Igalia 2021 Goals

November 2020

Igalia

Who we are

Igalia

Worker-owned cooperative with people all over the world
Browsers are the main area of work (graphics, multimedia, etc.)
We advocate for healthy open source, open standards and secure platforms/software
We actively participate in spec definition organizations (e.g. TC39 and W3C)

The GTK port

Focuses on the Linux desktop
- GNOME Web (a.k.a. Epiphany)
- Embedded web views in applications

The WPE port

Widely used in embedded—Linux for now
3/4 of our WebKit-related income comes from embedded industries
Designed with performance, small footprint, accelerated content rendering, and simplicity of embedding in mind

Igalia + WebKit

We expand WebKit’s relevance and diversity of investment
We help promote a healthy commons with value all around
- Our customers
- WebKit
- The larger ecosystem

Consider…

How many browsers does the world need?

Early web

Early Web Limits

Mobile Web Limits

Embedded Limits

Browsers, browsers everywhere

TV
Game Consoles
Car, airplane, train infotainment
Digital Signage
Point of Sale
Speakers
Smart Appliances
more

A growing segment using WPE

Many investing upstream
We invest upstream
We can talk about this
Everyone wins

2020 Review

WebKit contributions 2019

Last year we were the #2 committer with 11% of all commits! Wow!

WebKit contributions 2020

So far in 2020 we are the #2 committer with 15.5% of all commits!!!

How did we do in 2020? (1/2)

Pretty great! Moved most things forward!

Improving MathML
Lazy Loading (mostly)
Stale-while-revalidate
Offscreen Canvas (lots)
ScrollIntoViewOptions
ResizeObserver
Text Wrapping

How did we do in 2020? (2/2)

SVG/CSS alignment
QtWPE
PSON support
GTK4 support
ITP support
Gamepad support (GTK)
PointerLock support (GTK)
WebDriver big improvements

Some other good things

Closer Coordination ❤️
Someone else talking about WebKit
Changing the conversation
- Open Prioritization
- Igalia chats (invites!)
Lots to make WPE easier to use

Obtaining WPE: binaries

📦 Flatpak
- Easy way to explore WPE
- SDK available to develop against WPE
- Also used for WebKit development
📀 Raspberry Pi OS with WPE image
- Raspbian-based, works out of the box
- Also available as nightly builds

Flatpak is generally advertised as the next-generation technology for building and distributing applications on Linux. The WPE maintainers leverage Flatpak to allow users to try two different WPE flavors. This can be a very easy way to let you explore WPE, check the features and specifications supported by WPE, or just want to experiment and learn more about what some of the differences with a full browser are.

We also maintaining the BuildStream project that produces the Platform and SDK Flatpak runtimes suitable for WPE and GTK WebKit development ports.

Still, probably the most straight-forward way to learn a lot without a lot of experience in embedded is to try out our image that runs on Raspberry Pi OS.

Just download and flash the image onto an SD card, plug it in and go. Lots of developers have a Raspberry Pi sitting around somewhere and if you don’t, you can one without a huge investment. A Raspberry PI 3b, as of the time of this writing costs under $45, and can be connected to any display or keyboard. The Raspberry Pi OS is a more or less full featured desktop OS, so it’s easy to configure things like a WiFi connection, install a local server, setup SSH and so on. The browser we’ve packed up with this distribution is not especially optimized for the hardware, so you can get a pretty good feel of what running on really limited 32-bit hardware can be like - and which sorts of performance related things we just owe to particular optimizations.

Obtaining WPE: Build Recipes

🔧 Yocto WPE images using meta-webkit
- Documented build instructions
- Pre-built images for Raspberry Pi 3 and i.MX7 boards
👷 Buildroot
- In official releases since 2019.05

Epiphany Tech Preview

wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web/Development

Flatpak 📦 bundle
—
GNOME Web 🌐 from Git
+
Latest WebKitGTK 🧭 release

Source Releases

	GTK	WPE
Stable	9	9
Development	10	7
	19	16

Total: 📦 35 releases, 🛡 7 WSAs

This is the amount of releases we did this year, a lot of them!

Releases for both the GTK and WPE ports are done from the same release branch so that we can share the stabilization efforts before stable releases, bugfix releases, and security advisories among both ports (WSA: WebKit Security Advisory).

The release schedule follows the GNOME release cycle: two stable “major” releases per year in March and September.

