Hello world!
This week most of my time was spent working on getting WebKit2 compiling on Haiku. WebKit2 is the new multi-process model for WebKit. It replaces the old WebKit1 that our port uses currently. WebKit2 spawns a new process for each tab, and possibly more (for network access, etc.). The key features are:
- When a webpage crashes WebKit, only the tab showing this page is lost, not the whole browser
- The use of more processes makes the application feel more reactive. As you know, the threading model in WebKit is not a perfect fit with Haiku's one, but splitting things in a separate process allows us to have a standard Haiku application as the visible browser shell
- All the tricks of getting WebKit running (specific tweaks to BApplication and BWindows) are moved to the rendering process. This makes the BWebView API much simpler, as it will become just a plain subclass of BView, with no expectations on the BApplication or BWindow
- The WebKit2 API is where all current WebKit development happens. WebKit1 lacks support for some features
The quest to provide a better web browsing experience continues this week with some small fixes which result from hours of tracking down bugs.
Hello there,
As mentioned in the previous report, two weeks ago I attended the RMLL conference. As usual this was quite interesting, and an occasion to show Haiku to more people in the free software community. We got only about 10 persons attending our conference and 4 attending our workshop on making Haiku packages. However, the main event was the “Libre Village” where we got to meet people and try to get as much of them as possible to try Haiku. I played Critical Mass with some people there, and also helped porting PyTouhou to Haiku.
Hello there!
Few things to mention this week.
The 1.4.1 version of HaikuWebkit with the new drawing code is available in the nightlies. While it seems to work better in many cases, there will likely be a few regressions, please give it a test run and report any rendering problem you get.
With this released, I started the work on getting WebKit2 to build. Following the advise from one of the webkit-gtk developers in last week update comments, I’m starting with a port that will use UNIX Domain Sockets.
Hello everyone,
Things are rather quiet on the WebKit side this week. I’m reviewing and fixing the remaining bugs with the new drawing code, which is now working rather well. On the WebKit side, I have implemented a limited form of transform support for regions (only handling translation and scaling, not shear and rotations), which has very good results. As a consequence, we now have mostly correct drawing and quite good performance. Before I do a release (I know the version in current nightlies is quite outdated now), I want to fix one more bug, which is the lack of video display on youtube. This is probably a simple fix once I understand why the current code isn’t working anymore.
Hello world, another update!
The most exciting news this week is that I enabled the CSS JIT on Haiku. This is a new feature in WebKit that applies the same optimization techniques used for JavaScript, to CSS. CSS is becoming a complex language, and matching elements in the page with CSS rules and selectors can take a lot of time with complex stylesheets. WebKit will now use a JIT to compile CSS rules, which allows faster matching, and thus faster layout and rendering of the page. Since this uses mostly the same code as JS, enabling it was just a matter of switching the flag on in the webkit compile-time configuration.
Hello there,
app_server optimizations
Work on WebKit continued this week. In the previous report, I mentioned several issues with the new tiled rendering. Most of them turned out to be either problems in app_server or misuse of the APIs in the WebKit code. The most important part was that WebKit used region clipping and expected the region to be transformed when using SetTransform; however, with the current design, region clipping isn’t affected by the view transform.
Hello everyone!
Work on the new drawing code for WebKit continues this week. We have scrolling support again (this was a bug in app_server, which stippi helped to fix), the scrollbars are drawn in the view thread (we are still using the fake scrollbars from WebKit), and the screen is updating as it should, so we get animations to work much better (for example the 2048 game plays with animations now).
Hello everyone,
I spent most of the week working on the texture mapper drawing code. I spent a lot of time tweaking the options (each change requires a complete build of Web+, so this added up to a lot of time…), and today I got the texture mapper to display something in a BWindow.
Hello everyone.
Well, just got confirmation from Haiku, Inc. that I can continue working on this during May. Thanks to everyone who donated money to Haiku, Inc. for making this possible!
As mentioned last week, I’m working on fixing the flickering and missing rendering on some pages. I didn’t get very good results yet, but I can at least give you an overview of the different ways WebKit can render things on screen.
