[webkit-dev] Accessibility Object Searching

[Dominic Mazzoni]

I just had another thought: how would this work in a multi-process browser?

As you may know, Chrome runs an instance of webkit in a separate
renderer process for each tab, but the GUI and all accessibility
handling happens in the main browser process. Because accessibility
calls are synchronous, we cache accessibility information in the
browser process and respond to queries from that cache, rather than
sending an IPC to the renderer process and getting a response. I
realized that we wouldn't be able to use this search function very
easily as you've proposed it. If NSAccessibility gets such an API,
we'd have to write our own implementation that could run in Chrome's
browser process.

My understanding was that WebKit2 and Safari are moving to a
multi-process model as well. Is this design going to be compatible
with this?

- Dominic