[Development] Make WebKit an add-on

[Ziller Eike]

On Jun 20, 2014, at 8:53 AM, Rutledge Shawn <Shawn.Rutledge at digia.com> wrote:

> 
> On 20 Jun 2014, at 08:32, Knoll Lars <Lars.Knoll at digia.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Currently Qt WebKit and Qt WebKit Widgets are marked in our documentation
>> as Qt Essentials. I’d like to propose to move them to the add-on category
>> for 5.4.
>> 
>> There are several reasons for that, the main ones being:
>> 
>> * Qt WebKit is not supported on Android, iOS and WinRT
>> * We can’t develop it much further (esp we can't update with newer
>> versions of webkit), as the webkit project has moved into a different
>> direction
>> * Qt WebEngine is going to replace it over time
>> 
>> Unless someone has a very good reason against changing this, I’d like to
>> change the status of the 2 modules in time before the 5.4 branch is being
>> created.
> 
> Will all of our own usage of WebKit (such as in Assistant and Creator) be replaced with WebEngine in time for 5.4?

I don’t know when it will be possible to actually create a WebEngine backend for the help viewer in Qt Creator, but I did some work in Qt Creator 3.2 to make that technically easy (we already had an additional “QTextBrowser” based backend before, but it was a ifdef mess).

Br, Eike

-- 
Eike Ziller, Senior Software Engineer - Digia, Qt
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