[alessivs]

> The web needs independent browsers...[websites] should work on any browser

Unfortunately, independence ends with the choice between WebKit (QtWebKit) or Blink (QtWebEngine), albeit with a faithful Opera 12-like interface that's less resource hungry than Vivaldi. Otter is still in development and it shows in some rough spots and occasional crashes.

[jordemort]

I'd love to go back to 1999 and see everyone's reaction when I tell them that almost everyone in the 2020s uses a browser derived from Konqueror, and that you have your choice of Konqueror derivatives from Apple, Google, or Microsoft. Whoever named it was more prescient than they realized.

[mustacheemperor]

There’s an old turn of phrase, first comes the Navigator, then comes the Explorer, then…

[t-writescode]

There’s also the Gecko engine, Firefox does still exist.

[alessivs]

I was referring to a choice between WebKit and Chromium/Blink in Otter, not the web in general, though the sheer resources required to keep up with the Web(R) from other players may be leading us that way (hopefully not).

For example, after switching the preferred engine in about:config, it's even possible to leave Otter in a transitional state, having one tab load a web page in WebKit, and another in Blink, in the same running application.

[kennywinker]

And it's quite good. I switched over a little over a year ago, and I have no regrets.

[brnt]

QtWebkit has been deprecated for a long time, and removed from Qt6. If you use it, you'll run into 'not supported' messages on most Google websites.

[spijdar]

Last time I used a QtWebKit browser, I could get around this easily by user agent spoofing. Not sure if the experience was totally perfect, but there were no glaring problems.

Doesn't change the fact that it's been deprecated/removed upstream, though, unfortunately.

[nly]

There was an effort to revive QtWebKit some time ago, despite its removal from Qt proper

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=QtWebKit...

[asddubs]

it would be cool if just one of those smaller browser projects was based on firefox/gecko

[andrewroff]

There is SeaMonkey - https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

It's essentially a continuation of the Mozilla Suite (formerly Netscape). However they're falling behind on Gecko integration, with the latest version still on Gecko 60 (2018) with backports.

The reality is that Mozilla doesn't focus on embedded applications of Gecko besides Firefox (even Thunderbird is sidelined these days). Projects that are essentially third-party, like SeaMonkey, really have no visibility at all. This is the reason why the Chromium Blink engine has become so widespread, especially when it's been nicely packaged up by the commercially-backed Qt project.

[arp242]

I don't know why there aren't more browsers based on Gecko; especially since there are quite a few people who are not exactly thrilled with the general direction Firefox has been going.

There's PaleMoon, which is a fork, and there's SeaMonkey, although the latest version is based on Firefox 60.8 (May 2018), so I guess that's more of a fork than "using the Gecko engine" too? Also the UI is a bit too 1999-esque even for my tastes.

So I guess it's just hard to re-use Gecko? Using QtWebEngine (or QtWebKit before that) is very easy. No really, it's 20 minutes and you have a basic browser. I built a basic "vim-like" browser in the style of Qutebrowser in a day with PyQt (missing a lot of UI stuff and polish, obviously) and I'm not even very experienced in Qt/PyQt (or GUI programming in general).

[berkes]

I presume part of this is that for a long while the KDE/webkit/chrome engine was a separate, isolated thing, whereas the rendering in Firefox was not.

Not sure where Firefox/gecko is now, but pulling the rendering apart from the UI and improving it to be usable by other UIs, projects, would help get this done.

[krzyk]

Or just a real browser not a repackaging of other browsers/engines.