[Development] Deprecating modules with 5.5

[Alejandro Exojo]

El Friday 06 February 2015, André Somers escribió:
> 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.

This is a thought that I had several times when reading about the QtWebEngine. 
I understand, though, that the customers that The Qt Company is trying to 
appeal might not have a problem with bundling lots of libraries. Deploying to 
Windows, Mac (or mobile, even though here WebEngine not applies there) already 
means bundling lots of libraries with your application.

We all know how web browsers have changed. From reasonable applications 
capable of fetching a file through a simple one way protocol, and displaying a 
mostly static multimedia content, to huge beasts that require lots of complex 
network (websockets, WebRTC), multimedia, graphics, devices, storage, etc.

Kevin said "Relying on Chromium is a horrible idea", but non-horrible 
solutions probably won't exist anymore if you add a web browser into the mix. 
You probably will have to surrender to what the upstream team that developed 
the browser left you. And there aren't that many upstreams.

Speaking of that...

What about Gecko? Is the license a problem? Or is still a technical reason?

Because a long term possibility would be to team up with people in GNOME or 
KDE who might need a web browser engine, and speak with Mozilla to help. After 
all they are supposed to be a non-profit, so collaborating with other open 
source projects should be in their DNA. It's not like their XUL has much use 
outside their projects, so having some Qt and GTK+ integration and more users 
of their technologies should be good for their mindshare.

Here are some notes on the patches that Sailfish Browser needs to embed Gecko:

http://blog.idempotent.info/posts/whats-behind-sailfish-browser.html

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Alex (a.k.a. suy) | GPG ID 0x0B8B0BC2
http://barnacity.net/ | http://disperso.net