Simon Willison’s Weblog

Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project (via) 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!

# 12th September 2022, 7:34 pm / acid3, browsers, webkit, andreas-kling, ladybird

Protecting Against HSTS Abuse (via) 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.

# 19th March 2018, 10:21 pm / ssl, privacy, security, webkit

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.

# 27th June 2011, 10:31 am / css, ios, safari, webkit, recovered

WebKit is Dropping HTML5 “popstate” Events (via) 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.

# 30th October 2010, 7:41 am / bugs, html5, pushstate, twitter, webkit, recovered

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.

# 18th August 2010, 1:49 pm / mathml, safari, typography, webkit, recovered

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).

# 2nd February 2010, 9:50 am / html5, video, webkit, safari, flash

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.

# 14th December 2009, 1:16 pm / webkit, transitions, css, animation, natalie-downe, 24-ways, rotation

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.

# 10th October 2009, 12:28 am / alex-russell, ppk, webkit, mobile, browsers

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.

# 7th October 2009, 12:23 pm / webkit, mobile, ppk, testing, standards

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.

# 23rd September 2009, 9:57 am / alex-russell, chromeframe, google, ie, webkit, chrome, xuacompatible

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.

# 22nd August 2009, 11:52 am / browsers, css, css3, alex-russell, flexiblebox, hbox, vbox, webkit, gecko, standards

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.

# 22nd May 2009, 12:33 am / natalie-downe, css, csstransforms, webkit, safari, printstyles, rotation, pocketbooks

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.

# 29th April 2009, 11:57 pm / webkit, profiling, javascript, franciscotolmasky

Google Chrome, the comic book (via) 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.

# 1st September 2008, 7:45 pm / googlebrowser, google, scott-mccloud, javascript, webkit, phishing, antiphishing, usability, chrome

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.

# 3rd June 2008, 7:57 am / logo, webkit, javascript, safari, squirrelfish, performance, bytecode

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.

# 25th April 2008, 11:26 pm / webkit, css, variables, daniel-glazman, david-hyatt

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).

# 8th February 2008, 11:21 am / prototype, javascript, safari, webkit, w3c, selectors, libraries, queryselector

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

# 22nd November 2007, 11:51 pm / safari, css, documentation, webkit, browsers

Ten New Things in WebKit 3. Does “incremental updates for persistent server connections” for XMLHttpRequest mean Safari now has native support for Comet?

# 16th November 2007, 1:19 am / comet, ajax, javascript, safari, webkit, safari3, xmlhttprequest

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.

# 12th November 2007, 11:21 pm / media, audio, events, html5, osx, safari, video, webkit, javascript

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.

# 26th October 2007, 9:45 pm / matrix, transforms, affinetransformation, graphics, webkit, safari, apple, css, browsers

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.

# 25th October 2007, 7:56 am / greasekit, csrf, javascript, greasemonkey, cookies, safari, security, sitespecificbrowsers, webkit, xss, chris-messina

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.

# 20th October 2007, 12:03 pm / webkit, apple, safari, sqlite, offline, html5, whatwg, webinspector

Native DOMContentLoaded is coming to Safari. I filed this bug over two years ago. They’ve just committed the resulting patch to trunk.

# 8th October 2007, 1:07 am / javascript, onload, browsers, domcontentloaded, safari, webkit

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?

# 21st June 2007, 11:49 am / webkit, safari

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

# 21st December 2006, 10:34 am / webkit, css