Development releases with the last version number <90 are taken from trunk; any time we deem it interesting.
With second version number ≥90, releases are done from the stable release branch in the weeks before the first stable release. They are considered release candidates.
WSAs (Security Advisories) are published when we get information about which CVEs were fixed in which Safari versions, then correlate with our release history to determine which of our releases contain the fixes.

Development: releases are trunk snapshots
Stable: releases in March and September
Only improvements, bug, and security fixes

Supported Systems

The oldest, as per the dependecies policy:

Distribution	GCC	Clang	libstdc++	Until
Ubuntu 18.04	7	6	7	April 2021
Debian Buster	8	7	8	Late 2022

The support policy is:

We support each major Debian version until one year after the release of the next major version.
We support each Ubuntu LTS until one year after the release of the next Ubuntu LTS.

For WPE it can be a challenge, because integrators may happen to choose e.g. a Yocto release at the end of its life cycle (~2 years old), then take another 2-3 years to develop a product without taking any updates, we can easily end up with a 5 year old userland and toolchain.

There are workaround we can use, but luckily it has gotten better and we have not needed any in the last year. Some integrators are now even taking WebKit updates (if with some delays, e.g. picking 2.28.x when 2.30.x is already out)—our API/ABI stability guarantees are paying off, and releases rarely break applications.

Web Platform 2020 Highlights

Layout 1/2

Flexbox and Grid layout fixes
- Flexbox gaps 🥳
list-style-type: “string”
logical inset/border/padding/margin
CSS Text breaking

Layout 2/2

Intersection & resize observers
math-style and MathML displaystyle
Aspect ratio:
- image default from HTML attributes
- CSS aspect-ratio 🚧

Scrolling

scroll-snap 🚧
scroll-behavior 🚧
overscroll-behavior 🚧
scrollend event 🚧

Loading

Lazy image & <iframe> loading
Fetch/XHR
stale-while-revalidate
referrer-policy attribute

WebXR

Device API
- Session management
- Retrieving pose 🚧
Testing
- WPT score 29/81
- XRTest API
Platform integration with OpenXR
- WPE
- other ports?

📺 MSE platform refactoring

Lots of clean ups and bug fixing
New features such as AV1 support, rate setting and subtitles

📺🔒 EME upstreaming

Upstreamed and reenabled full support of ClearKey
Added support for other key systems by using third party software

🎥🎙 WebRTC

Keeping up with libwebrtc updates
Maintenance

JavaScriptCore (1/2)

Landed:
- instance public fields (enabled by default)
- instance private fields
Work on optimizing private fields to enable them by default

JavaScriptCore (2/2)

Doubled EWS test throughput with more ARMv7/MIPS boards
Support for for-of intrinsic in ARMv7/MIPS
Implemented static fields (pending review)

🎹 Misc

📝 Web Platform Tests

Imported/updated more tests into WebKit
Added WebKitGTK runs to wpt.fyi
- Daily: nightly build from trunk
- Weekly: stable and development releases
Implementation and bugfixing to make WebKit more interoperable.

⛑️ QA (1/2)

Improved the status of GTK & WPE LayoutTests bots
- GLib: Common baseline for GTK & WPE
- More than 500 commits of gardening
- Bugzilla housekeeping, closed many obsolete bugs
Deployed 25+ more bots and new builders

⛑️ QA (2/2)

Dogfed the new Flatpak SDK and deployed it early in bots
Added WebDriver support in WPE
Improvements in WebDriver tests
General bug-fixing and improvement of tooling and infrastructure code base
Beta instance of Mozsearch for WebKit

⛑️ QA Layout tests - GTK Unexpected

⛑️ QA Layout tests - WPE Unexpected

⛑️ QA Layout tests - GTK Expected

⛑️ QA Layout tests - WPE Expected

Mozsearch for WebKit

QA current EWS bots

GTK Build
WPE Build
API-GTK Tests
JSC ARMv7/MIPS Build
JSC ARMv7/MIPS Tests

QA current post-commit bots

GTK Release/Debug Build
WPE Release/Debug Build
GTK Release Debian Stable Build
GTK Release Ubuntu LTS Stable Build
GTK Release Packaging Nightly Ubuntu 18.04 & 20.04
WPE Release Packaging Nightly Ubuntu 18.04 & 20.04

QA current post-commit testing bots

GTK Release/Debug JavaScript Tests
(JSCore-tests + test262)
GTK Release/Debug Tests
(LayoutTests + API)
GTK Release/Debug WebDriver Tests
WPE Release/Debug JavaScript Tests
(JSCore-tests + test262)
WPE Release/Debug Tests
(LayoutTests + API + WebDriver)

QA current post-commit JSC bots (build & test)

JSC ARM64
JSC ARMv7
JSC MIPS

2021 Plans

GTK + WPE 🔮

Graphics pipeline revamp
ANGLE backed WebGL & WebGL2
Interactive form validation
More <input> types (color, date, etc.)
GPUprocess
Scrolling animation improvements
OpenGL ES 3 support
Vulkan and WebGPU (it would be great!)

