Sunsetting libsoup 2 support in WebKitGTK

Summary

• Networking support for the WebKit GTK and WPE ports uses the libsoup library.

• In 2021 libsoup had an API/ABI break, resulting in the 3.0 major release.

• Since October 2021, stable releases after 2.34.0 of WebKitGTK and WPE have had support for using either libsoup version 2 or version 3. This was done in order to give developers time to migrate their applications.

• The WPE port removed support to use libsoup 2 in May 2024, and 2.46.0 was the first stable release to support only libsoup 3.

• WebKitGTK 2.52.0, due in March 2026, will be the first stable release to ship without support for libsoup 2; the code is already being removed from the main development branch.

What is libsoup?

The libsoup library provides HTTP networking support for applications, using GObject to integrate tightly with the GLib event loop.

The GTK and WPE WebKit ports use libsoup as a client for accessing network resources using the HTTP, HTTP/2, and WebSocket protocols. As the library supports being also used for serving content, this is used to to provide embedded HTTP servers for WebDriver usage, to run tests, and more.

Why is libsoup 2 support being phased out?

Removing the code needed to support libsoup 2 will ease the maintenance burden on the team that develops WebKitGTK and WPE. Additionally, it is our responsibility to nudge WebKit users towards using libsoup 3, which is receiving active maintenance.

As of October 2025, Linux distributions like Debian or Chimera no longer provide libsoup 2 packages and their WebKitGTK packages use libsoup 3. Other distributions like Arch Linux are actively working on removing libsoup 2 from their repositories, or no longer provide a WebKitGTK package built with libsoup 2, as is the case of Ubuntu and Fedora.

The four and a half years since the first stable WebKitGTK release (2.34.0, October 2021) with support for libsoup 3, and the first stable release that will no longer support libsoup 2 (2.52.0, due in March 2026) should have provided enough time for developers to migrate their applications.

How can applications be migrated?

Applications that use the webkit2gtk-4.0 API can easily migrate to the 4.1 one: the only difference between those is that the former uses the old libsoup 2, while the latter uses libsoup 3.

• If your application uses only functionality provided WebKitGTK, changing the dependency on the webkit2gtk-4.0 pkg-config module to webkit2gtk-4.1 and rebuilding should be enough in most cases.

• If any other libraries used by the application also require libsoup, make sure those are also using libsoup 3.

• If your application code uses functionality from libsoup itself, follow the migration guide included in the libsoup 3 manual.