The last few days I spent fixing up some more details in the new HTML5 gdk backend. Not everything is supported yet (keyboard input in particular is very weak), but much more things work now. Even thought the backend is not of production quality it is now good enough that I think its interesting for a larger audience to play around with. So, today I merged the branch into the Gtk+ master branch (i.e. what will be Gtk+ 3.2).

The new multi-backends setup in Gtk+ 3.0 makes this much easier to test. All you have to do is build Gtk+ with –enable-x11-backend –enable-broadway-backend.This will give you a normal X11-based Gtk+ where you can enable the broadway backend at runtime by setting the GDK_BACKEND enviroment variable.

The backend only supports firefox 4 atm, and Mozilla disabled websockets by default, so you have to enable enable websockets for any input to work. However when this is done you can test any app by running:

GDK_BACKEND=broadway your-application& firefox http://127.0.0.1:8080/

I recorded a small screencast to show this stuff: (webm source file here)

[vimeo width=”512″ height=”384″]http://vimeo.com/21062117[/vimeo]

Note that the recording is using a local connection, it will be slower over the network depending on the network bandwidth.