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Future of webkit on BS players

Roni Starc

May 16, 2014 05:58

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I would like to ask something regarding WebKit which is used on the XD Players.

You advise in previewing the html pages that are made to be run on the XD players in Google Chrome, bacause of the same API (html engine). But Chrome moved from WebKit to Blink (which is a fork of WebKit) sometime last year. From current information, Blink is still very much like WebKit but  this might and will change in the (near) future. I would like to ask you if BrightSign has also any plans of moving to Blink.

I'm asking this because WebKit is not so common on Windows PC's anymore .Now, that google has dropped it (and is using and developing Blink - with Opera conrtibuting too) and Apple has discontinued the "original" webkit browser for Windows - Safari (and with it perhaps the porting). So there remains only the Maxthon browser for now (or maybe some other not well known alternatives). And developing html content that runs on an browser engine, that has bad support in windows, which is still the main working system for BrightAuthor, could really complicate things. :)

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6 comments

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  GD May 19, 2014 07:27

  Webkit and chrome do a good job of following html standards, so most of the time i'm perfectly able to test/debug in chrome. The player itself runs a linuc variant. However, It will be good to get an official statement on this.

  The trick is, how much is implemented in the player system? For instance, you can't set video.currentTime(120) to jump to a time in a video-element. Also, CSS and jQuery animation performance is not so much a webkit issue, as it is a issue with player implementation for performance.

  The (simulation) preview in BA 3.8 beta doesn't even use webkit (looks like msie explorer is used), so you can't really test stuff out in preview.

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  Roni Starc May 19, 2014 08:04

  As I said, for now webkit and Blink work mostly the same, but it's hard to tell what will happen in the future. A big problem would be if Blink would drop the -webkit prefix (because it would just follow the w3c names). And this (working in the same way) depends a lot on the versions used. If you use the latest webkit and latest blink, everything should work equally. But this week i stumbled on something, that in the webkit used by brihtsign not everything works the same - the flexbox. While newer versions of webkit suport the new naming (display: flex or display: -webkit-flex) in BS only the old syntax (display: -webkit-box) seems to work. They also support different propeties, so BS's are not truly css3 compliant.

  I also discovered, that chrome and BS user agent set css's can differ, so I am no longer optimising the positioning in chrome, but I started tweaking it directly on BS's (the inspector agent that BS's support is really a blessing here).

  Yes I tired the preview too, and everything is broken, so i went back to browser testing :)

  As for the jquery css animation performance. I red somewhere that jquery does most of the animations the old-school way - by changing css values (like top or height), and not with the css3 animation funcionality. Only the css3 animations can be hardware accelerated, so the jQuery animations are not hardware accelerated and the performance can be poor. I started looking for other libraries that supposedly support animations. And I try to avoid using jQuery in the BS html presentations if I can. It just slows everything. jQuery was mainly build to abstract differences among browsers (and browser versions) and make the development easyer. BS's use webkit, so everything can be optimised for it.

   

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  Roni Starc March 01, 2016 07:16

  I would ask if BrightSign decided to do something about these information?

  I spoke to one of your representatives at ISE2016 (very tall guy with glasses, sorry but don't remember the name). He said to me, that BrightSign changed the browser engine in the latest Firmwares. He mentioned that it now uses Chromium. With only this information I would suppose that BrightSigns now also use the Blink rendering engine, and not Webkit anymore. But this depends on the version of Chromium that was used. A bigger issue is the JavaScript engine as WebKit uses JavaScriptCore, and Chromium uses the V8 engine. They are mostly the same, but have certain differences. For example, the version of Chromium at the time of writing this the support for ES6 Harmony varies between the engines, no Idea how it is on BrightSigns. It is hard to test apps on a different platform from the one that is running on the devices (Chrome with Blink and V8 vs WebKit with JavaScriptCore).

  Your representative agreed with me that you should be providing this info if you aren't already.

  I also showed him a webpage that provides info to web developers what they can use in certain web browsers: http://caniuse.com/ . It provides info for almost all browsers which CSS, javascript and HTML elements they support. So If you provided us the version of the used chromium it would help a lot in the development of more sophisticated HTML5 elements because now it can happen that one develops a feature, tests it on Chrome and then finds that the used CSS or javascript property is not implemented on a BS player. So back to the development ...

  Could you please add the versions/editions of the HTML5 tools that are used on the BrightSign players to the FW release notes?

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  Lyndon March 08, 2016 02:00

  I'll get this information. I want to say we're doing Chromium 37 now, but are in the process of upgrading to a newer release, but that's most likely June timeframe. I'll get details. 

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  Lyndon March 08, 2016 21:19

  Chromium is 37 for fw 6.0 and fw 6.1 release. We will be updating it for upcoming firmware 6.2 release. If you publish this site on a player, http://whatsmyuseragent.com/, it will tell you as well.  

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  Roni Starc March 09, 2016 06:24

  Thank you very much for this information.

  Much appreciated.