This weekend I had no access to my trusty home workstation and worked on my portable Thinkpad T440p and thus I decided to work on my Falkon plugins. I postponed this for a long time. Objective The main objective is to port the add-ons to Qt6 / PySide6 and update version and author signature. Progress I managed to port the ToolbarTools and Unloader. Unloader probably can be rewritten in QML for better compatibility. I will leave that for later when I will have will to do that.

A lot of happened since I last wrote something about Falkon development. Release of Falkon 23.08 Relatively a lot of stuff was changed/added/fixed for this release series. The biggest thing I struggled with was session restore optimizations which is very slow and I manahed to get it faster by a bit and also introduce new bugs. Well nothing is for free. There is still a second part waiting and that is to delay putting icons into the tabs on the tabbar until they are realy needed. This operation actualy takes most of the time.

This spring I did not have much time on Falkon since I was learning how to drive a car. There were still some moments left for Falkon. Release of Falkon 23.04.0 Thanks to KDE Gear team there is another major Falkon release. This time (with some trial and error) I also put the changelog and some picture on the main Falkon site to show Falkon is alive and well.

Weird news from development of Falkon web browser. Development History browser When filter is not empty, do not delete the whole history under a date if the date entry is selected. This is especially cruel when trying to remove multiple entries and using keyboard shortcut Ctrl+A, Good Bey History. Now the entries unrelated to the filtering phrase should not be deleted. While I also deleted my whole history, this was reported at bugzilla.

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.

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.

Weird news from development of Falkon web browser. Development: Site Settings At the start of the month I did something and I already forgot what it was (very sad) and than I took a “short” break for a week which turned out ot be for a whole month due to other reasons. Extensions During this break I worked on two QML extensions Cookies.txt and Readability. The Cookies.txt is in a way me trying to understand how to work with cookies from within QML extension in order to write a proper tutorial for it. The Readability was done on a request and because I thought it can be somehow hacked with QML. This took a bit longer than I expected, but it is nice to have.

This rewrite was a challenge as well as a good test subject for Falkon QMl API. I had to work around few pitfalls to make it work. Click on button always opens popup Desired or not the popup will always open. I used it to write there sone informative message, but it is unsued so far. In the future it an be used a bit more to dislay the debug message or a feedback from the script if the conversion fails.

This weekend I decided to test if it is possible to create a Cookies.txt style extensions for Falkon by using QML API. This work is partially based on Firefox and Chrome extensions. The GUI is shamelessly copied from the Firefox extension but I had a little trouble porting it to QML since I have still long way to go with this language. I like the GUI being a simple one and to the point. Either export “All” or the “Current Site”, sounds nice.

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.

Simple story the likes of which happens all the time where an incorrect example together with my lack of knowledge led me to the world of hurt. In the Falkon example QML extension in order to set some basic (top level) element the original author decided to use Rectangle component (or class? or object? or whatever, I will call it component). The Rectangle component is not supposed to be used this way since it is by default also setting the background to white and thus it is not styled by the KDE theme.

Weird news from development of Falkon web browser. Why? Sadly, even after project moved under the wings of KDE it did not see many contributors (am I as major stalker at fault?), maybe new contributors did not want to go through hassle of creating KDE account (joining KDE). This is hard to say for me. Anyway, I wanted to do something what is already outlined and what someone already tried in the past and thus there is a bit of information on how it should be done. That is how I came across “Site Settings” feature. This idea comes from a merge request on Phabricator “Added feature to remember the zoom set on a host” by Anmol Gautam but was not accepted since it was a lot of code which only handles zoom while all data were still stored in the ini file which would make it slower and slower as time goes on.

This weekend I decided to semi automate the process of searching for RSS feeds on websites while using Falkon web browsers. Many websites provide RSS feeds but do not provide any visible link or icon to access them (eg. many Wordpress based sites) and I had to open the source code and search in that mess for xml feeds. These feeds are ussualy in HEAD html element but sometimes can appear anywhere on the website. I decided to only include the ones provided in HEAD since this is a standard way of informing browser that there are RSS feeds.

Introduction Hello, while using Vertical Tabs extensions in Tree Style mode I developed a habit of keeping tabs and only unloading them. This leads Falkon to have hundreds and hundreds of tabs always prepared for me to load. In face of this I became curious about how many tabs there actually are and how many are un/loaded so I developed Tab Counter extension. Let me show you it’s features! Toolbar Button, actually Label The tab count is shown in a toolbar button, which can be moved where user desires is to be.