[qutebrowser-announce] Qt 5.9, QtWebKit-NG 5.212 Alpha and next qutebrowser release

[Florian Bruhin]

Hey!

Qt 5.9 and QtWebKit-NG 5.212 have been released recently, a few
interesting things you might want to know about them:

QtWebKit-NG and segfaults
-------------------------

QtWebKit-NG segfaults often (like when posting comments on reddit) when
built with GCC 7 (like on Archlinux). I was able to track the bug down
and asked for a workaround to be applied to the package, but it's not in
yet:
https://github.com/annulen/webkit/issues/562
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/54428

You might want to switch to QtWebEngine in the meantime, or downgrade
your qt5-webkit-ng package, or rebuild it with that patch (it'll take
some while to build though).

Qt 5.9
------

Qt 5.9 has a lot of interesting stuff for QtWebEngine:

- Updated to Chromium 56 (5.8 was based on 53) with all associated
  features and bugfixes (no more "Renderer process crashed" hopefully!)
- Downloads now show a proper reason when failing (as soon as PyQt is
  updated to 5.9, see below)
- Bugs with typing accented chars (dead keys, compose key, etc.) should
  be fixed. (Was already patched on Archlinux)
- The bug where pages opened from another page get grey when the
  original tab gets closed is fixed. (Was already patched on Archlinux)
- <select> menus now work properly. (Was already patched on Archlinux)
- The filesystem: scheme now works, making things like Telegram Web or
  mega.co.nz work.
- Videos using WideVine (like Amazon prime) now show the overlay with
  video controls correctly.
- Copying text to primary selection now works properly (and doesn't copy
  more text than selected).
- onbeforeunload handlers ("Are you sure you want to leave this page?")
  now display a qutebrowser prompt instead of an empty popup window.
- Setting cookies-store now doesn't require a restart anymore
- Brotli support is enabled
- Various fixes related to IME tools
- A crash when using Geolocation is fixed
- Various fixes for Drag & Drop issues
- Scrolling now works properly with a touchpad on OS X

There's probably more, but that's what I can remember.

My qt-debug packages should now be updated, except for qt5-webkit (the
non-ng one) which refuses to build with GCC 7.

Links:
https://wiki.qt.io/New_Features_in_Qt_5.9
http://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtwebengine.git/tree/dist/changes-5.9.0?h=5.9
http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/05/31/qt-5-9-released/

Issues after updating to Qt 5.9
-------------------------------

If you get "Cannot mix incompatible Qt library (version 0x50800) with
this library (version 0x50900)" after upgrading, make sure all
third-party plugin packages you have built against 5.8 are rebuilt.

The usual offenders for this are qt5-styleplugins and
qtwebkit-plugins-git.

PyQt 5.9 and next release
-------------------------

I planned to do the next release once Qt 5.9 and PyQt 5.9 are released
(because then I can do binary releases shipping that for Windows and
macOS without having to build things from source).

Unfortunately it was announced that PyQt will skip 5.9 and wait for
5.9.1.

Qt 5.9.1 is planned for later this month ("if no new blockers reported
from RC put Qt 5.9.1 out at week starting 26th June") so the next
qutebrowser release will be delayed until then as well.

Qt 5.9.1 will come with security fixes from Chromium 57-59, and nothing
else relevant to qutebrowser as far as I can tell.

Backends
--------

Just to clear up the confusion regarding what the default backend is:

- QtWebEngine for the macOS releases (since some earlier release
  already)
- QtWebEngine for the Windows releases starting with the next release
- QtWebKit (if available) when running from source or distro packages,
  but that's going to change with v1.0 which isn't too far away.

Crowdfunding / New config work
------------------------------

I'm in the middle of working on the new config thanks to the
crowdfunding, you can see my progress here:
https://blog.qutebrowser.org/

I think that's all!

Florian

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