GNOME's Epiphany web browser recently gained support for rendering HTML with WebKit. The patch for WebKit support in Epiphany—which was experimentally implemented at the GNOME GUADEC conference—is now available for testing.

The GTK+ port of WebKit is the first open source HTML render to fully pass the Acid3 test on the Linux platform. WebKit, which is Apple's increasingly popular fork of KDE's KHTML rendering engine, is used by Apple's Safari web browser and the iPhone.

WebKit is a lightweight yet powerful rendering engine that emerged out of KHTML in 2001. Its flexibility, performance and thoughtful design made it the obvious choice for Chromium's rendering engine back when we started. Thanks to the hard work by all in the community, WebKit has thrived and kept pace with the web platform’s growing capabilities since then.

"I wrote earlier about refactoring the HTML5 video patch to allow different backends. I've now added a patch for GStreamer support to bug 422540..."

In the latest nightly builds, the WebKit engine can handle HTML5 attributes for non-blocking JavaScript loading

Since last week's announcement of the YouTube and Vimeo beta versions which use HTML5's element, the Mozilla developers have been defending the fact that Firefox 3.6 cannot play the content on these betas even though it supports HTML5. The reason for the problem is that the HTML5 working groups decided not to specify which video codecs the tag would support.

Last month we talked about a hackfest to improve Linux video playback that came about after a GNOME developer began work on using Cairo/Pixman for raw video in GStreamer and looking at other ways to leverage hardware acceleration within this major open-source multimedia framework.

The open-source WebKit HTML rendering engine is rapidly gaining ground on the Linux platform where it is increasingly being adopted by conventional desktop applications for content display. Ongoing efforts to facilitate tighter WebKit integration are opening the door for developing rich Internet applications on Linux with the open-source GTK and Qt development toolkits.

"The git repository has multiple branches which means a little more git usage is needed to get at the Ogg (and soon, GStreamer) backends. [...] By default the 'master' branch has a checked out working tree. Building this produces element support without any decoder. One approach to building the Ogg backend is to create a local branch with the commits from the remote branch origin/ogg and build that..."