If you see the Buddha on the road, port it to GTK+

July 24, 2007 10:07 pm xan General

Ok, there’s something to play with now for the very early adopters:

  • Checkout Epiphany trunk (http://svn.gnome.org/svn/epiphany/trunk/)
  • Apply the patch on bug 459333
  • Checkout WebKit trunk (http://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/trunk)
  • Build and install the GTK port:
    • cd WebKit
    • WebKitTools/Scripts/build-webkit –qmakearg=WEBKIT_INC_DIR=$PREFIX/include/WebKit –qmakearg=WEBKIT_LIB_DIR=$PREFIX/lib –gdk
    • cd WebKitBuild/Release && make install
    • For me the path to the pc file was broken and had to fix it in the Makefile, will open a bug tomorrow
  • Compile Epiphany with –with-engine=webkit flag
  • I didn’t say it would be easy

If everything succeeds you should be able to launch the browser and load URLs from the entry. Beware that the port is very basic, so almost nothing will work. A lot of work is needed both in ephy and webkit, if you want to help come to #epiphany at irc.gnome.org or #webkit at irc.freenode.org.

Some (IMHO) exciting ideas are on the backburner for WebKit-GTK, so stay tuned. The basic summary would be that this could become the really integrated browser GNOME deserves, down to the engine level.

PS: following the tradition of silly hackergotchies someone might want to use this for mine. Photo by the crazy Peruvian (aka Diego).

17 Responses

  1. Adam Williamson Says:
    July 24th, 2007 at 10:36 pm

    well, as I mentioned in the comments for the last post, gtk-webcore is in fact alive and well and under maintenance…

    I don’t know the exact details of the relationship between the two but it would be a shame for there to be a split between gtk-webcore and this upstream gtk port of webkit, perhaps the status of the two should be clarified / resolved before too much work goes ahead?

  2. xan Says:
    July 24th, 2007 at 10:39 pm

    The author of gtk-webcore hangs around the webkit channel and he seemed at least interested in cooperating with the upstream project, so I hope we’ll manage to work all together in the end.

  3. Ploum Says:
    July 24th, 2007 at 11:03 pm

    Here’s one proposition for your hackergotchi :

    http://ploum.fritalk.com/xan/little_xan.png

    You can find here a big version and also the XCF file so you can modify the shadow easily :
    http://ploum.fritalk.com/xan

    It was not easy because the color of the picture is really really bad.

    Hope that you enjoy it.

  4. anonymous Says:
    July 24th, 2007 at 11:08 pm

    Thanks! At last epiphany can be truly lightweight and start instantly as it should! Could you please measure and report us differences in startup time?

    For me, once this is done, it is one step closer to throwing away the firefox bloat… (irrelevant, but improving epiphany tab handling (bug 110540) is another necessary step to take).

  5. Mikael Hallendal Says:
    July 24th, 2007 at 11:15 pm

    Woah, very nice!

    Need to try it out and hopefully be able to fiddle some with integrating it in Devhelp at some point.

    Keep it up!

  6. diegoe Says:
    July 25th, 2007 at 7:40 am

    Actually this one is quite better: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lucasrocha/831375401/

  7. diegoe Says:
    July 25th, 2007 at 8:01 am

    Actually you might need this line:
    QTDIR=/usr/share/qt4 WebKit/WebKitTools/Scripts/build-webkit –qmakearg=WEBKIT_INC_DIR=$PREFIX/include/WebKit –qmakearg=WEBKIT_LIB_DIR=$PREFIX/lib

    And to install libqt4-dev.

  8. reinouts Says:
    July 25th, 2007 at 9:46 am

    Some thought food related to the title of this entry.

  9. thebluesgnr Says:
    July 26th, 2007 at 12:06 am

    First of all, thank you! Can’t wait to run epiphany on WebKit.

    I tried building with diegoe’s instructions and apparently only the Qt backend is built (no WebKitGdk package found when building epiphany).

  10. thebluesgnr Says:
    July 26th, 2007 at 2:23 pm

    Ok, passing the –gdk option when building WebKit builds the GTK+ port instead. I now have Epiphany running against WebKit!

    This is great, keep up the good work. :)

  11. xan Says:
    July 26th, 2007 at 3:29 pm

    Ploum: thanks for the hackergotchi!

    thebluesgnr: agh, sorry! the –gdk parameter was indeed missing it the instructions. Updated.

  12. Jakob Says:
    July 26th, 2007 at 6:17 pm

    This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title o.us poetry. Thanks for informative article

  13. isb Says:
    July 26th, 2007 at 10:27 pm

    These are some notes on my experience of building with Ephy with WebKit, in case they are helpful to others:

    http://ephylog.blogspot.com/2007/07/building-epiphany-with-webkit-backend.html

  14. Compilare e installare Epiphany con backend WebKit, o quasi « pollycoke :) Says:
    July 27th, 2007 at 12:38 pm

    [...] Post di Xan [...]

  15. GNOME 2.19.6 « TuxLinux…. La combriccola del pinguino Says:
    August 3rd, 2007 at 8:05 am

    [...] novità più importanti di questo rilascio? L’introduzione del backend WebKit per il browser Epiphany, sostanziali modifiche al sistema di syntax highlighting di GEdit ed il supporto ai metadata XMP [...]

  16. Gnome 2.19.6 « Note su LINUX Says:
    August 3rd, 2007 at 6:12 pm

    [...] novità più importanti di questo rilascio? L’introduzione del backend WebKit per il browser Epiphany, sostanziali modifiche al sistema di syntax highlighting di GEdit ed il supporto ai metadata XMP [...]

  17. GNOME 2.19.6 Says:
    August 17th, 2007 at 6:56 pm

    [...] novità più importanti di questo rilascio? L’introduzione del backend WebKit per il browser Epiphany, sostanziali modifiche al sistema di syntax highlighting di GEdit ed il supporto ai metadata XMP [...]