The new browser / QT5

[Remy]

I checked falkon under windows and saw some issue (e.g. on my site  http://remydodin.levillage.org/en/presentation.php?item=0900003&id=moi ) - pictures aren't correct and audio didn't start at expend time... ) 

[Per E. Johannessen]

Just to avoid confusion, like Dave Yeo mentioned, there are;

https://falcon-browser.jaleco.com/

and

https://www.falkon.org/

Believe Falkon (with 'k') is the one likely to be ported.

[Dave Yeo]

I installed it and tested a bit on Mint. Unluckily I had to update Mint from 18.3 to 19 first which took quite a while.
Installing with apt (similar to yum) it did pull in some KDE libs which probably aren't needed but do give some extra functionality like a password manager. It also pulled in gstreamer which is likely used for multimedia, this could be a problem as we don't have a gstreamer port and when I looked at it back when Firefox used it, it did not look trivial to port, it's plugin based so needs to dynamically load DLLs. So Youtube etc may not work at first on OS/2
Has the same minimal (phone?) UI that has become popular for some reason with the hamburger menu and not very configurable.
Doesn't support WebExtensions unluckily and only has half dozen or so extensions. I spent quite a bit of time trying to install the JavaScript blocking extension with no luck. Even being able to block all JavaScript would be better then nothing. No idea about cookies.
The browser itself seemed fine, displayed everything I tried, didn't take much CPU or memory but I didn't test that much. I assume it uses the same JavaScript engine as Chrome so a lot of stuff that doesn't currently work should.
It'll probably make a good secondary browser but the lack of extensions is a problem and things such as passwords will have to be manually transferred.
Have to play with it a bit more but at least it seems to display modern JS heavy sites.

[David Graser]

still doodling around

[Dmitriy Kuminov]

Dave, WebExtensions will eventually be available in QtWebEngine. Currently planned for Qt 5.14, here is its official bug report: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-61676. (And btw the original ticket mentioned Falkon, https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTWB-35).

Given that Qt 5.13 is already out (to which our port of Qt5 for OS/2 will be updated within a couple of weeks), Qt 5.14 is really soon. It is scheduled for November, 2019 so if it goes well on their side WebExtensions will appear before/when we are done with our QtWebEngine port. Even if it gets postponed further, we will still get it one day. We have a lot to do before Falkon is ready to run on OS/2 anyway.

[Dave Yeo]

That's good to hear as extensions do make the browser so much more useful. It's a shame that the weird interface has caught on, but it seems to be the way things are going on all platforms.

[Remy]

Just to avoid confusion, like Dave Yeo mentioned, there are;

https://falcon-browser.jaleco.com/

and

https://www.falkon.org/

Believe Falkon (with 'k') is the one likely to be ported.

Right, I realy mean falkon

[ivan]

Like Dave I installed it on my Linux Mint computer and I too am totally not impresses with the UI and the fact that there doesn't appear any way to change it. 

Not a browser I would use unless forced to do so - even firefox is heading that way and don't mention chrome.

[Dmitriy Kuminov]

BTW, YouTube works great in pure QtWebEngine as long as "proprietary" FFMPEG codecs are enabled when building it. So I expect it to work out of the box on OS/2 once we port it (we already have FFMPEG et al). It will lack hardware support of course but that's another story.

[David Graser]

doodling again

[jailbird]

Qt 6.0 is already in the planning stages. So hopefully we won’t have to go through this all yet again.

[Dmitriy Kuminov]

This really depends on how they decide to go. They made Qt 5 much more modular and plugin based (compared to Qt 4 and earlier) and this is a good thing. It simplifies things a lot (in terms of support and porting to new platforms as well). Therefore I suppose they will leave the overall structure intact this time. Which means less work bringing it to OS/2.

[Pete]

Hi All

Will there be an email/newsreader client to go with the new browser?


Regards

Pete

[David Graser]

Hi All

Will there be an email/newsreader client to go with the new browser?

VOICE is working on an updated version of PMMail that I believe will be available for for all to use.  I don't know if a newsreader is in the works.

[Tuure Linden]

QT seems to be a bit problematic because they release new major versions "all the time". In the Linux World the KDE desktop and other software follows QT. Usually when a new version of QT is available, the older one is abandoned soon. I'm just wondering how long time it takes that the "new" browser becomes obsolete and QT6 will have to be ported. And how much work that will be again... But there are now other alternatives than a QT based browser?