At least in GStreamer-based ports (WPE and WebKitGTK, I haven't checked on Mac ports because I don't have the proper environment easily available), the media element is leaked after explicit deinitialization and detaching from the HTML document, even after manually triggering garbage collection using the web inspector. For more details and a test case, see: https://github.com/WebPlatformForEmbedded/WPEWebKit/issues/1285 After some debugging, we've detected that 2 extra references to HTMLMediaElement appear when using the controls (3 refs in total), while in a scenario where the controls are hidden on purpose only 1 reference remains, which is released as soon as the GC kicks in.
Pull request: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/25625
<rdar://problem/124527802>
Pull request: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/26798
Committed 277196@main (80dd62a7e332): <https://commits.webkit.org/277196@main> Reviewed commits have been landed. Closing PR #26798 and removing active labels.