Why is it granted? WebExtensions is an open spec, it is possible to implement it in any browser if needed. (Orion does this, although I think they don’t cover 100% of the features yet.)
But an ad blocker and userscript support can take you long ways, yeah.
Media through a standard MPRIS implementation, and downloads through.. I don't know what the system is called, but it works
So let's say I'm building an app like Blender or Reaper - I'm sidestepping the need for most of the OS-specific/native-widget components, because I already need to do a whole lot of very complex and custom rendering, and that is the saner choice when going for portability. But I would still like to maintain a certain level of basic OS integration, for example a native menu bar on macOS, matching the light/dark theme with the OS, or perhaps... a native file picker?
What are my choices on Linux? Link with Gtk, and make the app look out of place on KDE? Link with KDE, and pull in half of it with me when installed on Gnome? Link both? Summon Cthulhu?...
Sounds like we've had a solution for a moment, and now we want to remove it, because think of the yaks?
There are competing, incompatible and incomplete solutions across distributions and software ecosystems.
Yeah, about that... fracturing at every possible level.
- Linux vs Free/Open/Net/Dragonfly BSD
- Linux distro 1 vs X vs A vs Ω vs ...
- glibc (with all its warts like versioned symbols) vs musl vs BSD libc
- systemd vs sysvinit vs rc vs OpenRC vs daemontools/s6/runit/...
- Who "owns" /etc/resolv.conf?
- apt vs (yum / dnf) vs pacman vs apk vs xbps vs emerge vs ...
- Flatpak vs Snap vs AppImage
- X11 (and libx11 vs xcb) vs Wayland (which protocols/extensions are supported?)
- OSS vs ALSA vs PulseAudio vs Pipewire vs sndiod vs ...
- Gtk (2/3/4) (with Gnome or without) vs Qt (with KDE or without) vs Tk vs direct X11 vs SDL/glfw/... vs an obscure toolkit last updated 15 years ago
inb4 it's about choice, the heck I'm supposed to choose as an app developer? inb4 "follow the standard", half of these are not standardised but still in widespread use? inb4 distro policies, which distro - top 10 on distrowatch looks like more work than macOS+Windows combined? Delegate to package maintainers, and my app is "fixed"/patched beyond me being able to debug/support? I choose what seems to work (for example, escaping via the XDG portal) and I'm getting rug-pulled?
This is exactly why we can't have nice things.
Btw KIO is now using QtNetwork for it's http implementation, instead of having it's own. So http2 is now also supported.
I also started using Falkon, but it still lacks too much for me, unfortuantely. And I wish it could import all history too. (
Ironically, such "warning" also shows up when browsing discuss.kde.org. Yes, the very KDE discussion board warns you against using KDE's own web browser.
Such is the propaganda of Big G, that user-agent discrimination is actively encouraged to further Chrome's marketshare.
I really like it because it's fully and truly integrated with KDE, not needed a whole sort of patchs to integrate to it like Firefox needs to.
It's actually great. Not sure about the "Qt doesn't upgrade WebEngine often enough" in other comment (what is "ofteh enough"? I got several updates for it over the year) and of course it can be lagging from stuff from mainstream, but I think for 99% of users it's just fine.
Granted, you can't use Chrome/Firefox plugins, which may it seem not worthy to some people, but there's a basic adblock and greasemonkey extensions shipped with it with default which blocks most of stuff and even you can install a script to speed up youtube ads so that annoying ad will run out in a sec or less. Apparently you can write your own plugins for it but last time I wrote to one of its devs the api wasn't even documented.
There are some quirks on it, though, like the user agent thing - I set up as the latest chrome user agent for every website except accounts.google.com where I left it as the one shipped with Falkon so it lets me sign in, and yet it shows a warning about "upgrading" to another browser.
Ironically, such "warning" also shows up when browsing discuss.kde.org. Yes, the very KDE discussion board warns you against using KDE's own web browser.
Since some years ago I have a silly idea about a plugin that transforms tabs into some sort of Vim buffer list thing that can be filtered by the url bar, but am too incompetent about C++.