In my previous post I shared that I had managed to get a basic implementation of WebKitGTK+WebKit2 to work under Wayland. I also discussed some of the pieces that were still missing, most important of which was supporting for multiple views, that is, having the possibility to run multiple browser windows/tabs that render accelerated content simultaneously.

In the last weeks I have continued making progress and I am happy to say that I have finally implemented support for this too, proof in the video below:





Support for multiple views required to implement an extension to the Wayland protocol so that we can effectively map widgets and their corresponding Wayland surfaces in our nested compositor. This is needed to know which surface provides the graphics for which widget. Thanks to Pekka Paalanen for introducing me into the world of Wayland extensions!

My work also uncovered a number of hidden bugs in WebKitGTK that were hidden by the fact that we always use a sharing context for all our GL contexts. In Wayland, however, my colleague Zan Dobersek is working on implementing support for the sharing context separately and our patches still need to be merged together, so I have been working all this time without a sharing context and that uncovered these bugs that show up when we deal with multiple views (and hence multiple GL contexts). I am still working on fixing these but in any case merging my work with Zan’s should be enough to prevent them from actually producing any harm, just like in X11. Actually, one of these bugs is the one behind the rendering issues I mentioned in my last post when clicking on the browser’s back button.

One more thing worth mentioning: I needed a full browser to test multiple browser windows and tabs, so that also led me to test all my work with Epiphany/Web, which I had not done yet (so far I had restricted myself to work only with WebKit’s MiniBrowser), that is of course the browser I use in the video above.

If you are interested in following progress more closely or want to look at the patches that enable Accelerated Compositing for WebKitGTK/WebKit2 under Wayland, here is the bug.

Finally, I would like to thank my sponsor, Igalia, for supporting this work since its inception.