Many Broadway HTML5 Backend Improvements Land In GTK4

Earlier today I wrote about the experimental HTML5 Wayland compositor. While that may be more like an experimental toy at this point, for those wanting to run GTK3/GTK4 applications within a web-browser, there's the longstanding Broadway HTML5 back-end to the GTK tool-kit. Broadway received a number of significant improvements for GTK4 today.

It's been a while since last having anything new to report on this Broadway HTML5 back-end for GTK and even looking like it might be dropped from GTK4, but Red Hat's Alexander Larsson today submitted a number of improvements to this back-end for streaming GTK+ programs into a web-browser via the HTML5 canvas capabilities.

This latest batch of work by Larsson includes GskBroadwayRenderer as a new custom renderer although right now mostly still falls back to Cairo.

There's also support for FD passing in the protocol that will be used for passing buffers, uploading textures to the Broadway daemon, using render nodes, a node cache, and hundreds of lines of other improvements that can be found covered by this Git search.

On GTK3, Broadway can be a bit clunky and not always work out right, but will be interesting to see how efficient and usable it will be by the time of GTK+ 4.0.