By Silvia Cho. Given the popularity of HTML5 and web technologies, browsers have become an essential technology in almost all industries, including the automotive. Because of its complexity, it is very important to understand the pros and cons of the available choices before making a decision. This talk aims to explain and compare each of the available open source options. WebKit is a web rendering engine with a generic part (WebCore, JSEngine), and ports for specific platforms that implement bits like rendering, networking or multimedia. GTK+, EFL and Wayland ports are available. Blink is fork of WebKit from which several projects have evolved such as Chromium, Crosswalk, and CEF. During the presentation, Silvia will explain and compare each them and provide more details of WebKit for Wayland which has several advantages for the IVI system.

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Silvia Cho
mscho@igalia.com
Browsers for the
automotive: an introduction
to WebKit for Wayland

2. Igalia and WebKit/Chromium
● Open source consultancy founded in 2001
● Top contributor to upstream WebKit and Chromium
● Working with many industry actors: tablets, phones, IVI,
smart TV, set-top boxes, and smart home

3. Outline
➢ Browser requirements for the automotive
➢ A bit of history
➢ Selecting the best alternatives
Introduction to WebKit for Wayland
➢ Conclusions

4. Browser requirements for the
automotive

5. Requirements
● Browser as an application and as a runtime:
- User Experience: specific standards and UI modification
- Portability: support of specific hardware boards
(performance optimization)
- OTA updates
● Browser as an application:
- Functionalities
● Browser as a run time:
- Application manager integration

6. Available alternatives
1) Licensing a proprietary solution
2) Deriving a new browser from the main open
source browser technologies:
- Chromium
- WebKit
(Firefox: Mozilla removed support in their engine for
third party browser developers)

7. Understanding the main alternatives
● Decision between Chromium and WebKit
● Chromium and WebKit share a lot of history,
design and code
● Learning the history of WebKit and
Chromium improves the understanding of the
pros and cons of each solution

8. A bit of history

9. WebKit Project History
2001 2005 20092005 2011 2013 2014
Fork of KHTML & KJS
Open sourced as WebKit
Chromium upstream
WebKit 2: big architectural change
Blink: Google departs
WebKit for Wayland

10. App (host process)
Webcore
V8
Chrome-WebKit
WebKit
Application
WebKit
Webcore
JS Engine
WebKit1
App (render process)
Application
WebKit (UI process)
Webcore
JS Engine
WebKit2
WebKit (web process)
WebKit1 vs Chrome-WebKit vs WebKit2 (2012)

11. Google’s Departure and Blink
● Google announced on April 3rd, 2013 that they would
fork WebKit and create Blink
● Motivations according to Google:
They were not using WebKit2 anyway
Easier to do ambitious architectural changes after the fork
Simplification of the codebase in Blink
● Tension between Apple and Google before the fork
Architectural decisions: Network Process
Code governance: Owners need to approve some core changes
● Big shock within the WebKit community

12. Current status in consumer industry
● Early consequences:
- Many WebKit contributors chose to migrate their projects to
Blink/Chromium and created Crosswalk, QtWebEngine, etc.
- Some WebKit ports became deprecated
● Ports have been removed. Many libraries became default inside Chromium
(SKIA, V8, FFMPEG, AURA, etc)
● Because of porting and maintenance challenges, the adoption of
Chromium in consumer industry has been slower than expected.
● Recent trend towards more use of Chromium

13. Selecting the best alternative:
Introduction to WebKit for Wayland

14. ●
Chromium alternatives:
- Chromium directly
- Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF)
- QtWebEngine
- Crosswalk
Selecting the alternatives

15. App (host process)
Webcore
V8
Chrome-WebKit
WebKit
Application
WebKit
Webcore
JS Engine
WebKit1
App (render process)
Application
WebKit (UI process)
Webcore
JS Engine
WebKit2
WebKit (web process)
WebKit1 vs Chrome-WebKit vs WebKit2 (2012)

16. Chromium
● Architecture designed primarily for browser application
development
- Latest HTML5 specs implementations
- Content API changing constantly; embedding APIs is unstable
- Wayland support is not finished
- Ports have been removed and many libraries became default
- FFMPEG is the default multimedia framework; AURA is the default
graphics toolkit. If changes or replacements are needed, it will
require big changes to the source base.

17. ● Chromium alternatives:
- Chromium directly
- Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF)
- QtWebEngine
- Crosswalk
● WebKit alternatives:
- QtWebKit (legacy, efforts to revive it )
- WebKitEFL (maintenance mode)
- WebKitGTK+ (active)
- WebKit for Wayland (active)
Selecting the alternatives

18. WebKit for Wayland
● Designed for embedded systems
● It does not depend on a toolkit anymore;
it doesn’t necessarily need Wayland
● Output can be embedded into a separate
OpenGL scene or into a toolkit (e.g., Qt)
● Output can be displayed directly via the window
or display manager
● Less memory footprint

19. WebKit for Wayland
● It is hardware-accelerated which relies on EGL and
OpenGL ES
● It abstracts underlying rendering and presentation
interfaces
● Flexible architecture
- easy to plug in components (e.g. multimedia
framework)
- possible to modify the whole stack without
diverging much from the latest upstream version

20. WebKit for Wayland
Things to do:
● Upstream remaining work (end of 2016)
● Optimize on specific hardware
● Implement custom UIs
● Implement latest HTML5 specs (if needed)
Conclusion:
● From technical POV in what regards to an embedded
environment, WebKit for Wayland is a great choice

21. Chromium: things to consider
● Architecture designed primarily for browser application development
- Latest HTML5 specs implementations
- Content API changing constantly; embedding APIs is unstable
- Wayland support is not finished
- Ports have been removed and many libraries became default
- FFMPEG is the default multimedia framework; AURA is the default graphics toolkit. If
changes or replacements are needed, it will require big changes to the source base.
Forking is one way to have control of the code for your needs.
- Forks have a natural maintenance burden risk, given that upstream Chromium evolves
very fast.
● But it can still be used for the embedded environment if
following issues are properly addressed:

22. Chromium: things to do
● Create a stable API (or use CEF)
● Finish Ozone-Wayland support
● Integrate native multimedia framework
● Set up a proper branching strategy
for a possible Chromium fork
● Optimize on specific hardware
● Implement custom UIs

23. Conclusions

24. Conclusions
● Both WebKit for Wayland and Chromium are active
open source projects in terms of code and
contributors
● Each solution has a different design purpose
Apples vs. Oranges
- Wrong question: which is better?
- Correct question: what needs do I have?
● It is important to be aware of the implications of the
pending issues and set up proper strategies to
cope them

25. Thank you!
Silvia Cho (mscho@igalia.com)