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
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.