Currently, the only way to add a webextension is to specify a directory: webkit_web_context_set_web_extensions_directory () This is a request for api such that you could specify one or multiple paths directly to a extension(s) to load. Use cases: 1) When packaging webkitgtk with java/jni (namely eclipse), packaging a separate folder is complicated. The machinery (e.g maven/jar/OSGI) is typically designed to find/extract (and optionally load) specific .so files, not a folder containing just extension(s). (In our case we had to spend a lot of time implementing/modifying the build system to handle webkitgtk's 'extensions in a directory' approach. 2) Ability to load only selected extensions at run time without moving '.so' files around. This is not an urgent request as we now have the mechanism working via directory, but it would be nice to see the ability to specify .so directly in the future. (Relevant Eclipse/SWT upstream bug: 528287 – [Webkit2] Request webkitgtk developers for feature to load extension '.so' instead of specifying a directory. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=528287 If you could update that bug when/(if) this feature is complete, then that'd be great)