[Development] Assistant WebKit/WebEngine support

[Simon Hausmann]

Am 25.06.19 um 10:10 schrieb Morten Sørvig:
> I’m not sure if it has been mentioned; we have another option which is to use the OS web browser component via the Qt WebView module.
>
> The benefits would be
>
> * up-to-date web browser (and someone else keeps it up to date for us)
> * insignificant additional download size
> * no trouble with restricted platforms where shipping a full web browser is not feasible (but then maybe creator isn’t going to run on those platforms, anyway)
>
> QWebView’s platform coverage may be insufficient for Creator, which means
>
> * no html docs on those platforms :(
> * or, we expand QWebView platform coverage
> * or, QT WebView does have a WebEngine backend


I think that would indeed be desirable in the long run. At the moment 
this is limited to macOS (and from the looks of it, Qt Creator has 
direct support for using WebKit on macOS, but oddly my build doesn't 
have it enabled?). I'm quite excited about Microsoft's WebView2 
development that could become a very nice backend for QWebView on 
Windows. I played with it the other day and it looks quite nice. The 
deployment model is not suitable for us at the moment (nuget only) and 
it's still in an early release phase. However it comes with a powerful 
API and an opt-in evergreen distribution model.

QWebView would also need to be improved to support feeding custom data 
into it, unless somebody implements serving via a local http server.


I think these are all options in the future.


Simon