Otter Browser support scope

[rickysarraf]

I'm currently evaluating the Otter Browser and so far the feature set look promising as a light-weight cross platform Qt browser. Most other browsers are just too obsessed to track user activity one way or the other. FF may not be tracking but it is terribly slow.

Back to the topic of Otter, while evaluating the browser it came to my surprise that Otter is developed on Github and the very same Github page does not support the Otter Browser.

[rickysarraf]

Actually, my intent is to push this package into Debian (and thus be inherited by all derivaties). I already revived the packaging, as of now, to the latest from your git commit. The result is: otter-browser_1.0.02+git0.51e86425-1_amd64.deb

The Debian packaging request was already filed in: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=948674

So far, in my evaluation, otter isn't really very ready to be introduced to general users. The github example is above. I also ran another modern web app, PhotoPrism, a local instance of it where it does some auth. That webapp uses good amount of Javascript. And again, I was surprised that otter couldn't handle that webpage. No errors, nothing. It just kept looping, while trying to render the login on the main page.

Is there any targeted timeline for the next stable release ? I thought of giving you this feedback so that you could consider them for your next stable release.

Is there any more feedback you'd want ?

[Frenzie]

I'll add two remarks.

The first, and I'm not sure otoh if it makes a difference, but the libqt5webkit in Debian seems to be alpha 4, while the tip of the dev branch is a bit newer https://github.com/qtwebkit/qtwebkit/commits/qtwebkit-dev I'm not interested in building it right now to find out, but the Windows build might include it precompiled.

Secondly, if you install/depend on qtwebengine5-dev the QtWebEngine backend will also be built. You can enable that in about:config, or if you build it without libqt5webkit-dev present it'll only support QtWebEngine. That backend might suit your purposes better.

[rickysarraf]

Thank you for the pointer @Frenzie That did improve the experience, in comparison to the QtWebkit backend.

But, as mentioned in another bug report, the performance is sub-optimum. I tried both, the latest release as well as the current repo's tip.

[Frenzie]

You could try asking @Emdek on the IRC channel.

[Emdek]

@rickysarraf, as noted by @Frenzie, the best way is to contact me on IRC (either on ~~freenode~~ or libera, we are migrating channel), between 10:00 and 18:00 UTC, just be patient. ;-)

The main issue is that QtWebKit is again lagging behind upstream WebKit. Also, as last resort you can go for QtWebEngine backend (Arch is defaulting to that one), but it's Blink… Plus it got some regressions in recent Qt releases (for example Google broke session history restoration, by starting to require their proprietary format).

[Emdek]

So, just libera network, freenode went mad and started banning channels.

[the-Arioch]

still screenshots page mention freenode instead https://otter-browser.org/screenshots/

[DI555]

guys, btw, could we create Otter's channel and group(chat) in telegram?

[ghost]

if you install/depend on qtwebengine5-dev the QtWebEngine backend will also be built.

Tried to do that in Linux Mint 19.2 (Ubuntu 18.04/Bionic base) but noticed that although generic qt5 minimum version is 5.6 the QtWebEngine minimum version is 5.15. My system has Qt5 v 5.9.5 and obviously that QtWebEngine wasn't accepted. Don't know/don't think the QtWebEngine can be upgraded separately, nor do I know how to do that if it were somehow possible. Question is, is the 5.15 version absolutely mandatory or could it be lowered to 5.9? I really wouldn't want to screw up my system right now.