[Development] Assistant WebKit/WebEngine support

[Eike Ziller]

> On Jun 25, 2019, at 10:26, Simon Hausmann <Simon.Hausmann at qt.io> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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?).

It is there, but not used by default. You can switch between different backends (that are supported in your build) with e.g. QTC_HELPVIEWER_BACKEND=native (for the native webview backend) or =textbrowser for the QTextBrowser fallback.
It has issues though. Which is why it is not default. Embedding the native view into Qt Creator so far didn’t work reliably, with different issues depending on Qt version.
The collection of issues I had so far, never all together though ;)
- blank webview
- working webview but blank QML views (possibly fighting over OpenGL contexts?)
- mouse hover not working 
- last time I checked the webview was scaled x2 when it first opened

> 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
> 
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Eike Ziller
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