7 @@ class Driver(object):
         else:
             environment['DUMPRENDERTREE_TEMP'] = str(self._driver_tempdir)
         environment['LOCAL_RESOURCE_ROOT'] = str(self._port.layout_tests_dir())
-        environment['ASAN_OPTIONS'] = "allocator_may_return_null=1"
+        environment['ASAN_OPTIONS'] = "allocator_may_return_null=1:detect_leaks=0"
         environment['__XPC_ASAN_OPTIONS'] = environment['ASAN_OPTIONS']

         # Disable vnode-guard related simulated crashes for WKTR / DRT (rdar://problem/40674034).

That’s it. Enjoy.

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #59

Igalia WebKit Team — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:02:33 +0000

Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from March 2 to March 9.

As part of this week's handful of news, WebKitGTK and WPE WebKit now have support for Gamepad's "VibationActuator" property, the video decoding limit is now configurable at runtime in addition to build time, and an interesting fix that makes WebKit render fonts like other browsers by making it blend text incorrectly (!).

Cross-Port 🐱

Using libmanette's rumble support, enabled Gamepad VibrationActuator for WebKitGTK and WPE WebKit.

With these changes, playEffect() can be used to play dual-rumble vibration effects.

Multimedia 🎥

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.

VIDEO_DECODING_LIMIT is now configurable at runtime, in addition to build time. That will allow vendors that share a single binary build on different platforms to fine-tune their needs without a rebuild.

Graphics 🖼️

Landed a change that tweaks the text rendering done with Skia. With this change, the text looks more natural now - just like in other browsers. However, this is done by blending text incorrectly as a compromise.

Releases 📦️

One more set of release candidates for the upcoming stable branch, WebKitGTK 2.51.93 and WPE WebKit 2.51.93, have been published. For those interested in previewing the upcoming 2.52.x series this release is expected to be quite stable. Reporting issues in Bugzilla are, as usual, more than welcome.

That’s all for this week!

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #58

Igalia WebKit Team — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:11:00 +0000

Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from February 23 to March 2.

This installment of the periodical brings news about support for Qualcomm qtivdec2 and qtivenc2 on GStreamer, GPU texture atlas creation and replay substitution, enhancement of the scroll gesture in WPE, and two new releases: WebKitGTK 2.51.92 and WPE WebKit 2.51.92.

Cross-Port 🐱

Multimedia 🎥

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.

Work on adding support for the Qualcomm GStreamer qtivdec2 and qtivenc2 elements is on-going

Graphics 🖼️

Implemented GPU texture atlas creation and replay substitution in the Skia painting engine on GTK/WPE. After recording, raster images are packed into GPU atlases via BitmapTexture, with two upload paths: an optimized DMA-buf path that memory-maps GPU buffers and dispatches uploading to a dedicated worker thread, and a synchronous GL fallback using BitmapTexture::updateContents(). Atlas uploads are synchronized across workers using a countdown-latch fence. During replay, SkiaReplayCanvas intercepts raster image draws and substitutes them with atlas texture draws, mapping source coordinates into atlas space.

WPE Platform API 🧩

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.

The recent WPE WebKit 2.51.92 release is the first one to have its WPEPlatform documentation online, but it was not included in the tarball. This issue has been corrected and tarballs for future releases will also include this documentation.

Scrolling using touch input with WPEPlatform would result in scrolling faster when more than one touch point was in effect. The gesture detector has been fixed to make scrolling have always a consistent speed.

Releases 📦️

The third —and likely the last— release candidates for the upcoming stable branch, WebKitGTK 2.51.92 and WPE WebKit 2.51.92, have been published. For those interested in previewing the upcoming 2.52.x series this release is expected to be quite stable; but there might be still some rough edges. Reporting issues in Bugzilla are, as usual, more than welcome.

That’s all for this week!

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #57

Igalia WebKit Team — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 19:52:49 +0000

Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from February 9 to February 23.

