WebView in Qt 5.1 - first impressions

[Qu0ll]

Now that I have WebView successfully displaying Google Maps in Qt 5.1 I thought I would share my first impressions.

For a start, it seems to be way slower than Firefox or any other standard browser on this machine. When I open Google Maps in Firefox, the entire page is loaded and rendered in about 2 seconds. When I open the exact same page in WebView it takes about 10 seconds to load and render the entire page.

Once the initial page is loaded though the speed at which other linked pages are loaded and rendered seems to be not that much slower than in Firefox.

However, there seem to be a few behavioural quirks that I have noticed. For example, clicking the left mouse button and dragging the map is supposed to pan around but in WebView it has no effect. Also, double-clicking zooms into the map in Firefox and then subsequent double-clicks zoom in even further. With WebView the first double-click zooms in as expected but the second one then zooms back out again.

Why is loading the first page in WebView so much slower than a standard browser?

Why are the anomalies in the way the page behaves (especially with the mouse) and are these quirks likely to be fixed in a future release?

[JKSH]

Hi Qu0ll, glad to hear that you've managed to get it working.

I noticed the lag too when I was dabbling with it, but I'm not a regular WebKit user so I didn't look into it.

I saw that you posted this to the Interest mailing list too -- that's the best place to ask about future plans for Qt; this forum is more for "how to use Qt". (It would be nice if Qt's engineers visited here too, but I guess they already have their plates full)

By the way, you might be interested in the "Snowshoe project":http://snowshoe.openbossa.org/ -- it's a QML-based browser with optimizations for mobile platforms. See if their code boosts performance.

[Qu0ll]

After a bit more testing it seems the actual performance of WebView is not that bad when the mitigating factors highlighted in this list and others are taken into consideration.

I am more concerned by the behavioural quirks especially in the way mouse clicking, double-clicking and dragging work (or don’t work). I have noticed that these happen on all web sites.

Can anyone comment on whether these are just unfixed bugs or are intended behaviour? If they are bugs, are they on the roadmap to be resolved?