[Sugar-devel] Browse and the move to WebKit

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On 14 June 2011 20:58, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
> 1. I've only made half the argument above. Mozilla is bad, but why is
> WebKit the solution? The key questions here are: is it embeddable?
> Does it work well when embedded? Do the developers support it being
> embedded?

With WebKit2, this all you need to load a web page into a GtkBox

WKViewRef web_view = WKViewCreate(WKContextGetSharedProcessContext(), 0);
WKPageLoadURL(WKViewGetPage(web_view), WKURLCreateWithUTF8CString(PAGE_URL));
gtk_box_pack_start(GTK_BOX(box), GTK_WIDGET(web_view), TRUE, TRUE, 0);
gtk_widget_show(GTK_WIDGET(web_view));

Quite an improvement over mozilla :) More importantly, from
http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2

"WebKit2 will provide a stable C-based non-blocking API that is mostly
platform agnostic. In order to achieve the goal of a non-blocking API,
several techniques are used to make the API usable while still
providing a comprehensive set of features to the embedder."

A couple of important points here:

1 The API is stable, something that mozilla never guaranteed even
between minor releases.
2 The API is the same every other WebKit2 based browser will be using,
it's not a special, incomplete subset of the API for embedders (I
would say that was the crux of the problem with gtkmozembed).

My main worry is not about embeddability really but about the quality
of the gtk specific bits. I'm not sure I trust libsoup for example.
Motorola and Igalia are working on those

http://blogs.igalia.com/alex/2011/04/08/webkit2-minibrowser-for-the-gtk-port-running/

It would probably be a good idea to talk with them about status/plans.
Testing MiniBrowser should be interesting too, it builds very easily
on F15.

Hope that helps,
Marco