WebKit -> WebEngine

Dirk Hohndel dirk at hohndel.org
Sun Oct 31 12:20:02 PDT 2021



> On Oct 31, 2021, at 11:58 AM, Robert Helling <helling at atdotde.de> wrote:
> 
> My understanding was that from Qt, the announced direction was clear: Abandon WebKit and move to WebEngine! For example, for a while Qt5 stopped shipping WebKit at all with its binaries and you had to build it yourself for every new version. And this seems to be even stronger with Qt6, it was my understanding that WebKit is dropped for good.

Correct

> I made this new attempt because a) I was tired of building WebKit myself and even more as a step towards moving to Qt6 (which seems to be the only hope to have support for Apple Silicone at all in any kind of near future). But as mentioned in the other thread, it is by far the only obstacle of moving to Qt6.

Yes, there are a hand full. I addressed one recently with the removal of QRegExp. And I think most of the others will be similarly easy to address.
This is all one of those issues of "TIME". It's a weird concept. And there never seems to be enough.

I'd love to see someone else take the lead on that - but as we all know, there aren't a lot of people left who are actively working on Subsurface, and even fewer who are comfortable working on Qt things...

> For the time being, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem. I just have to reintroduce a number of #ifdefs to make the choice between WebEngine and WebKit optional depending on what is available for the system at hand. I just removed those as I was under the impression that the transition is a clear step forward. The transition does not add any functionality. I would only argue that it simplifies the printing logic quite a bit.

While I think that having the cleaner code would be a huge win - if we completely lose Windows support (still our largest user group - but Android is catching up), that would suck.
And of course, eventually we'll have to transition to Qt 6 everywhere, including Windows, but we'll burn that bridge when we get there :/

Thanks for your work on this. It is TRULY appreciated.

/D



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