WebKit Blog

Why are you expect Apple to announce web-related stuff at WWDC? Besides the fact that the web isn't really what WWDC attendees care about, WebKit is also open source and you can watch development happening. Yes, sometimes Apple does work on a big thing that doesn't actually land on the open source project until they announce it, but that's usually when it's being done to support some other hardware or OS feature that they haven't announced yet. If you want to see what's going on in WebKit, just check out https://webkit.org. A simple way to follow along is to read the "What's New In Safari Technology Preview ##" blog posts (and install the Safari Technology Preview to actually try this stuff out).

Well, you wouldn't mail the Safari team, you'd just follow WebKit development (which has a lot of contributors from a lot of different companies): http://webkit.org/

Apple has open source figured out. It's the prefect fusion: the core technologies (http://webkit.org) are open source, but they manage the UI like no one else can. Software with style, the way it should be. The WebKit team is absolutely fantastic too, I miss them.

> Who outside of Apple is using WebKit at this point? Gnome/GTK, at least. The one bundled with Gnome (previously called Epiphany) still uses it. I was going to say Midori, but apparently it's recently-ish switched to Electron, which is understandable, but a little disappointing. There are other niche browsers using WebKitGTK, but with the loss of Midori (?) and Qt's WebKit interface its definitely got a really small presence now. > And how often do the tarballs drop? Unlike most open source projects inside Apple, WebKit is developed basically in the open, with a dedicated website at https://webkit.org/ and an SVN repo at https://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/. They also link directly to the WebKitGTK project, and provide instructions for building for/on Linux (and Windows). It's kind of a shame it's not more widely used -- I understand why most people so inclined would prefer Gecko/Firefox, but there may come a time when the only valid choices are a rendering engine backed by Google's dollars, or one by Apple's dollars. And unlike Mozilla, which is still mostly relying on Google's dollars, Apple has a vested financial interest in keeping a separate and at least adequate web stack. Edit: Worth mentioning one problem with WebKitGTK adoption in linux has been API deprecation. I haven't done any dev work with it, but I know a lot of projects just gave up after the WebKit -> WebKit2 port, and GTK itself can be a PITA. The tooling outside Darwin/OS X is more cumbersome,…

I'm still shocked that they went the Chromium route here. This would have been their chance to really, well, for lack of a better way of putting it: stick it to Google [0] I think it would have been far, far more impressive to use Quantum (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum) or WebKit (https://webkit.org), with the added benefit that nw.js is already up and going for the Webkit engine (and likely would have sufficed as an Electron replacement that they could drive forward, but I suppose they own Electron now with Github acquired) For its not Apple anymore and certainly not Mozilla that is the prime competitor nowadays to Microsoft, its Google (With Chromebooks in the schools, and their small business and cloud offerings) and Amazon's Web Services division that are their main competitors now. While I don't know how all the business logic went into this and ultimately came up with this being the best calculation at hand, I think this would have played better in the media too (especially if they leaned on Mozilla) [0] I know Chromium != Google, but its pretty hard not to see that most of Chromium's development is downstream from Google and Google employs and/or otherwise has had some direct influence over the core team

Apple essentially invented color matching on personal computers back in the classic Mac OS days; it's hard to believe after all this time, they're not dealing with color correctly. The WebKit blog from 2016: WebKit color-matches all images on both iOS and macOS. This means that if the image has a color profile, we will make sure the colors in the image are accurately represented on the display, whether it is normal or wide gamut. This is useful since many digital cameras don’t use sRGB in their raw format, so simply interpreting the red, green and blue values as such is unlikely to produce the correct color. Typically, you won’t have to do anything to get this color-matching. Nearly all image processing software allows you to tag an image with a color profile, and many do it by default. [1]: https://webkit.org/blog/6682/improving-color-on-the-web/

The original webkit blog post about parking lot mutex implementation is a great read https://webkit.org/blog/6161/locking-in-webkit/

Firefox runs the game well on the Mac, while the Neutralino build (presumably using the WebKit shipped with Safari) experiences some performance issues. Can you replicate the performance issues with Safari? If so you might be able to glean some insights from https://webkit.org/web-inspector/timelines-tab/ When profiling, it can often be useful to compare profiles of "working well" versus "not working well". So you could record a 10 second timeline when things are going smoothly, then a 5 second timeline when perf is bad - things that jump out on the second timeline are worth looking at.

