Falkon: Development Update, Sep 2022

Weird news from development of Falkon web browser.

Development: Site Settings

I continued working on some system for WebAttributes and it looks fine at the moment (well, it just works). The thought which I have is to put all the WebAttributes into one field in the database and parse it afterwords instead of having a separate field for each attribute. I did not try this yet and I will keep this idea for later date when everything will be ready.

Nest I moved to working on Cookie support and because of that started rewriting the SiteSettingsManager class to have sane interface.

Well, I can only blame my lack of preliminary research of the problems and possible solutions for this big rewrite. Instead of writing a good code from get go I change it according to the current needs. So far it works.

Bugs

Right after KDE Gear team released “Falkon 22.08.1” I took another look at the Bug 439268 (Typing text in the search bar sends data although suggestions are disabled). During my first look at this I thought I would need to connect/disconnect signals to this module or to conditionally create and destroy the OpenSearch object, or that I need to update this module. Well, I was silly and I was looking at it in a complicated way. On the second look I noticed that all I need to do is to set the suggestionUrl (or domain, or something) to an empty string when the suggestions are disabled and that fixes the problem. There is some left over code there which was supposed to hide entries (more like not show them to user) from search engine.

Misc

On the other hand I want to put documentation for Falkon to KDE API site and plugin examples and my short tutorials to KDE Develop site. This would make it easier for other to develop extensions and help Falkon to improve.

Conclusion

The development of SiteSettings is going well and there is even a bug fixed. I call this a success.

Any help is welcome and can speed up or improve the quality of this patch.

You can follow the progress of the development on KDE Invent where I created an issue and draft of a merge request.