// April 8th, 2010 // 7 Comments » // News
There’s a hot new build of Awesomium coming down the pipe!
Version 1.6 is essentially a major rewrite of Awesomium (roughly 80% of the codebase has been scrapped and redone) that takes advantage of Chrome’s process-isolation architecture in a big way: both WebViews and Plugins are now isolated within their own process. What this basically translates to is better stability (crashes are isolated within each WebView/Plugin), improved security (scripts are run in an outside process), better plugin support (Flash is now 100% on both Windows and Mac OSX builds), and faster performance on multicore systems (multiple WebViews scale across multiple cores).
What’s more, Awesomium has been upgraded to the very latest builds of Chromium and WebKit which brings additional gains in performance, compatibility (especially with the bleeding edge of CSS3 and HTML5), and stability.
While most of the internals have been revamped, the API has only gone through a few minor changes– the biggest difference you will notice is that the function signature for WebView::render has changed and also there are some new member functions for WebViewListener. Please see “examples/HelloAwesomium” for an example of using the new API in a basic application.
There are quite a few extra resources that you’ll need to bundle with your executable (pretty much everything within the bin/debug and bin/release directories, respectively). Also, the size of the final binary has increased significantly due to all the added dependencies (though, work is still being done on eliminating a few redundant components). Expect another reduced-size build of the ICU DLL for the final release of Awesomium v1.6 for users who only need support for UTF-8 and Western-encoded web pages.
If you’re feeling ambitious, an experimental “Alpha” build of Awesomium v1.6 is available for download here. Please feel free to test the new build and let us know any and all issues you might have in the Awesomium Support Forum.
Please note that while the major functionality of the alpha build is finished, it is still not totally feature-complete at this time– the biggest parts still in progress are opening of external windows (eg, via target=”_blank” or via GetURL in a Flash plugin) and asynchronous retrieval of JSValues via WebView::executeJavascriptWithResult.
Also of note, be aware that the Debug builds of Awesomium link against the Debug build of WebKit which implies the debugger is very likely to halt upon encountering instances of malformed HTML/Javascript– this is normal behavior. Also, if you’re using XCode, you should be aware that Flash 10 on Mac OSX makes calls to “Debugger()” and so it is helpful to disable “Stop on Debugger()/DebugStr()” when debugging your application.
** Update: Somebody just alerted me to a compatibility issue with Windows XP with the Alpha build (loading of dwmapi.dll), I’m working on it and will post an updated build later.
** Update 2: An updated build “Awesomium v1.6 Alpha B” has been posted with a fix.
