AZazakai·Jul 15, 2026
Prior art: WebKit.js, the WebKit rendering engine ported to JS
https://github.com/trevorlinton/webkit.js/
In Show HN: Firefox in WebAssemblytrevorlinton
webkit.js
Web Development2014–2026
trevorlinton / webkit.js
webkit.js
Pure JavaScript Port of WebKit
7Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Pure JavaScript Port of WebKit
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year10 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-01-16 17:56:17 UTC to 2026-07-15 21:59:34 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
10 sourcesIt's possible, see https://github.com/trevorlinton/webkit.js/
In Show HN: Dillo 3.1.0 released after 9 yearsFor flexbox check out Facebook Yoga (https://github.com/facebook/yoga) or Webkit.js (https://github.com/trevorlinton/webkit.js).
In Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node orThere is also HTML/CSS layout engine litehtml (https://github.com/litehtml/litehtml) and even a full-blown web engine in JS: WebKit.js (https://github.com/trevorlinton/webkit.js)
In Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node orYou can make PDF client-side by html2canvas or webkit.js (https://github.com/trevorlinton/webkit.js)
In Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node orSomeone has got WebKit compiled to wasm (no js support though):
https://github.com/trevorlinton/webkit.js
https://trevorlinton.github.io/
And another has JavaScriptCore compiled to wasm:
https://mbbill.github.io/JSC.js/
Combine the two and you have a full browser engine!
In WebAssembly in my browser desktop environmentWell someone has already got WebKit to run in WASM[1] so hey, maybe it’s not that far off :D
[1]: https://github.com/trevorlinton/webkit.js
In LibreOffice running natively in the browser via WebAssembly>It would be great if there was a built-in browser method though, to just get a bitmap of the screen in Javascript.
I've used webkit.js (https://github.com/trevorlinton/webkit.js) to implement a client-side save-chart-to-image feature in an web app. Not really sure if I'd currently recommend it, but the strategy has promise if developed on more. Most people needing to do this right now for arbitrary HTML would probably be better served by having their webapp make a request to a server to run wkhtmltoimage and return the image.
The project isn't actively maintained and I never managed to compile it myself, so I wouldn't be able to effectively maintain or extend or fix issues in it. It doesn't have any hooks to call code when it's done rendering something, so I had to experiment and finally I noticed it would call a specific webgl method wh
Read the rest
en it was done, so I would monkey-patch that webgl method to call my code afterward.
Then there's the issue that it's a 5mb download (gzipped) to the user's browser. It was only needed for a little-used feature, so I made the file not be requested until the feature is triggered, and then the download progress is shown on a modal. (And then the browser keeps the script cached after loading it once, so future uses of the feature are quicker.)
In the end, it works well for my use case here. Some parts of my use case that helped it work was the fact that immediate rendering wasn't necessary (it was fine to make the user wait for it to load), and the fact that it only had to work on HTML that the web app itself generated. webkit.js doesn't handle things like images or remote resources currently, so it wouldn't work well for arbitrary user-provided pages.
Is it really a good idea to link to a 47MB raw JS file hosted on github's server so most visitors to the blog post will click through without any actual interest? Seems a bit rude (and a great way to hang a browser/tab for a minute or two.)
If you want to communicate the size of the output, link to the github summary: https://github.com/trevorlinton/webkit.js/blob/master/WebKit...
In [dead]WebKit.js: Pure JavaScript Port of WebKit
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