qtwebkit VS Pyjector

Not so ancient - Otter uses QtWebKit 5.212 from Mar 10, 2020.

AFAIK, Otter Browser uses the latest QtWebkit-ng on Windows. It scores 341 points in HTML5Test. There is also an experimental Qt WebEngine backend.

The main backend for Otter Browser is QtWebkit Reloaded, last updated in 2020, see the screenshot.

As for Otter Browser, there is a bug in QtWebKit. Try using Otter Browser on Qt WebEngine.

Otter Browser is based on QtWebKit-NG, which is from 2020, so still relevant. That said, you can use the nightly WebKit build from Playwright: https://i.postimg.cc/Fz7FwRQW/Playwright.png

Lastly, the other webkit based project, QtWebkit. It is also very lightweight and fast, It also provides a cross-platform render and It has access to the system dialogs. The down side is that you will have to make a Qt App to use it. If you don't want to implement it, then you cannot use It

> I hate that it's based on Chromium though

There aren't really many alternatives. The main one is WebKitGTK, but that comes with its own set of issues (mostly performance/compatibility). You can use qutebrowser with QtWebKit as well, but I wouldn't recommend it - it's based on a 2018 WebKit with many known security issues: https://github.com/qtwebkit/qtwebkit/releases

I had hoped for Servo to fill that gap at some point, but so far that hasn't happened yet: https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/27579

Another possibility is for Geckoview to be ported to Desktop platforms some day: https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ - something the people behind Tridactyl would like to happen: https://tridactyl.xyz/ideas/#port-geckoview-to-x86_64

> and Qutebrowser privacy related settings also seem quite limited compared to Firefox... (and even compared to Chromium.)

Can you be more specific? Pretty much anything that's possible to expose (either via a QtWebEngine API or via Chromium commandline arguments) is exposed. Certain things (like deleting cookies belonging to a tab when it's closed) just aren't possible without implementing them in QtWebEngine first unfortunately.

FWIW there's an overview here: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/4045

and Qt has mostly moved to qtwebengine/blink. qt-webkit is sort-of-not-really maintained by very few volunteers. https://github.com/qtwebkit/qtwebkit/releases

While you can still use it with QtWebKit instead, I wouldn't recommend doing so, as that's still based on a 2018 WebKit with no process isolation or sandboxing.

Thanks for the detailed answer.

Many years ago, I considered adding an embedded browser (or just HTML renderer) into a game, as a simple way to build the game menu. The requirements mostly were:

- We needed the raw pixels as output. This was SDL, and the game was purely pixel based. Should also support alpha channel / transparency if possible. Also we would need to be in full control of all input events (keyboard inputs, mouse clicks), and have some easy way to handle some events like button clicks etc.

- Cross-platform (at least Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, and potentially more). Should also be easy to build, and not have much dependencies.

- It should be a small dependency (WebKit was way overkill; or maybe you can build a stripped down version?).

We gave up. Although we didn't really needed all the modern HTML features, and also no JS. I guess for a projects like yours, you have somewhat different requirements.

I wonder if it is worth it to fork an existing browser (Chromium, Firefox) for your purpose. But this is probably impossible to maintain and keep in sync with upstream.

I wonder whether there are other simple ways to hook into the browser. After all, you are in control of the OS, and you can inject some code. On MacOSX, there was actually some nice way to script things like this. But I think they restricted that very much now.

https://github.com/albertz/Pyjector