As we all are hit with the rather outdated web engines available on SFOS, there is a game changer through Flatpak-provided up to date Qt environment. I expect that with the next SFOS release, we will get new libhybris that allows us to use Flatpaks on many (probably most) SFOS devices. With this, there is a natural question whether we can use it for writing a browser.

At present, the best browser that we can run using Flatpak & SFOS is probably Angelfish. However, it feels rather slow. Fortunately, it seems to be mainly caused by something inside the app and not WebEngine as such. When running a trivial browser with just WebEngineView, I get fast (or at least not unusually slow) performance. This will have to be confirmed on slower devices, as we don't have yet hardware acceleration for WebEngine on SFOS (couldn't figure out why exactly).

... and you don't get "outdated" browser warning on github with any of those ...

Ideally, we could join forces with Plasma developers and base the work on Angelfish. I guess the main issues would be then design of the interactions as they seem to be quite different from what we are used to. Alternative would be to write something from scratch and base it on Jolla browser or some other design.

It all could be done in a way that when SFOS will update to some newer Qt version, we could make Silica UI as well on the basis of the same code. It takes time, but looking on Pure Maps, its surely possible. Until then, we could also make styling closer to what it is on Sailfish, if we have time for it.

Good thing about developing using Flatpaks is that you can debug test on PC immediately. As far as I have seen with Pure Maps, it did speed up the development a lot.

With this thread I am mainly looking for interested developers and a feedback regarding the policies. Ideally, there would be someone coming out and taking leadership on this project from our side...

Edit: will work on helping with Angelfish development: https://invent.kde.org/jbbgameich/plasma-angelfish