@vandys @WebKitGTK @igalia while we figure out what's up with the mailing list, you can chat with us in our Matrix room: https://matrix.to/#/%23webkitgtk:matrix.org (that is #webkitgtk:matrix.org)
#webkitgtk
If you ever experienced broken / offset drag-and-drop previews in GNOME Web (Epiphany), particularly with kanban board applications like Trello for example, this is the bug report I filed about it in WebKitGTK: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=292058
It took me years… YEARS to figure out a reliable way to trigger the #GNOMEWeb / #WebKitGTK bug where the native general "Copy/Back/Forward/Reload" right-click menu would show up on top of GMail's custom contextual menus.
Finally I found a 100% surefire way to make it happen. Now it seems so straightforward, all of a sudden :blobsweats:
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=258746#c5
When I hand-coded that static HTML+CSS in 2013-2019, I did not realize that my personal website's "Clients" logos wall page would remain one of the best scrolling performance benchmarks for #WebKitGTK even in 2025 with Skia and a triple-buffered #GNOME 48, but here we go… fresh #Sysprof captures where that page casually brings the framerate down from 60fps to 12-18fps: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=221738#c26
With everything going on in #WebKitGTK's port to Skia, performance optimizations in GNOME Shell and Mutter, optimizations related to libsoup, #Sysprof profiling marks for WebKitGTK… I ended up waiting for 1.5 years to reprofile some bloated news websites that are slow to load in #GNOMEWeb. Today, I did that: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=291796
Wake up babes, new web browser engine benchmark just dropped (a fintech banking website's CPU-devouring front page text carousel):
* https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=291791
* https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1954307
@that_leaflet Regardless of the technical merits, I cannot say that it fills me with confidence when webkitgtk.org greets me with this screenshot that looks like it's more than ten years old, and proudly advertises "GNOME 3" when GNOME 48 was released last month, and the last 3.x release was 4.5 years ago.
A new stable series of #WebKitGTK was released recently, but work on future improvements continues. Nothing like a new installment of #WebKitIgaliaPeriodicals to keep tabs on what we're up to!
WIP #21 is now available! → https://blogs.igalia.com/webkit/blog/2025/wip-21/
One of my moonshot performance feature requests in #WebKitGTK for #GNOMEWeb: the ability to (semi-)automatically unload tabs from RAM when you have too many of them (especially idle ones)… https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=291369
Even with 24 GB of RAM it has been a lifesaver for me in Firefox on #Linux; being able to tell the browser to aggressively auto-unload idle tabs from websites like Reddit and YouTube, while keeping "safe" (ex: work intranet, chat system) tabs allowlisted, is great for saving resources.
A few weeks ago, we released WebKitGTK 2.48. Read here the highlights of this release!
Update on the #GNOME "suspended" window state not firing when obscuring windows: it turns out to be multiple bugs :blobsweats:
* The bug affecting #GNOMEWeb / #WebKitGTK presumably remains a #Mutter bug in handling subsurfaces: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3634#note_2405587
* The heisenbug part of the issue I was seeing where even gnome-system-monitor was not responding to obscuring surfaces turns out to be caused by the "Dim Background Windows" extension for #GNOMEShell … I reported it here: https://github.com/stephane-13/gnome-shell-extension-dim-background-windows/issues/37
has anyone had any success building webkitgtk on windows? #webkit #gtk #windows #webkitgtk
Oh great, I seem to have found a heisenbug in #Mutter's handling of obscured windows for emitting the "suspended" state (i.e. to allow apps to throttle themselves and save power when they are hidden by another window on top of them): https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3634#note_2404120
It seems to happen randomly, but it might explain some cases where power savings in #GNOME are not as good as they could be.
What's really weird is that #WebKitGTK seems to encounter an additional bug on top of that, where it isn't random.
@hub I sure hope not, indeed.
For what it's worth though, it's also reportedly just as wasteful on #WebKitGTK, so I wouldn't be surprised if Chromium/Electron was also affected.
The unstable #kde6 25.03.90 builds have been completed. Uploads are pending. #nwgshell repos have been taken care of for the most part, and the latest #libreoffice for arm64 is also ready to go. I just need to get everything in place. That leaves #gnome and #webkitgtk (which usually needs a patch) for me to look at yet, both need some rebuilds though.
I pushed updates to #nwgshell #kde6 #webkitgtk and more. Now wishing it was all a single repo right now. 🙃 https://slackware.lngn.net/
A ponies-on-rainbows feature I would miss from Firefox (or Chromium) in #WebKitGTK / #GNOMEWeb: the ability to print/save only the current selection from the page.
Feature request here: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289608
@janvlug @ph00lt0 @nicorikken @bert_hubert
The main issue is the lack of a standardized Webview on #Linux. #KDE has #QtWebengine, #GNOME has #WebkitGTK and they are not "just #Chromium".
#Electron ships a stripped down and rarely updated version of Chromium, which is pretty horrendous, for RAM etc.
At least for #FOSS apps it should be possible to convert them to webview apps somehow, but for that we first need one.
An example of how I'm trying to simultaneously help #WebKitGTK, #WebKit and #Firefox:
I recently spent time looking for ways in which web engines could save dynamic tables of contents (outlines) into PDF metadata using the webpage DOM's headings (h1, h2, h3, etc.) when "printing" to PDF. Very useful for archival purposes, and great for #accessibility.
I filed these enhancement requests as a result:
* In WebKit: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=288719
* In Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1950656
@MisterMultiverse There is #Luakit for example, which is a quite old project actually and it is licensed under #GPLv3.
It uses #WebKitGTK and is configurable in #Lua. But the configuration complexity becomes absurdly high very quickly!
There are also some other projects, most of them also invoking the WebKitGTK engine. It’s not that there are no other browsers, but those are by far not in feature parity and pretty much none of them has a mobile version or synchronization – or are just not maintained anymore.
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