[WebKit-devel] Release kwebkitpart?

[Dawit A]

On Sunday, June 27, 2010 15:00:13 Urs Wolfer wrote:
> On Friday 25 June 2010 18:54:13 alekcejk at googlemail.com wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > There was discussions couple of month ago about public release  of
> > kwebkitpart and putting it on kde-apps.org.
> > 
> > Is there any news when kwebkitpart release could be?
> 
> You are right, there was a discussion about it.
> 
> It was my plan to release it, but I have been really busy the last
> months... I have had very few time to work on KDE-related things.
> 
> This will change in the next weeks hopefully...
> 
> IMHO the current state is quite ready to be released soon.
> 
> Dawit, what do you think about it?

Personally I am fine with such a release with one stipulation. The release be 
marked as beta or technology preview or something along those lines to 
indicate its current state of development. Besides lacking many important 
features readily available in other webkit browsers, mostly due to these 
features not being implemented upstream by QtWebKit, KWebKitPart itself has a 
couple of critical bugs that need to be addressed.

To help those that want to use KWebKitPart in place of KHTML permanently make 
an informed decision, I have outlined the current state of issues and missing 
functionality in both QtWebKit and kdewebkit/kwebkitpart below:

QtWebKit/kdewebkit
============
#1. HTML 5 video support is iffy at best for a good many users. At least that 
is the case with Qt 4.6.3, even when QtWebKit 2.0 is substituted for the 
QtWebKit that comes with Qt 4.6.3. The issue was supposedly going to get 
better with the upcoming Qt 4.7, but that does not seem to be the case. 
Hopefully, the use of different Phonon versions between KDE & Qt will be 
addressed with Qt 4.7 ??? Dunno...

#2. Still no Java applet support.

#3. No spell checking and form completion support.

#4. No access key support.

#5. KIO<=> QNetworkAccessManager related integration issue that are caused by 
the different architecture of these two IO frameworks. Specifically, the issue 
of being unable to save the response of a POST request when the returned 
content is supposed to be saved to file. 

See the link below for more details: 
http://websvn.kde.org/branches/KDE/4.5/kdelibs/kdewebkit/ISSUES?view=markup


kwebkitpart
========
#1. The recent change that finally integrated Konqueror's history mode with 
QtWebKit's "correctly" has a huge flaw when saving and restoring history 
information from multiple tabs! That will be addressed by me at some point, 
but it is there for now...

#2. Complete support for extensions a lot of users find useful, such KHTML's ad 
block plugin, still remain to be implemented. Some come with rudimentary 
support while others are completely unsupported...

#3. Support for some of Konqueror's HTML settings is still lacking/missing. I 
have gotten at least one functionality implemented and accepted upstream for 
QtWebKit 2.0, but there are more than a few options that do not yet work or 
work as intended.

See the link below for more details:
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/extragear/base/kwebkitpart/TODO?view=markup

Hope the paints a clearer picture of the state of affairs than a simple answer. 
Referring to the two links given above is the best way to find out the current 
status of the two modules above.

Regards,
Dawit A.