Overview of QtWebKit 2.2
QtWebKit is a web content engine based on the Open Source WebKit project, the same engine used by browsers such as Google Chrome and Safari from Apple. QtWebKit has broad support for modern web technologies and is compliant with typical web content. It also has a C++ API that allows Qt applications to embed web content and to examine and manipulate it. The QtWebKit C++ API is extensively documented in the QtWebKit documentation.
QtWebKit is developed as a part of the WebKit community, which enables every new release of QtWebKit to include the latest developments from the WebKit project.
The QtWebKit-2.2 branch was created from the WebKit trunk on May of 2011 (r85855) and received close to 400 patches, mostly for regressions and critical bugs. Compared to QtWebKit-2.1 (an independent release, not part of the Qt bundle) and QtWebKit-2.0 (from Qt-4.7), it includes hundreds of fixes and many HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript improvements.
QtWebKit-2.2 is up-to-date regarding fixes for security problems found in the WebKit codebase. Since the branch creation in May, more than 50 security fixes have been brought from trunk.
For technical details of the QtWebKit-2.2 branch, such as known bugs, repository address and a list of fixes, please check the QtWebKit-2.2 release page.
Changes since QtWebKit-2.0 (Qt-4.7)
The WebKit project moves really fast and it's hard to highlight specific features of QtWebKit-2.2. Below is a small list containing some of the most important new features supported by the engine. Besides these new features, thousands of other improvements and bugfixes have been made.
Please note that QtWebKit-2.1 was an independent intermediary release targeted at mobile platforms only. It's not included here for simplicity.
Web Developer Features
These are some of the new features present in QtWebKit-2.2:
- Support for HTML5 media (audio/video)
- HTML5 File API (http://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/)
- Typed Array (http://www.khronos.org/registry/typedarray/specs/latest/)
- HTML5 Hashchange Event (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/history.html#event-hashchange)
- DeviceMotion (http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source-orientation.html)
- CSSOM View Module (http://www.w3.org/TR/cssom-view/)
- Spatial Navigation
- Touch Events
- Geolocation API
- Progress element and meter element
- Viewport meta tag
- Canvas element
- Application cache
- Web SQL Database
- Web Storage
- CSS Animations
- CSS Transitions
- CSS 2D Transforms
- CSS Text
- CSS Masks
- CSS ScrollBar Styles
- Native JSON parser
Note: HTML5 and CSS3 features are based on draft specifications that are subject to change. Some of them are still considered experimental.
