[webkit-qt] [Announcement] QtWebKit Technology Preview 1

[Konstantin Tokarev]

Hi all,

We are pleased to announce QtWebKit Technology Preview 1 [1]

This release features major update of WebKit engine, bringing in support for modern Web standards, performance and memory usage optimizations, lots of bug- and security fixes done by WebKit community since 2013, when Qt port was removed from the trunk of WebKit.

Here is a list of the most prominent changes:

New Web APIs:
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* A lot of ES2015 features are now supported (82% according to [2] as compared to 10% in QtWebKit 5.6)
* Responsive images support (<picture> element, srcset and sizes attributes)
* ellipse() method in Canvas API
* CSS selectors ::read-write and ::read-only
* HTML <template> element
* WebAudio API

Other improvements:
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* B3 JIT compiler [3] is now used on x86_64, providing impressive performnce improvements for computationally-intensive code
* JavaScriptCore now uses C stack, reducing memory usage and memory fragmentation
* JIT for CSS selectors is now available [4]
* New Web Inspector UI

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However, not all features of QtWebkit 5.6 are implemented in this release. Here are the most prominent missing features:

* WebKit 2 and QML integration. Work on it is starting now.
* Support for Qt (QWebPluginFactory) and NPAPI plugins in WebKit 1 (widgets) API.
* Private browsing API.
* Accelerated compositing (OpenGL mode works in private branch but is not merged yet, software mode is not implemented yet).
* IndexedDB and WebGL are not supported yet

You can find a list of known bugs at [5].

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This release should be considered to have beta quality and is not recommended for use in production environments. However, it's already quite stable and could be used as site-speicifc browser or content renderer, unless your content is affected by aforementioned bugs.

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Your help is very much needed!

If you want to have your favorite features to be implemented faster, don't hesitate to join our team. There are a lot of different tasks, and many of them don't require knowledge of WebKit internals.

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This release was brought to you by Konstantin Tokarev (annulen) and Vitaly Slobodin (vitallium), with invaluable help of WebKit and Qt communitites' members.

Happy hacking, and stay tuned!


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[1] Source code: https://github.com/annulen/webkit/archive/qtwebkit-tp1.zip
    Or use qtwebkit-tp1 tag from https://github.com/annulen/webkit git repository
    Windows x64 binaries built with MSVC 2015: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30021413/WebKit_MSVC2015_X64_Release.zip

    System requirements, build instructions, FAQ and other useful info can be found at https://github.com/annulen/webkit/wiki


[2] https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/
[3] https://webkit.org/blog/5852/introducing-the-b3-jit-compiler/
[4] https://webkit.org/blog/3271/webkit-css-selector-jit-compiler/
[5] https://github.com/annulen/webkit/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Abug


-- 
Regards,
Konstantin