Falkon: Development Update, Jan 2023
Weird news from development of Falkon web browser.
My little break
I took a break for a few weeks (turned out to be a bit longer) to get a different look at the features I am working at. (Good excuse, right?)
Development
Site Settings
I am struggling with the UI design and the UI programming itself. I am not that skilled with Qt and its way of doing these things so it will take a bit before I gain the required skills and experience to continue working on it in earnest.
On other hand, while working (for fun) on a other parts of the code I noticed that the PasswordManager is also using host name as an id but for some reason also introduces alternative methods of setting up an id when the general QUrl::host() fails. I should implement this here as well.
Dark design
I was a bit interested and worked a bit to put together a dark variant of Falkon internal pages such as:
- falkon:start
- falkon:restore
- falkon:config
- falkon:about
- tab crash page
The actual color design is just something I put together from colors on my screen and other stuff I thought would “look nice” on my monitor with inaccurate color representation and with RedShift program enabled during the night (Enjoy, lol).
I still do not want to play with chromium flags to add checkbox to prefer dark mode.
Falkon: Light and Dark styled page
Waiting patches
There are few patches waiting for a check and inclusion for which I did not have time or will or mood to do so. Sorry for now, I will take a look soon
Extensions
KWallet
I was interested on how much work would it be to change the way how passwords are stored from the binary form to the map variant to allow users to browse or export Falkon passwords from KWallet without special tools. It turned out as a working solution (since it is based on the original one) and I learnt a thing or two while working on it.
I also almost forget to include the “updated” timestamp feature. I only found after looking at Clazy warnings on the GnomeKeyring implementation. This would be a really weird mistake.
Maintenance
Naturally, after the code was left as it is for a while it needs a top of care to be in top shape again. There are a lot of warnings and potential errors in the code which can be found with automated tools such as Clazy or CppCheck.
On top of that, there is a huge debt in Chromium flags and features support together with actual Falkon UI and usability improvements.
There is a work for a whole lifespan.
Conclusion
It goes well enough.