[Development] Deprecating modules with 5.5

[André Somers]

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.

André