iTunes 9, now with more WebKit

By Will Norris | Published: September 9, 2009

As John Gruber predicted yesterday, iTunes 9 certainly uses WebKit much more than the last version. I used wireshark to do a packet trace when I clicked on the Rock Music section. Sure enough, if you gunzip the response, it is effectively standard HTML (though they do declare a custom XML namespace for everything). It looks like this new HTML based format is triggered by the request header:

X-Apple-Store-Front: 143441-1,5

For example, the following simple curl command will retrieve this Rock page:

curl -H "X-Apple-Store-Front: 143441-1,5" \

http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewGrouping?id=24

To further verify that iTunes was doing little more than rendering the result with WebKit, I went through the response HTML, fixed a couple of URLs, and got this result — exactly what you see in iTunes 9. Of course, the “Quick View” for each album doesn’t work, but you can see how it is all pieced together.

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13 Comments

  1. Chris
    Posted September 9, 2009 at 3:35 pm | Permalink

    Protip: is much faster than making all of the URLs absolute.

  2. Rob
    Posted September 9, 2009 at 3:36 pm | Permalink

    Adding <base href=”http://ax.itunes.apple.com”> inside <head> is a quick one-shot way to deal with relative URLs while working with a local copy of the file.

  3. Will Norris
    Posted September 9, 2009 at 3:37 pm | Permalink

    well, there were only three relative URLs, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. Good point though.

  4. Jason Painter
    Posted September 9, 2009 at 4:15 pm | Permalink

    Could this be used to create a way to find and download full-size video art? I’d love to get some for my own DVD rips.

  5. Scott
    Posted September 9, 2009 at 5:16 pm | Permalink

    Agree with Jason Painter… hoping this unlocks some way to retrieve TV and Movie art again.

  6. Lo_PhatZ
    Posted September 9, 2009 at 6:57 pm | Permalink

    Yeah still a crummy old carbon app & talk about bloat.. the installed iTunes 9 app on Snow Leopard is 151Mb. After ‘slimming’ with Xslimmer it is now 32.8Mb

    Thats 118Mb of HDD space sucking garbage removed with ONE app alone..

  7. Jon H
    Posted September 9, 2009 at 7:08 pm | Permalink

    I noticed that, on my 10.5, non-iPhone-developing machine, the iTunes 9 installer required that I quit Xcode. I don’t recall that happening before.

  8. Al
    Posted September 9, 2009 at 7:22 pm | Permalink

    Always good to see the web crawling outside of it’s box.

  9. Igel
    Posted September 10, 2009 at 12:28 am | Permalink

    Great Post. ;-) Regards from VolksPhone

  10. jrk
    Posted September 10, 2009 at 2:13 am | Permalink

    this whole webkit rendering makes my itunes really slow - on my 2009 imac. feels like playing a high end video game on a low end pc.

    apple should improve the performance :(

    regards, jrk fluxforge.com

  11. Peter Speck
    Posted September 10, 2009 at 4:58 am | Permalink

    If you use GlimmerBlocker, and add the following rule, you can browse the iTunes store in Safari:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<glimmerblocker-rules>
    <rule rule-id="272656319" priority="2" type="request" host="ax.itunes.apple.com" host-type="is">
        <request language="js" version="1"><![CDATA[var ua = gb.request.headers['User-Agent'];
ua = ua ? ua.toString() : "none";
if (ua.match(/Safari/) && !gb.request.headers['X-Apple-Store-Front'])
    gb.request.headers['X-Apple-Store-Front'] = '143441-1,5';]]></request>
    </rule>
</glimmerblocker-rules>

    Copy the xml, and paste it into the rules table in your own filter.

  12. Jamie
    Posted September 19, 2009 at 7:11 pm | Permalink

    Was wondering if you would be able to post more details on how to go about retrieving the HTML? I have never tried anything like this and want to copy the content from an Album page as proof of concept for my honours project.

    Also, any thoughts if it is possible to:

    • add menu items to iTunes, ie your own custom devices?
    • surf external web pages within itunes? (ie itunes.exe -u “google.com”)?
  13. dvbportal
    Posted September 20, 2009 at 1:15 pm | Permalink

    Nice find. I’ve taken the idea and setup a proxy to make the necessary adaption on the fly. Most iTunes 9 pages work this way.

    Browse iTunes Store via proxy

9 Trackbacks

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