[Development] Deprecating modules with 5.5

[Simon Hausmann]

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