You're saying each tool solves a problem. That's true. But is it a problem that you have? And is the pain of that problem larger than the pain of introducing another tool that you need to debug when things go wrong? Also, browsers have really stepped up their game. Now there is native CSS nesting[0], cross-document view transitions[1] and much more. So the above calculus is continuously shifting. So much that I think it's best to start with a really simple stack nowadays.[2] [0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_nesting/Using_CSS… [1]: https://webkit.org/blog/16967/two-lines-of-cross-document-view-transit… [2]: https://mastrojs.github.io/

Don't mind at all! Worth calling out that this is the form used by two forms in JavaScriptCore: - DFG-SSA (used for high level optimizations in the FTL JIT) - B3 (used for low level optimizations in the FTL JIT) B3 is somewhat well documented: https://www.webkit.org/docs/b3/intermediate-representation.html

Great Q! Pretty much everyone in the field knows about MDN (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ ) and https://web.dev and https://caniuse.com but the Interop project is newer and maybe flying under the radar: https://webkit.org/blog/14955/the-web-just-gets-better-with-interop/ Enjoy!

They feel pretty close to shipping this to me: https://webkit.org/blog/14879/webgpu-now-available-for-testing-in-safa… They recently shipped an update that resolves all issues running PlayCanvas' WebGPU backend. My guess is that we're looking at 6-12 months to reach production. To track WebGPU support, I recommend this awesome site: https://web3dsurvey.com/webgpu

> I think this will make an important precedent It's worth noting this is not the first time things like this have gone to the community for feedback. They did the same for nested CSS selectors, which ended up working quite well feedback-wise: https://webkit.org/blog/13607/help-choose-from-options-for-css-nesting…

Another related announcement, with a bit more detail on specifics of the benchmark changes (and some history of Speedometer): https://webkit.org/blog/15131/speedometer-3-0-the-best-way-yet-to-meas…

Safari's rendering engine is open source, but the UI isn't. https://www.webkit.org

That's just comically false. Safari is under active development, gets new features all the time, and has a dev blog you can subscribe to over RSS [0]. You may not like Safari, and you're welcome to your opinion about it, but you're not welcome to your own facts. [0] https://webkit.org/blog/

It is. See: - https://webkit.org/ - https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Origins

Worth also noting is WebKit's standards positions at https://webkit.org/standards-positions/ (this one has not landed yet, likely to be opposed as well)

WebKit published a list of things they don't/won't add support for, so you can count them out on iOS. https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/ I have an native app for both platforms which uses some of these because I can't do it with a webapp, I'd love for everything to be done in the browser. Web Bluetooth Web MIDI API Magnetometer AP Web NFC API Device Memory API Network Information API Battery Status API Web Bluetooth Scanning Ambient Light Sensor HDCP Policy Check extension for EME Proximity Sensor WebHID Serial API Web USB Geolocation Sensor (background geolocation) User Idle Detection

But putting capabilities behind permission isn't what Apple or Moz considered. > Finally, if we find that features and web APIs increase fingerprintability and offer no safe way to protect our users, we will not implement them https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/07/apple-fingerprinting-privacy/ Strangling the web platform to keep users safe, forcing them onto much less secure much more invasive apps is not justified nor reasonable. Watching Mozilla adopt the same condescending paternalistic platform murdering "protect the children" absolutist authoritarianism with no possible consideration or affordances was a sad sad sad week. It's extremely reckless & hostile behavior, at deep deep deep injury to making so many great futures possible.

