Falkon: Development Update, Feb 2023

Weird news from development of Falkon web browser.

Development

GitLab FreeBSD pipeline

FreeBSD pipeline was failing for a while. It always failed on PyFalkon plugin and in qztools file. It looks like the “latest” FreeBSD something does not like “{}” as default option for QFlags type. To some extend I can understand it, since it runs some code generator and than builds the generated code. And if the code generator fails to resolve everything the compilation might fail.

On second look, it seems that Python support is disabled on FreeBSD package. It is a bit sad but the pipeline is still nice to have.

Custom path of QtWebEngine dictionaries

Falkon will now provide (in preferences) a list of dictionaries located in a folder specified by “QTWEBENGINE_DICTIONARIES_PATH” environmental variable. This functionality is built into QtWebEngine and it only needs to be instructed which language should be used for spellchecking. Now Falkon can do exactly that.

Zoom label in location bar

I thought this one is a good way to explore another part of Falkon code and that is the location bar. The zoom label was a tricky thing to make since I needed to learn how to manually draw it, so that it look kinda nice at least to me.

The functionality:

  • Can be enabled in settings
  • Is is hidden when the zoom level matches the configured default zoom level
  • The zoom level is reset by clicking on the label (described in tooltip)

A bit of inspiration was the one in Firefox, but my skills and artistic spirit are lacking, it is what it is.

State: Waiting for a second look.

Merge requests

Add an option for GPU acceleration

This one got merged, had to do it manually because GitLab was protesting. This a great addition made by Hao Chi Kiang.

Add Flatpak CI/CD Integration

Neelaksh Singh worked hard on adding a Flatpak CI integration. A nice thing for people using this form of a software distribution.

Extensions

I found a bit of time to fix additional extensions Cookies.txt and Readability. It was my mistake, I put a LICENSE file in the top level in the archive which resulted in install error from Falkon, I moved it into the “addon” directory and problem solved. And also as it was suggested to me, I added an entry point entry to the metadata.desktop file so that the older Falkon version can work with it.

RSSFinder

There is a slight change in the design to show a dedicated button for copying the URL and after clicking on the text part the feed will be opened in the new tab.

RSSFinder: A new design

RSSFinder: A new design

Conclusion

Thank to all the contributors Falkon is moving forward.

PS: As it goes, I can nicely describe what I work on and I am losing words when describing what others did since I see only the result of their efforts.

Articles from blogs I follow:

Why is your open source project still hosted on GitHub?

Perhaps the younger generation don't know anything about the past "evils" of Microsoft and naively believe that Microsoft is now the good friend to open source, but the truth is that all Microsoft acquisitions of open source projects is a busi…

via unixdigest.com May 22, 2025

StarFive VisionFive v2 and FreeBSD

This week I powered up the StarFive VisionFive v2 board that I have. I figured I would give FreeBSD another whirl on it, in the vague hope that RISC-V boards are a more cohesive family than ARM boards were five years ago. tl;dr: I didn’t get it to work as…

via [bobulate] May 20, 2025

Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commo…

via danluu.com October 28, 2024

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