Simon Willison's Weblog: webkit

Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project

2022-09-12T19:34:01+00:00

Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project

Conventional wisdom is that building a new browser engine from scratch is impossible without enormous capital outlay and many people working together for many years. Andreas Kling has been disproving that for a while now with his SerenityOS from-scratch operating system project, which includes a brand new browser implemented in C++. Now Andreas is announcing his plans to extract that browser as Ladybird and make it run across multiple platforms. Andreas is a former WebKit engineer (at Nokia and then Apple) and really knows his stuff: Ladybird already passes the Acid3 test!

Via Hacker News

Tags: acid3, browsers, webkit, andreas-kling, ladybird

Protecting Against HSTS Abuse

2018-03-19T22:21:57+00:00

Protecting Against HSTS Abuse

Any web feature that can be used to persist information will eventually be used to build super-cookies. In this case it’s HSTS—a web feature that allows sites to tell browsers “in the future always load this domain over HTTPS even if the request specified HTTP”. The WebKit team caught this being exploited in the wild, by encoding a user identifier in binary across 32 separate sub domains. They have a couple of mitigations in place now—I expect other browser vendors will follow suit.

Via @troyhunt

Tags: privacy, security, ssl, webkit

What data structures are used to implement the DOM tree?

2013-02-17T13:31:00+00:00

My answer to What data structures are used to implement the DOM tree? on Quora

You may enjoy this post from Hixie back in 2002 which illustrates how different browsers deal with incorrectly nested HTML. IE6 used to create a tree that wasn't actually a tree! http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=103791...

Tags: chrome, data-structures, firefox, html, internet-explorer, opera, webkit, quora, firefoxos

Visualizing WebKit's hardware acceleration

2011-06-27T10:31:00+00:00

Visualizing WebKit's hardware acceleration

Command line flags for launching Safari (and the iOS simulator) in a way that highlights areas of the screen that are being hardware accelerated—particularly useful if you are using the “-webkit-transform: translate3d(0,0,0)” trick.

Tags: css, safari, webkit, ios, recovered

WebKit is Dropping HTML5 "popstate" Events

2010-10-30T07:41:00+00:00

WebKit is Dropping HTML5 "popstate" Events

Really nasty bug with WebKit’s pushState support, discovered by Ben Cherry from Twitter. popState events get dropped if the user navigates while an outbound network request is in progress.

Via A comment from Kevin Cheng on Quora

Tags: bugs, html5, twitter, webkit, recovered, pushstate

Surfin' Safari: Announcing... MathML!

2010-08-18T13:49:00+00:00

Surfin' Safari: Announcing... MathML!

MathML is now supported by the WebKit nightlies. Worth checking out for the typographical discussion that’s broken out in the comments.

Tags: mathml, safari, typography, webkit, recovered

SublimeVideo - HTML5 Video Player

2010-02-02T09:50:43+00:00

SublimeVideo - HTML5 Video Player

Still a fair way to go (no Firefox support yet, and they plan to add a Flash fallback for IE) but in Safari this is pretty extraordinary. Smooth video, beautiful UI, full window mode and full screen mode in the latest WebKit nightlies. I’d go as far as saying that this is the nicest online video implementation I’ve seen (at least on the Mac).

Tags: flash, html5, safari, video, webkit

Going Nuts with CSS Transitions

2009-12-14T13:16:34+00:00

Going Nuts with CSS Transitions

Nat’s article for this year’s 24ways—adding special effects to images using CSS rotation, box shadows and the magical -webkit-transition property.

Tags: 24-ways, animation, css, natalie-downe, rotation, webkit

WebKit, Mobile, and Progress

2009-10-10T00:28:31+00:00

WebKit, Mobile, and Progress

Alex Russell responds to PPK’s analysis of the many different WebKit variants in today’s mobile phones, pointing out that the replacement cycle and increasing quality of WebKit in more recent phones means the situation still looks pretty good.

Tags: alex-russell, browsers, mobile, ppk, webkit

There is no WebKit on Mobile

2009-10-07T12:23:26+00:00

There is no WebKit on Mobile

PPK ran 27 tests against 19 different WebKit-on-mobile implementations and found enormous disparities between the levels of support in currently available mobile phones.

Tags: mobile, ppk, standards, testing, webkit

Introducing Google Chrome Frame

2009-09-23T09:57:59+00:00

Introducing Google Chrome Frame

Here’s what Alex Russell has been up to at Google: An IE plugin (for 6, 7 and 8 on all Windows versions) which embeds the Google Chrome rendering engine—sites can then opt-in to using it by including a X-UA-Compatible meta tag. Seems to be aimed at corporate networks which mandate IE for badly written intranet applications—they can roll this out without retraining users to use another browser or breaking their existing in house apps.

Tags: alex-russell, chrome, chromeframe, google, internet-explorer, webkit, xuacompatible

CSS 3: Progress!

2009-08-22T11:52:17+00:00

CSS 3: Progress!

Alex Russell on the new exciting stuff going in to CSS 3 based on real-world implementations in the modern set of browsers. Of particular interest is the new Flexible Box specification, which specifies new layout primitives hbox and vbox (as seen in XUL) and is already supported by both WebKit and Gecko.

Tags: alex-russell, browsers, css, css3, flexiblebox, gecko, hbox, standards, vbox, webkit

Dinky pocketbooks with WebKit transforms

2009-05-22T00:33:49+00:00

Dinky pocketbooks with WebKit transforms

Nat used 90 degree CSS transform rotations in print stylesheets for WebKit and Safari to create printable cut-out-and-fold pocketbooks from A4 pages. Very neat.