In this week we have a nice fix for video streams timestamps, a fix for a PDF rendering regression, support for rendering video buffers provided by Qualcomm video decoders, and a fix for a font selection issue. Also notable we had a new WPE Android release, and the libsoup 3.6.6 release.

Cross-Port 🐱

Added a new webkit_feature_list_find() convenience function to the public API, which searches for a WebKitFeature given its identifier.

Multimedia 🎥

GStreamer-based multimedia support for WebKit, including (but not limited to) playback, capture, WebAudio, WebCodecs, and WebRTC.

Opportunistically fix decoding timestamps to prevent deletion of preexisting samples when PTS doesn't conflict, fixing potential glitches when inserting videos (eg: ad insertion).

Graphics 🖼️

Fixed a PDF rendering regression caused by the canvas 2D operation recording feature, where switching between the recording canvas and the GPU surface canvas failed to preserve the full save/restore nesting, clip stack, and transparency layer state. Replaced the fragile state-copying approach with a state replay mechanism in GraphicsContextSkia that tracks the full sequence of save restore, clip, and transparency layer operations, then reconstructs the exact nesting on the target canvas when flushing a recording.

Added support for rendering video buffers provided by Qualcomm hardware-accelerated decoders, with aid from the EXT_YUV_target OpenGL extension.

Fixed the font selection issue that the system fallback font cache mixed up different font styles.

Releases 📦️

WPE Android 0.3.2 has been released, and prebuilt packages are available at the Maven Central repository. This is a stable maintenance release which updates WPE WebKit to 2.50.5, which is the most recent stable release.

libsoup 3.6.6 has been released with numerous bug and security fixes.

That’s all for this week!

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #56

Igalia WebKit Team — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 23:21:30 +0000

Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from February 2 to February 9.

The main event this week was FOSDEM (pun intended), which included presentations related to WebKit; but also we got a batch of stable and development releases, asynchronous scrolling work, OpenGL logging, cleanups, and improving the inspector for the WPE work.

Cross-Port 🐱

Graphics 🖼️

While asynchronous scrolling for mouse wheel events was already supported, scrollbar layers were still being painted on the main thread. This has been changed to paint scrollbars on the scrolling thread instead, which avoids scrollbars to “lag” behind scrolled content.

Fixed flickering caused by the combination of damage tracking and asynchronous scrolling for mouse wheel events.

It is now possible to enable debug logging for OpenGL contexts using the new GLContext log channel, which takes advantage of the message events produced by the widespread KHR_debug extension.

Figuring out the exact location inside WebKit that triggered an OpenGL issue may still be challenging with this aid, and therefore a backtrace will be appended in case of errors to help pinpoint the source, when the log channel is enabled at the “debug” level with GLContext=debug.

Configuring the build with USE_SKIA=OFF to make WebKit use the Cairo graphics library is no longer supported. Using Skia has been the default since late 2024, and after two full years the 2.54.0 release (due in September 2026) will be the first one where the choice is no longer possible.

WebKitGTK 🖥️

The “on demand” hardware acceleration policy has been rarely used lately, and thus support for it has been removed. Note that this affects only the GTK port when built with GTK 3—the option never existed when using GTK 4.

Existing GTK 3 applications that use WEBKIT_HARDWARE_ACCELERATION_POLICY_ON_DEMAND will continue to work and do not need rebuilding: they will be promoted to use the “always enabled” policy starting with WebKitGTK 2.54.0 (due in September 2026).

The Web Inspector has received support for saving data to local files, allowing things such as saving page resources or exporting the network session to a HAR archive.

Note that using the Web Inspector locally is supported when using the WPEPlatform API, and the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+I may be used to bring it up.

Releases 📦️

WebKitGTK 2.50.5 and WPE WebKit 2.50.5 have been released. These are stable maintenance releases that improves stability, correct bugs, and fixes small rendering issues.

The second release candidates for the upcoming stable branch, WebKitGTK 2.51.91 and WPE WebKit 2.51.91, have been published as well. Those using those to preview the upcoming 2.52.x series are encouraged to provide bug reports in Bugzilla for any issue they may experience.

