The Falkon web browser is now in the development version of the BLFS book. This browser was formerly known as QupZilla. It is now part of KDE but can be installed without KDE. It is considered to be a "light-weight" browser, but it requires the "heavy-weight" QtWebEngine backend. Anyway, I consider it to be a very nice browser with considerable features and configurability.

I mostly wanted to review some things about Falkon and QtWebEngine not yet mentioned, or obvious, or maybe even wrong in the BLFS book at this time...

1. PulseAudio: QtWebEngine does NOT require PulseAudio. PulseAudio and ALSA are both listed in the configuration help as "auto". I installed QtWebEngine and Falkon with only ALSA installed.

2. HTML5/MP4 Video: In order for Falkon to play HTML5/MP4 video embedded in web pages, QtWebEngine must be built with proprietary codecs enabled. The qmake option to do that is -webengine-proprietary-codecs (see the configuration help).

3. Use System Libraries: QtWebEngine can be configured to use various system libraries and packages instead of internal versions shipped with it (see the configuration help). Most of those are detected on the system automatically and used. But I found that I had to specify two of them (icu, ffmpeg) or the QtWebEngine configuration output would report "no" for finding those. And some others QtWebEngine would not detect even though I configured it to use them (libvpx, libxml2, libxslt). I was not able to make QtWebEngine use those system libraries. And finally, I found that specifying for QtWebEngine to use the system icu would stop the build, so I built QtWebEngine without specifying the system icu.

4. KDE Frameworks 5: The book correctly states that Falkon can be installed without KDE being present on the system, but it sort of implies that KDE Frameworks 5 has to be installed. Fact is, only ki18n from that large KF5 collection of packages has to be installed in order for Falkon to build and work. As the book says, KWallet is sacrificed doing this.

5. Spell Checking: Spell checking is available in Falkon. Dictionaries need to be in the format that Chromium uses (with file extension .bdic). QtWebEngine comes with a utility to convert Hunspell dictionaries (.dic) to that format. Make sure that the created .bdic dictionary file is in one of the directories shown in Falkon Preferences. This is how I set this up...

Code:

sudo mkdir -pv /opt/qt5/qtwebengine_dictionaries             &&
sudo /opt/qt5/bin/qwebengine_convert_dict                    \
     /usr/lib/libreoffice/share/extensions/dict-en/en_US.dic \
     /opt/qt5/qtwebengine_dictionaries/en-US.bdic            &&
sudo chmod 644 /opt/qt5/qtwebengine_dictionaries/en-US.bdic

6. Saving Bookmarks: Backup Falkon's bookmarks by saving them to an html file in the usual way using the Organize Bookmarks applet in the Falkon toolbar. But that does not backup the bookmarks menu icons. To save those too, manually backup browsedata.db in ~/.config/falkon/profiles/default. Restore the bookmarks and icons by importing the saved bookmarks.html file using the Organize Bookmarks applet. Then manually copy the saved browsedata.db file to ~/.config/falkon/profiles/default. The other conspicuous file there is bookmarks.json, but it will be recreated when the bookmarks are restored with the Organize Bookmarks applet and does not affect this icon matter.

I hope people here will try this new incarnation of QupZilla. The components mentioned above are easy to compile and install, but brace for a long building time (thanks to QtWebEngine). The browser is snappy, looks good, renders web pages well, has a little collection of extensions, and has the usual and expected widgets and utilities for managing caches, cookies, downloads, bookmarks, etc.

I found the libreoffice dictionary's were pretty much rubbish ( for en_GB ) but if you have the aspell dictionary's installed you can use that to create a much better dictionary like soObviously change the locations of libreoffice and qtwebengine to suit your setup.

Extra dictionaries can be downloaded from here:
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/

This is good to hear. Been using it (a version that is still called qupzilla) in my BLFS 8.1 system as my javoids-off no-cookies browser and it works well. I look forward to seeing it in the 8.3 book.

UPDATE: I'm still using Falkon as my Internet browser (along with Vivaldi sometimes). I wanted to add a tidbit here that I learned using Falkon.

It's more about the favicons in the bookmarks menu which I have mentioned before regarding how to get them to show up. I have also mentioned before that the menu icons are stored in ~/.config/falkon/profiles/default/browsedata.db and how that file can be manually backed up whenever the bookmarks are saved via "Organize Bookmarks" in the "Tools" menu. Remember, merely backing up the bookmarks will not save all those icons (possibly hundreds of them). And restoring the bookmarks (say, to a re-install of Falkon) will not restore the menu icons unless that browsedata.db file is also copied back to the config folder.

Here's the thing though. That browsedata.db file gradually grows in size as it accumulates favicons from every site ever visited. It can get big eventually. The "Tools" menu does have an applet to "Optimize database" which seems to reduce its size a little, but it still grows bigger all the time to many MBs.

I discovered that I can manually look through browsedata.db and edit it with SQLite. It didn't take long to produce a tiny new browsedata.db file that has only the icons in my bookmarks menu, and I saved that file to be used to restore the icons when the bookmarks are restored or to replace a giant bloated browsedata.db file.

Maybe someday Falkon will provide an applet to manage the menu icons. Until then, manually editing and occasionally maintaining browsedata.db appears to be safely possible.

P.S.: That browsedata.db file also contains a table named "history" and also contributes to bloat. But that table gets completely cleared out by the "Clear recent history" applet in "Tools".

P.P.S.: A new version of Falkon was released a few days ago.

The devs need to fix the instructions for preparation.

Needs to be...

Or it will complain about the missing KDE libs and pyside. I really hope that crap isn't a sign of things to come or I'll dump Falkon. I would prefer it to stay a QT only application. Also, I still think saving passwords works without kwallet if you have libgnome-keyring installed.

Note for libgnome-keyring: It needs GCR + Gnome Keyring, and it's vala bindings are broken, so the configure looks like..

Most of the tests pass, and it's used by a few other things.

Don't know where you are getting your build instructions as falkon uses cmake NOT configure.
FYI version 3.1.0 builds fine with just ki18n-5.49.0 as a dep ( and cmake and QT web engine obviously ).
Version 3.1.0 is available here:
https://download.kde.org/stable/falk.../-3.1.0.tar.xz
Build instructions:You may need to adjust CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH and/or CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX and/or LIB_SUFFIX.

Are you talking to me? That configure was for libgnome-keyring, which can be used in place of kwallet. That package isn't in the book, so I put it up there.

Sorry but the as the thread was about falkon I assumed you was talking about falkon, cross purposes!

Yes, and my point was that Falkon can use libgnome-keyring in place of kwallet. Also the instructions need to change to remove all of the po files. (rm -rf po*) LOL, Were you reading half of my post or was I just unclear?

50/50