Qt WebKit Still Being Developed As An Alternative To Qt WebEngine

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Qt WebKit Still Being Developed As An Alternative To Qt WebEngine

While it's been a number of Qt releases already since the Chromium-based WebEngine component replaced QtWebKit, some developers are still maintaining out-of-tree code for supporting QtWebKit...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=QtWebKit-May-2017

[3vi1]

QtWebEngine is not ready for prime-time and missing several things that made QtWebKit nice to control programatically. QtWebKit however, in addition to the deprecation, requires goats blood to get building correctly on Windows and is not helped by the half-dozen outdated instructional blogs you might find.

I ended up using neither in my last project. Well, actually I used each for a short time and then said "screw this". Luckily, I wasn't doing anything I couldn't just build myself in a graphics view.

Unless they're making an easy QtWebKit redistributable for Windows, this might not help too many people with their cross-platform apps.

[TheBlackCat]

QtWebEngine is not ready for prime-time and missing several things that made QtWebKit nice to control programatically. QtWebKit however, in addition to the deprecation, requires goats blood to get building correctly on Windows and is not helped by the half-dozen outdated instructional blogs you might find.

I ended up using neither in my last project. Well, actually I used each for a short time and then said "screw this". Luckily, I wasn't doing anything I couldn't just build myself in a graphics view.

Unless they're making an easy QtWebKit redistributable for Windows, this might not help too many people with their cross-platform apps.

They are already shipping Windows binaries.

[carewolf]

QtWebEngine is not ready for prime-time and missing several things that made QtWebKit nice to control programatically. QtWebKit however, in addition to the deprecation, requires goats blood to get building correctly on Windows and is not helped by the half-dozen outdated instructional blogs you might find.

I ended up using neither in my last project. Well, actually I used each for a short time and then said "screw this". Luckily, I wasn't doing anything I couldn't just build myself in a graphics view.

Unless they're making an easy QtWebKit redistributable for Windows, this might not help too many people with their cross-platform apps.

True. Not many people know this, but QtWebKit was deprecated for QtWebEngine because after Google left WebKit Qt was left as the single provider of goat blood to keep WebKit working on Windows, and we just didn't have enough sacrificial goats, no matter what they kept dying when we drained them of blood.

[GreatEmerald]

Good to hear. So far QtWebkit is the only way to have a decent browser natively on x32.

[annulen]

True. Not many people know this, but QtWebKit was deprecated for QtWebEngine because after Google left WebKit Qt was left as the single provider of goat blood to keep WebKit working on Windows, and we just didn't have enough sacrificial goats, no matter what they kept dying when we drained them of blood.

Actually, it turned out that we don't need that much goat blood to keep Windows supported. I've restored old IPC implementation, and, after series of trivial compile fixes and a few non-trivial runtime ones, it seems to work good. I think it's a small price for 3 years gap, and would be much easier if WebKit was updated regularly.

Of course it helps a lot to have downstream branch, where ugly hacks can be landed, of sorts that would never get r+. As you remember, Google also didn't ship straight from trunk, I guess for similar reasons.

[RayDonnelly]

> Not many people know this, but QtWebKit was deprecated for QtWebEngine because after Google left WebKit Qt was left as the single provider of goat blood to keep WebKit working on Windows.

Really? Funny then that the Qt Project decided to adopt a web technology for which it has never been (and probably never will be) possible to build using GCC on Windows which is claimed to be a supported platform at http://doc.qt.io/qt-5.6/supported-platforms.html

And yet one guy working more or less on his own is able to revive QtWebKit and get it working on basically the full range of Qt platforms.

[carewolf]

> Not many people know this, but QtWebKit was deprecated for QtWebEngine because after Google left WebKit Qt was left as the single provider of goat blood to keep WebKit working on Windows.

Really? Funny then that the Qt Project decided to adopt a web technology for which it has never been (and probably never will be) possible to build using GCC on Windows which is claimed to be a supported platform at http://doc.qt.io/qt-5.6/supported-platforms.html

And yet one guy working more or less on his own is able to revive QtWebKit and get it working on basically the full range of Qt platforms.

QtWebKit and QtWebengine have never been supported on all platforms Qt support. It is not just practically impossible, it is actually impossible, as some platforms like iOS do not allow alternative webengines.

But for the record, the switch wasn't my decision, or even my preference.

[annulen]

QtWebKit and QtWebengine have never been supported on all platforms Qt support.

However, QtWebKit is inherently more portable. Pretty much the only place that requires platform-specific code is WK2 IPC. So QtWebKit portability is limited only by portability of Qt, availability of a few dependencies such as ICU, and availability of modern C++ compiler.

OTOH, portability of QtWebEngine is bound to the will of Google.

It is not just practically impossible, it is actually impossible, as some platforms like iOS do not allow alternative webengines.

For the record, it's App Store that does not allow alternative web engines. AFAIK if you are making in-house or corporative app, it's quite fine to have alternative web engine, just like you can use V4 JIT in this case. Also, code for iOS support is right here in WebKit tree, so if someone wants to add support for iOS, it should not be too hard. But yeah, it won't be able to distribute result as freely as you would like