Browser Development • Re: Linux Pale Moon with Qt toolkit

What I worry about with Qt is that it has fairly quick turnover/deprecation; there tend to be a lot of breaking changes between Qt versions. While that's fine with native UI programs, it becomes more problematic for something as large and complex as XUL interaction in our code.

I do agree with that concern to a certain degree. That was definitely the case with older QT versions, but is not as much of a concern with newer ones.

QT5 came out in 2012 and still gets support and occasional updates in 2026. QT6 came out in 2020 so in theory assuming it gets the 14 years of support that QT5 has, that should get us to at least 2034 in terms of having a fully supported GUI toolkit that works with modern *nix. On newer QT versions, porting to a new QT version is much more trivial than porting between GTK releases as well, porting from QT5 to QT6 for example is fairly trivial.

What about FLTK? https://www.fltk.org/

It has so few dependencies and that is why I approve of such an idea.

I looked into FLTK as one of the options to try out before settling on trying out QT6. Personally I'd prefer something like FLTK or FOX but they are very minimal and would need a lot more work to work with our codebase. We'd be custom implementing a lot of GUI widgets that GTK or QT already provide.

I mean, I think it just comes down to the fact that any attempt to support modern mainstream Linux (especially 5 years from now) is going to involve some unhappy compromises no matter what we do. Modern Linux isn't the friendliest to our direction as a project, but I don't really want to ignore it completely and just build a wall around ourselves out of XLibre and GTK forks either... you know what I mean?

Definitely agreed. That's why I did the EGL port and have looked into the feasibility of porting to QT6. I think we should start preparing for the future now so that we are prepared because eventually we are going to stop working with newer *nix because of all this stuff, especially newer Linux.