Tags: css, csstransforms, natalie-downe, pocketbooks, printstyles, rotation, safari, webkit

Building a Better JavaScript Profiler with WebKit

2009-04-29T23:57:26+00:00

Building a Better JavaScript Profiler with WebKit

Clever hack from Francisco Tolmasky which solves the problem of JavaScript profilers showing ? as the name of any anonymous functions. He patched the WebKit profiler to look for a displayName attribute on a function and show that as the function name instead.

Tags: francisco-tolmasky, javascript, profiling, webkit

Google Chrome, the comic book

2008-09-01T19:45:27+00:00

Google Chrome, the comic book

Google have finally announced a browser project, though it’s currently vapourware (or rather comicware), existing only as a Scott McCloud comic. Still, it looks fascinating—entirely open source, WebKit with a brand new JavaScript VM, every tab running in a separate process for smarter memory usage and some new UI concepts and anti-pishing measures thrown in as well.

Via Google Blogoscoped

Tags: antiphishing, chrome, google, googlebrowser, javascript, phishing, scott-mccloud, usability, webkit

SquirrelFish

2008-06-03T07:57:11+00:00

SquirrelFish

WebKit’s JavaScript engine was no slouch, but that hasn’t stopped them from replacing it with a brand new “register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention”. It runs 1.6x faster and has the Best Logo Ever.

Tags: bytecode, javascript, logo, performance, safari, squirrelfish, webkit

CSS Variables

2008-04-25T23:26:46+00:00

CSS Variables

Hooray! My number one requested CSS feature (and I know I’m not alone), proposed by Daniel Glazman and David Hyatt so I imagine we’ll see it trialled in WebKit pretty soon.

Tags: css, daniel-glazman, david-hyatt, variables, webkit, css-custom-properties

Quoting Mike Shaver

2008-03-27T13:35:53+00:00

Ian's Acid 3, unlike its predecessors, is not about establishing a baseline of useful web capabilities. It's quite explicitly about making browser developers jump - Ian specifically sought out tests that were broken in WebKit, Opera, and Gecko, perhaps out of a twisted attempt at fairness. But the Acid tests shouldn't be fair to browsers, they should be fair to the web; they should be based on how good the web will be as a platform if all browsers conform, not about how far any given browser has to stretch to get there.

— Mike Shaver

Tags: acid3, browsers, gecko, ian-hickson, mike-shaver, opera, webkit, web-standards

querySelector and querySelectorAll

2008-02-08T11:21:03+00:00

querySelector and querySelectorAll

WebKit now supports the W3C Selectors API. Expect the various JavaScript libraries to add this as an optimisation to achieve massive speedups (Prototype are already working on it).

Tags: javascript, libraries, prototype-js, queryselector, safari, selectors, w3c, webkit

Safari CSS Reference

2007-11-22T23:51:42+00:00

Safari CSS Reference

Official documentation covering the CSS properties supported by Safari, including the -webkit proprietary extensions.

Tags: browsers, css, documentation, safari, webkit

Ten New Things in WebKit 3

2007-11-16T01:19:52+00:00

Ten New Things in WebKit 3

Does “incremental updates for persistent server connections” for XMLHttpRequest mean Safari now has native support for Comet?

Tags: ajax, comet, javascript, safari, safari3, webkit, xmlhttprequest

HTML5 Media Support in WebKit

2007-11-12T23:21:40+00:00

HTML5 Media Support in WebKit

WebKit continues to lead the pack when it comes to trying out new HTML5 proposals. The new audio and video elements make embedding media easy, and provide a neat listener API for hooking in to “playback ended” events.

Tags: audio, events, html5, javascript, macos, media, safari, video, webkit

CSS Transforms

2007-10-26T21:45:01+00:00

CSS Transforms

WebKit can now do transforms (scale, rotate, translate and skew) in CSS via a new -webkit-transform property. Transforms behave like position relative in that they don’t affect the layout of the page. You can also provide a full affine transform matrix as a shortcut.

Tags: affinetransformation, apple, browsers, css, graphics, matrix, safari, transforms, webkit

Site-specific browsers and GreaseKit

2007-10-25T07:56:01+00:00

Site-specific browsers and GreaseKit

New site-specific browser tool which lets you include a bunch of Greasemonkey scripts. For me, the killer feature of site-specific browsers is still cookie isolation (to minimise the impact of XSS and CSRF holes) but none of the current batch of tools advertise this as a feature, and most seem to want to share the system-wide cookie jar.

Tags: chris-messina, cookies, csrf, greasekit, greasemonkey, javascript, safari, security, sitespecificbrowsers, webkit, xss

WebKit Does HTML5 Client-side Database Storage

2007-10-20T12:03:21+00:00

WebKit Does HTML5 Client-side Database Storage

SQLite strikes again. The WebKit team have included a neat update to their Web Inspector that lets you browse and modify your client-side databases.

Tags: apple, html5, offline, safari, sqlite, webinspector, webkit, whatwg

Native DOMContentLoaded is coming to Safari

2007-10-08T01:07:01+00:00

Native DOMContentLoaded is coming to Safari

I filed this bug over two years ago. They’ve just committed the resulting patch to trunk.

Tags: browsers, domcontentloaded, javascript, onload, safari, webkit

Yet another one more thing... a new Web Inspector!

2007-06-21T11:49:01+00:00

Yet another one more thing... a new Web Inspector!

I installed the latest nightly but I couldn’t find the inspector (or work out how to turn on the debug menu). Anyone know what I’m doing wrong?

Tags: safari, webkit

Introducing text-stroke

2006-12-21T10:34:32+00:00

Introducing text-stroke

Webkit has some sexy new CSS properties: -webkit-text-fill-color, -webkit-text-stroke-color, -webkit-text-stroke-width.

Tags: css, webkit