I highly recommend you take a look at https://webkit.org/blog/6161/locking-in-webkit/ then. It’s been known for a long time that pthread mutexes are very expensive and terrible. Unfortunately you can’t fix it AND maintain back compat (and you might lose technical compliance with POSIX). But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t drastically better locking primitives and it’s the epitomy of hubirus to think glibc is a great codebase. It’s just widely used and most people really don’t want to dive into writing their own libc. Literally every high performance application I’ve seen uses their own locking primitives, DNS alternatives etc. The only exception is when the locking isn’t a critical bottleneck. Examples of the same concept in different contexts: WTF lock Folly locks ABSEIL locks Rust mutexes I have more interesting projects to work on than glibc maintenance.

I am supportive of this. Ofc, parent selector would still be nice, but I understand the problems solving that performantly. As a highlight, Nested CSS doesn't support nested selectors if they both begin with letters, so the "&" is used as divider. I highly recommend web-dev's check out the last section of the article*: https://webkit.org/blog/13813/try-css-nesting-today-in-safari-technolo… [*: even though, IMO, in this instance it seems like a hack; nesting CSS styles, while the HTML is nested in the opposite direction seems pretty counterintuitive. but having the tool in your toolbox could be useful for other things.]

This appears to be based on completely isolated runtimes. Note this line from fibonacci-recursive: // Broadcast function declaration of 'fibonacci' to napa workers. zone.broadcast(fibonacci.toString()); This "serializes" the function `fibonacci` as a string (!) and then `eval`s it in all the workers; this has some obvious limitations. Anyways about the same level as WebWorker. Filip Pizlo probably has outlined the best attempt at how real multithreaded JS might work: https://webkit.org/blog/7846/concurrent-javascript-it-can-work/

Oddly enough, JSC is never defined in the article. From elsewhere: > WebKit’s JavaScript implementation, called JSC (JavaScriptCore), implements all of ES6. -- https://webkit.org/blog/7536/jsc-loves-es6/

Safari is generally in favor of facilitating sites making money from ads, as long as the privacy impact is minimal. For example, they proposed and implemented https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-attribution-f… So I could see them implementing Topics if they were convinced that its specific tradeoff of better monetization for publishers vs leaking some bits about the user was worth it.

The officially recommended way to test WebKit on Linux is to use the Epiphany browser shipped in GNOME, which shares the same engine (and a quite similar UI even). Technical previews synchronised with the Safari Technology Preview available at https://webkit.org/downloads/ too.

Here's a short list of some browser engines that are not based on google's or paid for by google: Webkit: [1] It's a thousand times easier to compile and was the original base for chromium Servo: [2] This is much more recent, I haven't looked lately (until today) but it looks to be making rapid forward progress Elinks: [3] and friends, these are more capable than you'd think (hackernews works, even if you don't build it with javascript enabled.) Also it's surprisingly easy to write your own engine, it's just keeping up with some of the more political stupidity/abuse is hard. [3] http://elinks.or.cz/ [2] https://servo.org/ [1] https://webkit.org/

I'll note that you can subscribe to these in your RSS/atom feed reader (I use a self-hosted FreshRSS augmented by RSSHub). https://www.chromestatus.com/features.xml https://webkit.org/feed/atom/ For Firefox there's no feed but RSSHub can make one for you https://docs.rsshub.app/en/program-update.html#firefox

I hear this argument come up a lot and frankly it's just misleading to even bring it up. When a company controls an open source project, the project follows their vision–regardless of whether there are a couple other groups with slightly-more-than-nominal contributions. Ask yourself whether any one group could prevent a commit from going in that Google corporate had decided they wanted in Chromium–the answer is of course no. It'd be like saying Apple doesn't have essentially full control over WebKit's direction, even though this page lists a bunch of people who aren't from Apple: https://webkit.org/team/

Block any third-party cookies, and then block third-party JavaScript alltogether. Problem solved. Oh, there's nothing like that in the so-called "HTML standard"? Maybe, just maybe, Google being the standard body might have something to do with it, when Apple have been blocking third-party cookies for years now [1], and is in the progress of banning browser APIs that can be used for fingerprinting. Best of all, this might rollback all those HTML5 APIs that have no business being shipped with browsers, and bring back the web content we want. [1]: https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocking-and-mor…