contract work

Hello everyone!

As usual, after the 1.4.4 release there were some new bug reports for me to work on. So the first part of the week was spent investigating and fixing some of those.

• Several problems were fixed in the video code, which are leading to deadlocks and/or crashes of WebKit after a video is done playing.
• A problem with text not being drawn (seen for example on Trac) was fixed. This is apparently a new bug introduced on WebKit side, where small text with shadows ends up not being drawn at all. I'm not sure my fix is completely correct, but it seems to work.

Hello there,

This week most of my time was spent on debugging. My new machine is running fine, and now building WebKit takes a little more than an hour, which is much better than the 4 hours I was getting on the old laptop. With a 4 thread CPU machine some concurrency and locking issues became much easier to reproduce. This led to identifying and fixing a bug in our BSecureSocket class, which was not properly setting up SSL for thread-safe operation. I think this will fix most of the remaining memory corruption problems.

Hello there!

During the last two weeks, I spent most of my time working on the WebKit2 port. As I already mentioned, WebKit2 is where current WebKit development happens, and the most important change is the split of the WebKit system into two processes, one for showing the window, and one for doing the actual work of rendering the pages. But the more interesting thing is the more up to date and full-featured API that lets WebKit handle, for example, HTTPS certificates, so we don't have to do it ourselves - just show the dialog to the user when told to.

The quest to provide a better web browsing experience continues this week with some small fixes which result from hours of tracking down bugs.