Fresh from the ovens of Igalia‘s Industrial Web Hackery division I bring you what all of you were waiting for: support for the DOM methods window.{moveTo, resizeTo, moveBy, resizeBy} in WebKitGTK+, and the corresponding fix in Epiphany. What does this mean? It means that Browser Pong now works in Epiphany!

What? Browser Pong? Yes: Browser Pong.

Go nuts, this is better than World of Warcraft.

In a few days we’ll release Epiphany 2.29.90, so this is a good time as any to show a few of the new cool things it will bring.

The big one is, without doubt, good enough support for HTML5 video tag for the Youtube HTML5 beta to work. Pretty much all of the credit goes to the dynamic duo of Sebastian Dröge and Philippe Normand, which have been working tirelessly to improve our media support all across the board. As you probably know we use GStreamer for all our media needs, so if you happen to have the right codecs installed stuff will just work out of the box, like it should. Here you can see it in action, playing one scene everybody should know and love:

Another recently fixed bug is support for windowless NPAPI plugins, contributed by Brian Tarricone. For those of you still enslaved to plugins it should fix a few annoyances, not to mention that it allows for the plugin content to be manipulated alongside the rest of the web content, since it’s rendered directly in the browser window.

The world-famous Diego Escalante, who is doing an internship in our company with the mission of fixing as many Epiphany bugs as he possibly can, reimplemented EphyEmbedPersist on top of WebKitDownload , which will have the visible effect of making those mysteriously broken save-related context menu items work again.

On the same “kill all regressions” mood I spent some time implementing acceptance policies for cookies in libsoup and hooking the new APIs here and there. The result? This pesky items in the preferences dialog should do something again:

When I was not doing that or losing my youth in the depths of WebKit chasing some nasty bugs I’ve also been spending some time on the GObject DOM bindings for WebKit. I’m happy to say that a couple of preliminary patches have been already committed, and the first big-step patch of the process is under active review and hopefully will be accepted shortly, so you should begin to get some exciting new APIs to manipulate web content in a not-so-distant release!

There are just a few of the latest things we have been working on. I’ll, as usual, keep you more or less up to date here, but if you want the gory details of the day to day business, or even get your hands dirty on the stuff yourself, don’t hesitate to join our IRC channels (#epiphany on GimpNet and #webkit-gtk on FreeNode) or mailing lists. Happy hacking!

Haven’t blogged about the hackfest since the day zero (although others have done a great job), but I guess I have a good excuse since we have been working all day every day, no time for blogging!

Arrived yesterday night to Coruña for the WebKitGTK+ hackfest, a couple of hours before Gustavo did. Today he and I kicked off the day zero of the hackfest, before everybody arrives starting tomorrow.

We spent the whole day hacking on form login/password saving, and despite some issues with GNOME keyring being unhappy and dying on us, I can say we made good progress for one day of work:

This is epiphany/webkit master auto-filling my twitter.com login/password after launch, which as some people know is one of our last nasty regressions. There’s still a few things to do, but I’m confident about landing this before we leave Spain. Also, for those of you not following our development closely, the screenshot also shows the twitter favicon, since Gustavo recently fixed our favicon support in master.

Later today, Álex and Philippe joined us. Álex continued working in a tough accessibility bug in WebKitGTK+ he’s been fighting with, and Philippe arrived just in time for a nice dinner downtown. Not bad for one day, considering we were even not supposed to be here today!

You might have heard the rumors, and it’s true: we’ll be holding a WebKitGTK+ hackfest right before Christmas, from the 15th to the 21st of December, 2009.

A group of core WebKitGTK+ hackers and contributors will meet at the Igalia offices in A Coruña, and we’ll hack for a week on things like GObject DOM bindings, libsoup, a harfbuzz backend, native theming through offscreen widgets, HTML5 video/audio support and many more things.

I’ve put up a wiki page with all the information we have so far, so keep an eye on it if you are interested. Also, we have two sponsors so far, Collabora and Igalia (thanks!), but we can always use a few more of them. If you feel like you could contribute to advance the state of the Web support in our platform, please drop me a line at my email address, xan gnome org, or contact the GNOME foundation directly.

Happy hacking!

Possibly I’m about to make a fool of myself saying this, but since I wasted some time a few days ago I might help someone doing it.

Say you are debugging some feature in your program that is enabled with some command line paramater (“random” example: the –private option in Epiphany for private profiles). One way of passing this to gdb is the –args flag, but another one is to pass them to run/r in the prompt, like:

(gdb) r –private

You do your stuff, and then you decide you need to see what happens without the option. One “obvious” way to do it would be to write, after the previous line:

(gdb) r

Right? Wrong. From the GDB manual:

run with no arguments uses the same arguments used by the previous run, or those set by the set args command.

So you’d be basically running your program with –private again. The right way to do it, as the manual says, is to reset the arguments with ’set args’.

I wonder how many silly things I have done through the years without noticing because I didn’t know this.

Gustavo has written a nice sumary of all the new APIs in 1.1.14 (yes, all that stuff was only for 1.1.14!), so go and check it out if you are interested.

Yesterday we released WebKitGTK+ 1.1.14, Epiphany 2.27.92 and Epiphany-Extensions 2.27.92. I haven’t blogged about releases in a while (sorry!), and as the good people at Ars Technica mention development is moving at a “swift rate” (btw Ryan, you can remove the ugly hack to get the contents of the page from your app and use the new and shiny WebKitDataSource APIs) , so there’s a lot of ground to cover. I won’t go through all the APIs and fixes we have done in the last months though, you can always check the NEWS file for a brief summary, or check our documentation page to see what new APIs landed on each release.

Hi from GCDS! Now that both my normal talk and my crazy talk are done I guess I can break the radio silence and say what’s going on like everyone else is doing. I spent a couple of crazy days with Fer preparing our GNOME 1,2.3 talk, although to be honest it was great fun to make up all those jokes and find those videos. For those who asked, he’s preparing a technical ‘Making of’ of the talk, so stay tuned. Because of that I missed some talks and parties, but now that that’s over I’ll try to attend to as much stuff as possible! For starters, yesterday’s Igalia Party was great.

One thing I’ll try to do before I leave is to spend some time with the WebKit guys and try to get some serious hacking going (in my case, I’ll try to finally kill my a11y nemesis bug, which shall remain linkless), so if you want to join us or want to ask anything about WebKit just grab me and ask if you see me.