On Friday 6. February 2015 08.42.53 André Somers wrote: > Knoll Lars schreef op 5-2-2015 om 16:28: > > But we don’t have much of a choice, if we want to deliver an up to date > > web engine. > > Perhaps it is time to ask the question then: do we want to do that? Do > we really need to? > > It seems to me, that it isn't really possible to do. Not in a way that > doesn't require huge effort in support or pissing off everybody not on > one of the large main stream platforms. And the question might be: why > should Qt deliver an up-to-date web engine exactly? Do we really think > that people are going to use Qt to build advanced browsers? Sure, some > might (KDE comes to mind...), but you are right in your observation that > the technology is moving too fast and is developed between giants like > Google, Apple and Microsoft who could not care less about other uses or > other platforms than their own. > > All the while Qt is spending effort to catch up, deprecating compilers > and platforms because they can't take the latest Javascript engine to > it, users are hapily using browers like Firefox and Chrome. > > Perhaps it is time to conclude that Qt just can't compete in this race > if it doesn't want to be crushed between the giants playing this field. > Perhaps it is just time to settle for indeed a simpler goal: don't try > to provide a fully integrated full-fledged web engine, but instead > settle once again for a simpler alternative that we _can_ support and > that can be used for things like showing embedded help or showing simple > sites, and perhaps an API to wrap and embed the native web view provided > by the platform but with limited integration.
What simpler alternative do you have in mind? This "catch up" race is _exactly_ the reason why we decided to build on top of Chromium and don't look at it as just a "HTML/CSS renderer" anymore but as an entire platform. Unfortunately that means the platform is wide and comes with a lot of code, fortunately it almost entirely eliminates the "catch up" race. And yes, there is a surprising interest among the users of Qt to use an up-to- date implementation of the web platform in their Qt application. Not necessarily to build a web browser that competes with Chrome, Safari and the lot. Simon _______________________________________________ Development mailing list [email protected] http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/development
