WPE WebKit is being adopted in a wide range of industries, from cable operators to consumer electronic device manufacturers, with tens of millions of devices using it worldwide. Igalia can help you get the maximum performance out of your hardware by optimizing WPE WebKit for your needs.

WPE WebKit: Fast, lightweight WebKit port for embedded devices

WPE WebKit is the official WebKit port for embedded and low-consumption computer devices. It has been designed from the ground-up with performance, small footprint, accelerated content rendering, and simplicity of deployment in mind.

It brings the excellence of the WebKit engine to countless platforms and target devices, serving as a base for systems and environments that primarily or completely rely on web platform technologies to build their interfaces.

WPE WebKit’s architecture allows for inclusion in a variety of use cases and applications. It can be custom embedded into an existing application, or it can run as a standalone web runtime under a variety of presentation systems, from platform-specific display managers to existing window management protocols like Wayland or X11.

Igalia and WPE WebKit

Igalia is the author and primary maintainer of the WPE WebKit port. We have a strong team of engineers working steadily on improving WPE WebKit.

Igalia contributes actively to different parts of WPE WebKit:

Enabling efficient hardware-accelerated display of web content ranging from WebGL and CSS to HTML canvas and video elements.
Adding support for different multimedia specifications such as WebRTC, MSE (MP4, WebM, VP9, Opus), and EME (ClearKey and other third-party DRM frameworks).
Optimizing memory consumption.
Working on JavaScript engine performance and improvements for MIPS and ARMv7 architectures.
Maintaining the networking backend, focusing on security features.
Publishing periodic stable and unstable releases of WPE WebKit, including security advisories with CVE information.

Is WPE WebKit the right choice?

If you need a fast and lightweight web runtime for embedded devices that supports most of the web standards, has hardware acceleration wherever it is advantageous, and has a strong focus on multimedia applications, WPE WebKit will be one of your best choices.

In addition, WPE WebKit offers great possibilities for deployment on different platforms, thanks to its underlying design that allows for integration in a variety of hardware configurations. As a minimum, EGL and OpenGL ES 2 support and basic GStreamer integration are required.

WPE WebKit is being widely adopted by many industries, such as Digital Signage, Professional Audio, Home Appliances, Set-Top-Boxes, Automotive, and Inflight Infotainment. Tens of millions of devices around the globe are using WPE WebKit as their web runtime platform.

Facts

Igalia helps customers deploy WPE WebKit on many embedded platforms, and implements support for new features. Some advantages of WPE WebKit:

Enables rich and fast 2D and 3D HTML-based user interfaces, integrating multimedia, 3D content, and many of the latest Web technologies, to run smoothly and efficiently on low-cost devices.
Displays multimedia content directly in HTML, with high-quality CSS 3D animations, WebGL, and fluid high quality HTML videos.
Focused on graphics performance with multi-threading optimizations to improve CSS animation, scrolling, scaling, and rendering of canvas and video elements.
Strong focus on multimedia applications with WebRTC, MSE (MP4, WebM, VP9, Opus) and EME (ClearKey and other third-party DRM frameworks) supported and constantly improving.
Unlicensed parts of Youtube TV and similar platforms are now enabled.
The minimal set of dependencies needed to run WPE WebKit ensures that its footprint is small and it consumes less memory, which allows applications built with WPE WebKit to run on low-end devices.