Introducing the Qt WebEngine

#1

Post by ddb » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 12:22 PM UTC

Introducing the Qt WebEngine
blog.qt.digia.com

Re: Introducing the Qt WebEngine

#2

Post by nicholassmith » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 1:13 PM UTC

This is really interesting, because whilst Qt Webkit was a fantastic effort it had some quirks. Last project I was working on used Qt Webkit to provide a basic browser, so there was lots of fun with flash player integration, Javascript going awry and so on, if they're relying on Chromium to act as the core it should remove a lot of those headaches for developers and allow them to build on top of it much easier.

Definitely a big change, quite exciting though.

Re: Introducing the Qt WebEngine

#3

Post by borplk » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 1:33 PM UTC

Can someone provide a simplified summary?

Re: Introducing the Qt WebEngine

#4

Post by Touche » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 1:35 PM UTC

borplk wrote: post #3

Can someone provide a simplified summary?

Qt is switching (from WebKit) to Chromium.

Re: Introducing the Qt WebEngine

#5

Post by hannibal5 » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 1:36 PM UTC

borplk wrote: post #3

Can someone provide a simplified summary?

The Qt WebEngine will be based on Chromium.

Re: Introducing the Qt WebEngine

#6

Post by leokun » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 1:37 PM UTC

borplk wrote: post #3

Can someone provide a simplified summary?

Qt is making a change to what iOS/Cocoa, Android, and Microsoft developers call a 'webview', an embedded browser engine. Qt's version of a webview will switch from WebEngine to Chromium. So if you want to render a browser page inside an application built with Qt, in the future this page it will use Chromium's engine, not WebEngine which was a homegrown engine based on webkit.

Re: Introducing the Qt WebEngine

#7

Post by thesorrow » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 2:00 PM UTC

What's going to happen to wkhtmltopdf and phantomjs ?

Re: Introducing the Qt WebEngine

#8

Post by raptium » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 2:00 PM UTC

leokun wrote: post #6

borplk wrote: post #3

Can someone provide a simplified summary?

Qt is making a change to what iOS/Cocoa, Android, and Microsoft developers call a 'webview', an embedded browser engine. Qt's version of a webview will switch from WebEngine to Chromium. So if you want to render a browser page inside an application built with Qt, in the future this page it will use Chromium's engine, not WebEngine which was a homegrown engine based on webkit.

Qt WebEngine is (the new one) based on Chromium. The one based on WebKit is just called Qt WebKit.

Re: Introducing the Qt WebEngine

#9

Post by orng » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 2:13 PM UTC

This is great news, although I really wish it would have come sooner as we have spent a significant amount of time getting Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) to play nice with our Qt application in the past months.

One thing that I wonder though: Does this mean that the Qt WebEngine will stay more up to date? Because the old QtWebkit was lagging pretty far behind and for instance didn't get HTML5 support until very recently.

Re: Introducing the Qt WebEngine

#10

Post by rolleiflex » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 2:26 PM UTC

This is excellent news. I have been working on a project that uses QtWebkit extensively and I have had my fair share of burns from QtWebkit's platform specific quirks—such as all rendering being retina except SVG, causing SVG's in webpage to show incredibly pixelated. Chromium core should enforce a stricter feature parity with the current Chrome.