[Qtwebengine] Hopeful of a timeline?

[Jocelyn Turcotte]

Hello David,

You can find some of that information at:
http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwebenginewidgets-qtwebkitportingguide.html

Some of the features like private browsing should already be available in
Qt 5.5.

We currently have an internal development board at
https://trello.com/b/5G9c1rkb/qtwebengine that you can follow and you
can use the Qt bug tracker to vote and report issues or missing important
features.

I have to note that QtWebEngine isn't a 1-to-1 replacement of QtWebKit,
principally because some very advanced features can't be set in stone
through a public API without risking huge future maintenance efforts as
Chromium evolves under our feet. It is quite a dragon to ride.

The public API aims at solving the general use case of embedding web
contents in Qt applications, but if you are developping a more powerful
application I encourage you to look at the code and dig further to get
access to functionalities that you need, keeping in mind that the
further you dig, the more likely you'll have to update your code between
QtWebEngine updates.

Cheers,
Jocelyn

On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 05:28:19PM -0800, David Cortesi wrote:
> I was glad when Qt5.4 was released because I was eager to use QWebEngine.
> However when I began to port my app (a simple special-purpose browser) I
> was surprised to find some QWebKit features not (yet?) supported. Reading
> the archives of this list, it appears I was not the only one surprised --
> but surprise would be natural, given statements such as this from the digia
> blog (http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2014/12/10/qt-5-4-released/)
> 
> HTML5 and Web technologies have become more and more important over the
> > last years, and we have spent the last year developing a completely renewed
> > Web offering for Qt. The Qt WebEngine
> > <http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwebengine-index.html> module is the result of a
> > long-term R&D project where we adopted the Chromium Web engine for use
> > within Qt. With Qt 5.4, it is fully supported on the most used desktop and
> > embedded platforms. Qt WebEngine provides you with an easy-to-use API to
> > embed Web content in both Qt Widgets and Qt Quick based applications.
> >
> 
> Nothing in that announcement suggests that WebEngine is only partially
> finished. Indeed, "completely renewed offering" and "fully supported" might
> make a person think it is ready to replace WebKit.
> 
> Well, that would be a problem of communication from dev. to marketing,
> perhaps -- anyway it's water under the bridge!
> 
> What I would hope to see happen now is to assemble a list of WebKit
> features that are NOT available in WebEngine 5.4, with some indication of
> whether each feature is (a) not planned (b) planned but with a different
> API (c) planned for 5.5, (d) planned for someday, etc.
>
> Here in no particular order are things that I could not port to WebEngine
> in my simple app:
> 
> Settings: PluginsEnabled(bool)
> 
> Settings: JavaEnabled(bool) -- I suspect in Chromium this is subsumed under
> "plugins"
> 
> Settings: PrivateBrowsingEnabled(bool) -- Chrome browser definitely
> supports it
> 
> QWebFrame::hitTestContent(QPosition) -- necessary for a custom context menu
> to adapt to "what's clicked"
> 
> QWebPage.setContentEditable(bool) -- looks as if currently WebEngine pages
> are not editable, could they ever be?
> 
> QWebPage.setLinkDelegationPolicy(policy) and the associated
> linkClicked(URL) signal.
> 
> What else? And is there a timeline, or at least priority list, for these
> things?
> 
> Thanks for your attention,
> 
> Dave Cortesi

> _______________________________________________
> QtWebEngine mailing list
> QtWebEngine at qt-project.org
> http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/qtwebengine