qtwebkit VS adblock-rust

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.

Brave has written their own (open source) adblock engine (in rust) that is directly integrated into the browser (ie. not an extension, so is not affected by Manifest V3).

https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

Here is a (somewhat dated) article describing it by the authors:

https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/

Brave has its own Rust implementation of an adblocker embedded in the browser: https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust; so it does not embed uBlock Origin (but the filters are mostly compatible)

Disclaimer: I work at Brave but not on the browser.

We support :has currently, which impacts many filters in EL and uBO. Some non-supported filters such as upward() can be manually converted over to use :has instead. The other unsupported procedual filters are a WIP will depend how easy/hard they are implement. No ETA, but have opened a ticket https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust/issues/293

ublock on chromium and brave itself can't use all of the filters in that list: https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust/issues/4

It's open source https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

I've fixed this in the adblock engine as of https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust/commit/8a755bdb190bb55a3a3acee1e6507085051bdeec, and I'll push to get this patched in 1.47 soon. Thanks for the reports!