[webkit-dev] Make accelerated compositing mandatory

[Anders Carlsson]

On Jan 28, 2014, at 10:19 AM, Martin Robinson <mrobinson at webkit.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 10:00 AM, Anders Carlsson <andersca at apple.com> wrote:
>> This begs the question: How widely used is the GTK+ port of WebKit on
>> Windows? Do enough people use it that it's worth the maintenance burden for
>> the other ports that use accelerated compositing?
> 
> An example of a browser that uses WebKitGTK+ on Windows is Midori:
> http://midori-browser.org/download/choose/

Is this the only project using WebKitGTK+ on Windows? How many people do you think use it?

> If it is at-all helpful, we don't have WebKit2 support for the GTK+
> port on Windows. So if the majority of the maintanance burden is in
> WebKit2, there should be no problem with removing the non-AC code in
> WebKit2.

I don’t think we’ve ever had a problem with accelerated compositing being disabled in WebKit2. (I don’t know if anyone ever built without it).

I’m not a layout and rendering person, but I suspect that the burden lies in that part of WebCore. I also don’t think building with accelerated compositing means that it has to be enabled at all; WebKitGTK+ on Windows could probably just have a stub implementation of the relevant GraphicsLayer classes.

(FWIW, for the last two years or so WebKit2 on Mac has been running with accelerated compositing on always, and I strongly suspect this is the general direction other ports are taking too).

- Anders