Nuvola 4.9 Released; Status of the Chromium Port

[fenryxo]

Dear friends,

Nuvola 4.9 & friends were released. It is mostly a maintenance release as most of the energy is invested in the Chromium port of Nuvola, and the development of other features has slowed down. Announcement for users is in Medium blog, as usual, more technical details for maintainers and packagers are here.

News for script maintainers:

None, everything works as in Nuvola 4.8.

News for package maintainers:

• WebKitGTK >= 2.18.0 is required.
  
• If Nuvola is told that WebKitGTK supports MSE, it checks whether it is so and aborts otherwise. Don't use the `--webkitgtk-supports-mse` configure flag if it isn't true. None that WebKitGTK+ does not support MSE in the default build configuration yet.
  

Status of the Chromium Port:

There is ongoing effort to switch Nuvola Apps Runtime from WebKitGTK+ web rendering engine to a Chromium-based one. Announcement for users is in Nuvola News blog, as usual, more technical details for maintainers and packagers are here.

• Nuvola will use Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), which provides a low-level C/C++ API to embed Chromium engine (Blink layout engine & V8 JavaScript engine). This engine provides better compatibility with modern web apps, supports Media Source Extension, Widevine plugin, and Pepper-API Flash plugin.
• ValaCEF project was created to provide a high-level Vala & GTK+ API for Nuvola Apps Runtime (and possibly also for other GTK+ 3 applications).
• Nuvola 4.10 will build & support both WebKitGTK (required) and CEF (optional) backends. WebKitGTK will still be the default one, CEF will be used for selected web apps (Spotify, Google Play Music, Deezer, and BBC iPlayer).
• Nuvola 4.11 will build only CEF backend by default, but it will be possible to disable CEF and build WebKitGTK+ backend instead. However, it is unlikely to receive any more bug fixes and improvement and will be eventually dropped.

Best regards,

Jiri Janousek

P.S. Full changelog follows

Nuvola Runtime 4.9.0 - December 17th, 2017

Enhancements:

• URL entry widget was added: Press Ctrl+L or click the gear menu button → Load URL to display/change the current URL.
• Updated script: Yandex Music 1.5 was adopted by Aleksey Zhidkov and enhanced with an integrated Like button. An album art fix by Alexander Konarev has been also incorporated. Issue: tiliado/nuvola-app-yandex-music#2, tiliado/nuvola-app-yandex-music#10.
• Updated script: SiriusXM 1.4 by Jiří Janoušek. Metadata parsing adapted to recent SiriusXM changes.
• Updated script: BBC iPlayer 1.3 by Andrew Stubbs. Fixed integration of radio shows, added integration of progress bar, volume bar and skip action.
• Page loading indicator was added. Issue: tiliado/nuvolaruntime#229
• If Bumblebeed is detected, Nuvola assumes that the integrated Intel graphics card is the primary and skips unnecesary checks for an NVidia flatpak driver. Issue: tiliado/nuvolaruntime#380
• Various fixes regarding VDPAU & VA-API drivers. Issue: tiliado/nuvolaruntime#380

Under the hood:

• WebKitGTK >= 2.18.0 is required.
• If Nuvola is told that WebKitGTK supports MSE, it checks whether it is so and aborts otherwise. Don't use --webkitgtk-supports-mse if it isn't true.
• Fixed various memory leaks.
• Ongoing optimizations to replace synchronous IPC calls with asynchronous variants.
• ValaCEF project has been created to provide Nuvola with Vala bindings for Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF).

Nuvola SDK 4.9.0 - December 17th, 2017

• Default API version is 4.9.

Diorite 4.9.0 - December 17th, 2017

• New widget: Drtgtk.Entry - an enhanced version of Gtk.Entry.
• Fixed parsing of RPC notifications. Issue: tiliado/nuvolaruntime#385
• New widget: Drtgtk.HeaderBarTitle - a custom title widget for Gtk.HeaderBar.
• New utility function: System.cmdline_for_pid - Get command line of a process with given PID.
• Better debugging: Distinguish between socket creation errors. Issue: tiliado/nuvolaruntime#378
• New namespace: Drt.Dbus - DBus introspection and service activation.
• New utility method: Drt.Flatpak.check_desktop_portal_available - to check whether a proper XDG Desktop Portal DBus interface is present.
• New functionality: Functions to get, set and look up GTK+ 3 themes - see Drtgtk.DesktopShell.
• New widget: Drtgtk.GtkThemeSelector - a selector to list and change a GTK+ theme.