Anyone from Mozilla aware of the status of the Qt Firefox port? I remember seeing progress on Github and I was really excited for a while, but it seems to have completely disappeared.
Right now the Qt world doesn't have an acceptable browser, which is incredibly annoying for us since we're targeting Qt-based desktop environments. I'm hoping the move to GTK3 at the very least helps towards that.
You should check out Otter browser (http://otter-browser.org/). It's FOSS, an Opera 12 clone and uses Qt5. Despite it still being in a beta with known bugs it's under active development and quite usable in its current state.
Jolla uses a Qt port of Gecko (ESR, it seems) as the engine of Sailfish Browser, the default browser on Jolla devices. See https://github.com/tmeshkova/qtmozembed
As I understand it, even during the Nokia days, the point was to use Gecko with a Qt-native UI, so it wasn't about getting the entirety of XUL-based Firefox polished on Qt.
I made some fixes to the Qt backend a year ago, but gave up again rather quickly. There are some rather big chunck missing and as others have said it's actually getting worse. For example the Sailfish people removed the component that renders native buttons, because that would have been a lot of work to port to Qt 5. (So now you only get the rather ugly XUL implemented controls)
> Anyone from Mozilla aware of the status of the Qt Firefox port?
From what I can tell the progress is backwards. A few years ago there were Firefox Qt builds on mozilla and regular progress on it. Now the builds disappeared and the only commits to the Qt backend are in some hard to find github repos with no activity.
I haven't seen any activity around the Qt port for a long time.
Really the main visible difference is the file/print dialogs. I think maybe XDG would be a better way to standardize that, and would fix many other apps as well.
Rekonq actually uses WebKit under the hood, and it's pretty fast (faster that firefox and chrome) and lightweight, without any issue of compatibility problem on any webpage. The only big issue is that was very unstable for a lot of time.. at least on KUbuntu.
Rekonq is dead (as a project I mean), and I've seen plenty of compatibility problems, with rekonq, qupzilla or even the test browser (i.e. the problem is with the engine). FWIW epiphany (or "web", as is it called now) is GTKwebkit based and crashes just as often.
Qupzilla-git i.e. the version based on Qtwebengine is getting there, so reasonably soon we may have a decent Qt-based browser (I don't doubt scrollaway knows that). Also the fiber browser looks promising.
I do think we need a way to do CI between chromium and Qtwebengine, or else we'll end up shipping browsers lagging one or two versions behind chromium.
As far as gecko goes, I think it's over. The hope is servo, which being much more modular may be integrated without struggling with XUL.
Right now the Qt world doesn't have an acceptable browser, which is incredibly annoying for us since we're targeting Qt-based desktop environments. I'm hoping the move to GTK3 at the very least helps towards that.