GTK 🔮

GTK4 support:
- GTK3 and GTK4 parallel installable
- API break → chance for improvements
- First release with official support
- Build bots

WPE 🔮

Device Motion & Orientation events
Modern pasteboard support

Multimedia 🔮

GStreamer-based MediaRecorder
GStreamer WebRTC support (experiment)
GStreamer Web Inspector tab
MSE and EME complete features

Networking 🔮

We are the current maintainers of the libsoup library
libsoup3
- New API
- HTTP/2 support
PKCS#11 (TLS client certs, smartcards…)

Web Platform Specs

Offscreen Canvas (text support)
Unify the SVG and HTML rendering
(perf improvements, landing the branch)
Web Speech API (planned)
Scrolling
MathML
WebXR
:focus-visible
aspect-ratio

JavaScriptCore

Land remaining patches to make class fields feature complete
Rework of the private methods implementation
Optimization and fine-tuning until it can be all enabled by default (instance public fields already are)

WebAssembly 1/3

Uncontroversial maintenance
- Work on needed updates to reference types implementation for spec evolution (e.g. ref.null extern and similar)
Proposals that are pretty much done, but which might change
- JavaScript type reflection API

WebAssembly 2/3

Proposals that are generally agreed to be a good idea, but which need implementation feedback
- Type imports
- Typed function references
Proposals that sound like a good idea but about which there are significant ongoing discussions
- GC “MVP” with record and array types

WebAssembly 3/3

For all our work we plan to contribute to the shared validation tests as appropriate

JSC 32-bits 1/2

Fuzzing
- Develop necessary infrastructure
Polymorphic Inline Caching (PIC) for LLInt
Fine-tune default compilation thresholds
Continue regular investigation of tests failures and skipped tests

JSC 32-bits 2/2

Continue to improve available hardware resources and tooling for testing
Focus on adding performance bots
- Provide a better overview of how performance changes over time

📝 Web Platform Tests

Help to keep the WPT imported tests updated
Improve the tooling for importing WPT tests
Explore solutions to try to automate the import of WPT tests
Improve WebKit cross-browser compatibility
Add WPE to the wpt.fyi dashboard

Testing & Infra 👷

Manage build bots using Ansible
GTK builders using Wayland by default
Fuzzing

QA Upcoming EWS bots

GTK Non-unified Build
GTK LayoutTests
WPE WebDriver

QA Upcoming post-commit bots

GTK4 Release Build & Test
(LayoutTests + API + WebDriver)
GTK Release/Debug Security Build
(ASAN + TSAN + LayoutTests)
WPE Release/Debug Security Build
(ASAN + TSAN + LayoutTests)
WPE Release Build & Test AArch64 (64-bits)
WPE Release Build & Test ARMv7 (32-bits)

We want to deploy an EWS GTK Build bot that build using non-unified sources. Very often, one per month at least, we need to do build fixes due unified source failures. This bot could be a post-commit, if necessary.

We want to deploy an EWS GTK Bot that runs LayoutTests. We have been working aggressively in this task throughout the year, which led to highly improve the status of LayoutTests. We’re close to the goal and we hope we can have this bot in production before the year ends. Once this bot is deployed we expect it will help us saving a lot of time, specially in gardening.

We want to deploy a EWS bot that runs the WebDriver tests, based on WPE. This year the tests broke a couple of times as a side effect of other patches landing. We think it will be convenient to let know developers when a change may break the tests. Running this test-suite is fast (20 minutes).

Testing WebKit on embedding hardware is important for us. We want to run the LayoutTests suite in device with very low-capabilities (possibly on a big array of boards).

And lastly, we want deploy a bot that build and run test using an address & thread sanitizer which can help us detect potential bugs.

We also have plans for deploying fuzzers on WebKitGTK and WPE.

Summary

All these proposals for the work in the future in WebKit:
- WebKit as the Web Plarform for embedded devices
- Push for the Web Plaform as a solution for the commons
- Advocate for healthy open source, open standards and secure platforms/software

Thank you!
Questions?