The release of the new stable branch WebKitGTK 2.36.0, a port of the WebKit browser engine for the GTK platform, has been announced. WebKitGTK allows the use of all WebKit features through a GNOME-oriented programming interface based on GObject and can be applied for integrating web content processing tools into any applications, from specialized HTML/CSS parsers to creating fully functional web browsers. Notable projects using WebKitGTK include the default GNOME browser (Epiphany). Previously, WebKitGTK was used in the Midori browser, but after the project was taken over by the Astian Foundation, the old version of Midori on WebKitGTK was abandoned, and by creating a fork from the Wexond browser, a fundamentally different product named Midori was developed, based on the Electron and React platforms.
Key changes:
- A new implementation of tools for people with disabilities has been proposed, translated from ATK to DBus interfaces AT-SPI.
- Support for the requestVideoFrameCallback method has been added.
- Support for media sessions has been included.
- The hardware-acceleration-policy parameter, which determines the rules for hardware acceleration, has been set to 'always'.
- An API for handling custom URI schemes has been added.
- Real-time operation mode for threads that interact with users (event handlers, scrolling, etc.) has been enabled on the Linux platform.
Based on WebKitGTK 2.36.0, the release of the GNOME Web 42 (Epiphany) browser has been formed, which includes the following changes:
- The built-in PDF viewer (PDF.js) has been updated.
- Support for applying a dark theme has been added.
- Hardware acceleration has been constantly enabled.
- Preparations for migrating to GTK 4 have been conducted.
- The ability to open URIs via desktop handlers has been provided.
- Support for the libportal 0.5 library, which provides simple asynchronously working layers for most Flatpak 'portals', has been added.
- The code for managing search engines has been redesigned.
Source: opennet.ru
