Qt 5.5 Alpha Available [LWN.net]

Qt 5.5 alpha has been released. "With Qt 5.5, Canvas 3D is fully supported and a technology preview of long awaited Qt 3D is included. Qt 5.5 also introduces mapping support with a Qt Location technology preview. Qt 5.5 Alpha is the first step towards Qt 5.5 final release planned to be available in May." Check out the New Features in Qt 5.5 page for more details.

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Qt 5.5 Alpha Available

Posted Mar 17, 2015 19:46 UTC (Tue) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (11 responses)

Remember Zawinski's law?

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

Those were the golden days! Reading mail! Today, every program attempts to determine the user's position and show flashy ads. Please welcome QtLocation and QtMultimedia.

Qt 5.5 Alpha Available

Posted Mar 17, 2015 22:13 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (9 responses)

Qt5 is almost a feature-complete replacement for Firefox at this point. All it's missing is a decent frontend... sadly Konqueror died years ago.

Let's hope it doesn't become antifeature-complete also.

Qt 5.5 Alpha Available

Posted Mar 17, 2015 22:36 UTC (Tue) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link] (8 responses)

I don't know how much you're exaggerating, but that's kind of [awesome|disturbing]. I hope somebody runs with a thin frontend idea...

Qt 5.5 Alpha Available

Posted Mar 18, 2015 0:00 UTC (Wed) by Sho (guest, #8956) [Link] (7 responses)

Qt's included a copy of WebKit (the browser engine originally forked from KDE's KHTML) for many years now, and there are many desktop browsers playing frontend to that library, among them KDE's Rekonq, QupZilla and Arora.

What's new here is that Qt 5.5 has formally deprecated the Qt WebKit module, in favor of the new Qt WebEngine module instead based on Google's Chromium/Blink fork of WebKit. Qt WebEngine was originally added in Qt 5.4. WebEngine means newer code and better integration into Qt's modern rendering pipeline, enabling some newer web technologies, vs. the older (but until recently still lightly improving, e.g. 5.4 made Canvas2D GL-accelerated) WebKit module.

Qt 5.5 Alpha Available

Posted Mar 18, 2015 3:06 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (6 responses)

I swear KHTML is the most forked software in existence apart from the Linux kernel.

Qt 5.5 Alpha Available

Posted Mar 18, 2015 10:14 UTC (Wed) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (5 responses)

And we have Apple to "thank" for it.

Qt 5.5 Alpha Available

Posted Mar 18, 2015 23:26 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (4 responses)

Actually you have a bunch of Mozilla developers who'd been through the fire and decided, when the time came to build a new rendering engine for their then employer (Apple) to use KHTML instead.

This wasn't a corporate-insanity thing. It was a "we've been there, Gecko is not usable for this" thing.

Qt 5.5 Alpha Available

Posted Mar 19, 2015 0:41 UTC (Thu) by Sho (guest, #8956) [Link]

Ironically, Mozilla's Servo team is currently implementing the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) API to allow embedding the new engine into applications for real tests.

Qt 5.5 Alpha Available

Posted Mar 19, 2015 5:49 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

They should have talked KDE folks into moving KHTML to QtHTML instead of forking off into WebKit.

Qt 5.5 Alpha Available

Posted Mar 19, 2015 12:50 UTC (Thu) by Sho (guest, #8956) [Link]

Unfortunately back then, Qt was under an open license (GPL) but didn't have open governance yet. It was very difficult to get code into Qt without being a Trolltech employee. So this wouldn't really have worked for either side. The situation has changed only fairly recently, but dramatically for the better - KDE has directly contributed a lot of code to all Qt 5.x releases, hosted the Qt Contributor Summit at Akademy and KDE people act as maintainers for a bunch of areas of the codebase.

Qt 5.5 Alpha Available

Posted Mar 19, 2015 7:58 UTC (Thu) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link]

Using KHTML as new rendering engine was a very good idea. After seeing both Gecko's and KHTML's source, I'd have clearly made the same choice.

What they did _not_ have to do was forking KHTML and developing it behind closed doors for years before being pressured into opening up.

Qt 5.5 Alpha Available

Posted Mar 18, 2015 17:41 UTC (Wed) by jreznik (guest, #61949) [Link]

QtLocation is not new thing, it dates to Qt 4 and Nokia. And it's pretty useful to have mapping widget and location module for mobile apps (almost every single mobile application shows some kind of map). It even isn't that new in Qt 5 but now it's (almost) officially back. I use it in one of mine mobile apps as of Qt 5.3. Yes, you can write your own component but why if you want to show a few pins on map with your current location? Same applies for QtMultimedia.