does Falkon be the best Web browser in haiku?
any other suggestion?
Epiphany /GNOME Web work fine.
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No, Falkon crashes too frequently to be usable, try epiphany which is better.
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how about Otter?
is it better?
Otter uses the same out-of-date web plug-in for Qt framework as what Falkon uses but somehow doesn’t crash as much. I’ve heard that it isn’t much better than Falkon.
If you’re having trouble with the Wayland bindings, you won’t be able to use Epiphany. That mainly leaves WebPositive, the browser that comes with the OS.
Epiphany > otter > Falkon > WebPositive
is that right?
or any other web browser.
(no lynx, links or such application please)
Otter uses the deprecated QtWebKit, while Falkon uses QtWebEngine. They use completely different web engines, WebKit and Blink respectively.
I thought they both used QtWebKit. I guess that explains why Falkon crashes so much. It uses Blink code base that nobody wants to debug for Haiku because it won’t be hosted or maintained upstream anyway.
@Ilovehotdog
That sounds about right. Any other browsers just use the same web compatibility plugins and will have all the same downfalls.
Falkon is the continuation of Qupzilla which was using QtWebkit engine. When they dropped support for the old engine, they changed name of the project. Aesthetically, the interface has not evolved and both browsers are looking identical. That could explain your confusion.
I’d put them more like this:
Web (Epiphany) > WebPositive > the rest.
Mainly because they are stable enough for daily use, while the others are not.
3 Likes
Has anyone invested time into trying to build the most recent QtWebEngine? It would be interesting to see if it is able to build and if it provides any stability improvement.
While Epiphany is a good step forward compared to other alternatives, it’s still very far from a modern web browser. WebRTC is lacking, live streaming and videoconferences usually freeze after a few minutes (looks like some kind of memory leak or a similar behaviour because they keep stuttering more and more until it’s just unusable) and few more problems.
Considering that nowadays a modern and functional web browser is the gateway to having access to nearly everything one might need (videogames on geforcenow, coding on codeanywhere/codespaces, office suites, etc…) It seems that investing on the web browser might actually be more important than any other software that could be ported.
I did start an attempt at building qtwebengine for qt6 on haiku to see how it performs, but have not yet finished, the other day it got stuck at cloning submodules even though I was able to build some of them.
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While you maybe don’t know yet, but with this comment you have probably started a new round of this eternal discussion about the webbrowsers. 
Regarding git: git have some issues cloning huge trees, shallow clones can help a bit, but your best bet to use a different OS for the cloning and copy the resulting tree to a BFS disk for compiling the project.
Yes, cairo need be replaced with cairo-x11. It can be done automatically if allowing uninstalling cairo. X11 support in Cairo is technically not needed with GTK 3 Wayland, but it was built in such way.
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i try again. mmm, is that right?
stable:
epiphany > webposite > otter > dooble > falkon > netsurf
function:
BeCJK flash mailbox(website)
otter ok ok ok
epiphany no ok ok
dooble ok ok no
webpositive ok no ok
falkon ok no no
netsurf ok no no
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Actually, at this point, I think WebPositive is rapidly becoming a decent browser. However, the major issues with WP is playing web videos. If you can play a video, the video and audio are always out of sync or hiccups.
Last version I tried, you couldn’t event start a video on YouTube or Rumble (although the page loaded just fine). So, page rendering has vastly improved.
A new version of haikuwebkit will be released in a bit.
Note however that the video/audio issues will remain untill someone fixed them 
(the code there needs to be rewritten)
For my part I’ll rather look at webkit2 next, I personally don’t care too much about video playback in the browser with MediaPlayer and QMplay2 available…
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To me it’s the stalling curlThread that sabotages Web+ on every second link I click. I can easily avoid videos and either download them with yt-dlp or use Gnome Web. But clicking links is kinda essential…
I agree. A browser that simply works is absolutely necessary.
And the most important thing on the internet nowadays is not text, it’s video.
Please correct the title: Is Falkon the best web browser?
1 Like