Seeing the Doomed, yet Great Project: Qt WebKit

Last November, Digia announced the start of the new project named Qt WebEngine. Based on Google Chromium, it is a drop-in replacement of Qt WebKit. Most of the people welcomed the project, as they can easily use Chromium and Blink to their own environment. Digia said that Qt WebEngine will be as compatible as possible against Qt WebKit, and everybody belived in the promise, as Digia had a good reputation against Nokia, as they were practically leading the project well even in Nokia days of Qt.

Last week, I read a new blog article from Qt WebEngine team, and I saw some “complaints” about APIs for the new module. I jumped to the wiki and found out that my beloved QWebElement, which is the most needed core feature for my web crawler engine, will be unavailable in Qt WebEngine - according to the wiki, due to multi-process nature of the Chromium the feature should be designed asynchronously, but the design of Qt WebEngine is synchronous, it is not supported anymore.

Not only QWebElement. It also doesn’t integrate QNetworkAccessManager, which is another thing I use to check sanity of the content. Qt WebEngine uses Chromium’s own network stack, meaning I cannot review any network action from the Engine.

Thanks to the changes, my product won’t be able to support some of the features it currently has. From the foreseeable future, Qt WebKit will survive until Qt 5.4, which is expected to be released at this September, but there’s no guarantee what’ll happen when Qt 5.5 open source edition is released.

Of course there are be some reasons beyond giviing up WebKit as it requires more manpower for maintenance and I respect their decision to manage their development team in “more efficient” way. Yet I’m afraid there will be more who’re frustrated against new Qt WebEngine for its limited features as I read from some replies for Qt WebEngine blog article last week.

Well, now I search for some alternative development environment. I was already searching for a replacement of Qt itself as I see it become feature-bloat, resulting in more complicated setup environment, slow startup time in QML(up to 10 seconds for showing blank window), as I adopt new version of the library. And Qt WebEngine accelerated my move. Currently I consider wxWidgets+wxWebConnect(or wxWebView) combination as a replacement for current development environment.

Anyway, Qt WebKit was a great project, yet seeing one of the greatest development projects fade out to the history is quite a pain. Especially if the fadeout directly hits me hard.