This is a short PSA post announcing the return of the GNOME Web Canary builds. Read on for the crunchy details.
A couple years ago I was blogging about the GNOME Web Canary flavor. In summary this special build of GNOME Web provides a preview of the upcoming version of the underlying WebKitGTK engine, it is potentially unstable, but allows for testing features that have not shipped in a stable release yet.
Unfortunately, Canary broke right after GNOME Web switched to GTK4, because back then the WebKit CI was missing build bots and infrastructure for hosting WebKitGTK4 build artefacts. Recently, thanks to the efforts of my Igalia colleagues, Pablo Abelenda, Lauro Moura, Diego Pino and Carlos López the WebKit CI provides WebKitGTK4 build artefacts, hosted on a server kindly provided by Igalia.
The installation instructions are already mentioned in the introductory post but I’ll just remind them again here:
flatpak --user remote-add --if-not-exists webkit https://software.igalia.com/flatpak-refs/webkit-sdk.flatpakrepo
flatpak --user install https://nightly.gnome.org/repo/appstream/org.gnome.Epiphany.Canary.flatpakref
Update:
If you installed the older version of Canary, pre-GTK4, you might see an error related with an expired GPG key. This is due to how I update the WebKit runtime, and I’ll try to avoid it in future updates. For the time being, you can remove the flatpak remote and re-add it:
flatpak --user remote-delete webkit
flatpak --user remote-add webkit https://software.igalia.com/flatpak-refs/webkit-sdk.flatpakrepo
That’s all folks, happy hacking and happy testing.