Community & Events 🤝

We have published a blog post on our work implementing the Temporal proposal in JavaScriptCore, WebKit's JavaScript engine.

This year's edition of FOSDEM took place in Brussels between January 31st and February 1st, and featured a number of sessions related to WebKitGTK and WPE:

The Web Platform on Linux devices with WebKit: where are we now?, by Mario Sánchez, is a good introduction-level talk about the GTK and WPE WebKit ports.
WebRTC support in WebKitGTK and WPEWebKit with GStreamer: Current status and plans by Philippe Normand. Exactly what it says on the tin.
Interop and MathML Core by Eri Pazos, about the ongoing effort to improve how different Web engines handle MathML—including WebKit!

The videos for the talks are already available, too.

That’s all for this week!

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #55

Igalia WebKit Team — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 20:11:18 +0000

Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from January 26 to February 2.

A calm week for sure! The highlight this week is the fix for scrolling not starting when the main thread is blocked.

Cross-Port 🐱

Graphics 🖼️

Fixed the problem of wheel event async scrolling doesn't start while the main thread is blocked. This should make WebKit feel more responsive even on heavier websites.

That’s all for this week!

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #54

Igalia WebKit Team — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 21:00:55 +0000

Update on what happened in WebKit in the week from January 19 to January 26.

The main event this week has been the creation of the branch for the upcoming stable series, accompanied by the first release candidate before 2.52.0. But there's more: the WPE port gains hyphenation support and the ability to notify of graphics buffer changes; both ports get graphics fixes and a couple of new Web features, and WPE-Android also gets a new stable release.

Cross-Port 🐱

Implemented support for the :open pseudo-class on dialog and details elements. This is currently behind the OpenPseudoClass feature flag.

Implemented the source property for ToggleEvent. This can be used to run code dependent on the triggering element in response to a popover or dialog toggle.

Graphics 🖼️

Fixed the rendering glitches with wheel event asynchronous scrolling, which occurred when the page was scrolled to areas not covered by tiles while the main thread was blocked.

Support for hyphenation has been added to WPE. This requires libhyphen and can be disabled at build-time with the USE_LIBHYPHEN=OFF CMake option.

WPE Platform API 🧩

New, modern platform API that supersedes usage of libwpe and WPE backends.

WPEPlatform gained support to notify changes in the configuration of graphics buffers allocated to render the contents of a web view, either by handling the WPEView::buffers-changed signal or by overriding the WPEViewClass.buffers_changed virtual function. This feature is mainly useful for platform implementations which may need to perform additional setup in advance, before updated web view contents are provided in the buffers configured by WebKit.

Releases 📦️

WPE-Android 0.3.0 has been released, and prebuilt packages are available at the Maven Central repository. The main change in this this version is the update to WPE WebKit 2.50.4, which is the most recent stable release.

A new branch has been created for the upcoming 2.52.x stable release series of the GTK and WPE WebKit ports. The first release candidates from this branch, WebKitGTK 2.51.90 and WPE WebKit 2.51.90 are now available. Testing and issue reports in Bugzilla are welcome to help with stabilization before the first stable release, which is planned for mid-March.

That’s all for this week!

Enrique Ocaña: Igalia Multimedia contributions in 2025

eocanha — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 09:34:37 +0000

Now that 2025 is over, it’s time to look back and feel proud of the path we’ve walked. Last year has been really exciting in terms of contributions to GStreamer and WebKit for the Igalia Multimedia team.

With more than 459 contributions along the year, we’ve been one of the top contributors to the GStreamer project, in areas like Vulkan Video, GstValidate, VA, GStreamer Editing Services, WebRTC or H.266 support.

Igalia’s contributions to the GStreamer project

In Vulkan Video we’ve worked on the VP9 video decoder, and cooperated with other contributors to push the AV1 decoder as well. There’s now an H.264 base class for video encoding that is designed to support general hardware-accelerated processing.

