Bug 282080 – Add a public API to allow developers to configure the process display name to WKWebViewConfiguration

• Status: NEW
• Component: WebKit API

[Sam S]

Background:

• Each WKWebView instance typically has its own associated WebContent process
• The process name in Activity Monitor includes the website loaded within that WKWebView, and the name is not configurable through public WKWebView API
• A private API _processDisplayName exists within WKWebViewConfiguration which can configure this value, but it's not available for use in apps submitted to the Mac App Store due to its private nature
• This behaviour matches Safari, but other popular browsers (such as Firefox) obfuscate their process name - users may find it unsetting to see their open websites visible somewhere outside of the browser
• These process names aren't available programmatically in typical usage (they will show up with an obfuscated name in ps for example), but they can be accessed using _LSCopyApplicationInformationItem

Objective:

• Add a public API to allow developers to configure the process display name to WKWebViewConfiguration

[Alex Christensen]

WKWebViewConfiguration._processDisplayName works as you describe when there is one web content process per WKWebView at a time, but with site isolation we are currently actively working on making multiple web content processes per WKWebView at a time, and the design of WKWebViewConfiguration._processDisplayName is not really compatible with the flexibility that that demands unless you want all your processes to have the same display name with no variation and no way to tell which is which.  This is definitely something to consider, but I think exposing something like WKWebViewConfiguration._processDisplayName is probably not the way we want to do it.

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/139049139>