GStreaming Editing Services, the framework to build video editing applications, has gained time remapping support, which now allows to include fast/slow motion effects in the videos. Video transformations (scaling, cropping, rounded corners, etc) are now hardware-accelerated thanks to the addition of new Skia-based GStreamer elements and integration with OpenGL. Buffer pool tuning and pipeline improvements have helped to optimize memory usage and performance, enabling the edition of 4K video at 60 frames per second. Much of this work to improve and ensure quality in GStreamer Editing Services has also brought improvements in the GstValidate testing framework, which will be useful for other parts of GStreamer.

Regarding H.266 (VVC), full playback support (with decoders such as vvdec and avdec_h266, demuxers and muxers for Matroska, MP4 and TS, and parsers for the vvc1 and vvi1 formats) is now available in GStreamer 1.26 thanks to Igalia’s work. This allows user applications such as the WebKitGTK web browser to leverage the hardware accelerated decoding provided by VAAPI to play H.266 video using GStreamer.

Igalia has also been one of the top contributors to GStreamer Rust, with 43 contributions. Most of the commits there have been related to Vulkan Video.

Igalia’s contributions to the GStreamer Rust project

In addition to GStreamer, the team also has a strong presence in WebKit, where we leverage our GStreamer knowledge to implement many features of the web engine related to multimedia. From the 1739 contributions to the WebKit project done last year by Igalia, the Multimedia team has made 323 of them. Nearly one third of those have been related to generic multimedia playback, and the rest have been on areas such as WebRTC, MediaStream, MSE, WebAudio, a new Quirks system to provide adaptations for specific hardware multimedia platforms at runtime, WebCodecs or MediaRecorder.

Igalia Multimedia Team’s contributions to different areas of the WebKit project

We’re happy about what we’ve achieved along the year and look forward to maintaining this success and bringing even more exciting features and contributions in 2026.

Planet Igalia WebKit

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #65

Cross-Port 🐱

Graphics 🖼️

Infrastructure 🏗️

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #64

Cross-Port 🐱

Networking 📶

Multimedia 🎥

Graphics 🖼️

Releases 📦️

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #63

Cross-Port 🐱

Releases 📦️

Infrastructure 🏗️

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #62

Cross-Port 🐱

Multimedia 🎥

Infrastructure 🏗️

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #61

Cross-Port 🐱

Multimedia 🎥

Graphics 🖼️

WPE WebKit 📟

WPE Platform API 🧩

Releases 📦️

Community & Events 🤝

Simón Pena: Getting started with WPE WebKit: a minimal launcher

Getting WPE WebKit

The build system

The launcher

Building and running

Display backends

Next steps

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #60

WPE WebKit 📟

Releases 📦️

Community & Events 🤝

WPE WebKit Blog: WPE WebKit 2.52 highlights

Graphics improvements

Multimedia improvements

WebRTC

Other multimedia improvements

WebXR

API Changes

The future of the WPE API

WPEPlatform API changes

Legacy API

New WebKit API

Web Standards support

Other notes

Sergio Villar: Implementing WebXR in WebKit for WPE

Hironori Fujii: Async Scrolling Improvements

Kate Lee: Building a Custom HTML Context Menu with the New WPEPlatform API

Why a New API? #

WPEPlatform Launcher: A Minimal Browser in ~250 Lines #

How Simple Is It? #

Keyboard Shortcuts #

HTML-Based Context Menu: Solving the “No Native UI” Challenge #

The Architecture #

Reading Context Menu Items #

The HTML Menu: Dark Theme for Embedded #

Handling Actions via Script Message Handler #

Demo #

Building and Running #

Summary #

Resources #

Hironori Fujii: Building WebKit and libsoup with AddressSanitizer (ASan)

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #59

Cross-Port 🐱

Multimedia 🎥

Graphics 🖼️

Releases 📦️

Igalia WebKit Team: WebKit Igalia Periodical #58

Cross-Port 🐱

Multimedia 🎥

Graphics 🖼️

WPE WebKit 📟

WPE Platform API 🧩

Releases 📦️