Is QtWebKit truly cross platform?

Question

Will an application built with using QtWebKit (C++) be able to render web pages with Javascript, flash plugins, html5 successfully on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux?

Is the QtWebKit stand alone when deployed or does it use the host operating system's native browser components to render pages (done this in Java)?

Answer 1

webkit is an HTML5 renderer. If you use QtWebkit, it will include the webkit renderer (so it will not use any native renderer). It will also include handling for CSS and javascript. The browser window, buttons, menus, etc. are up to you to create, but they will use Qt. And interaction with the content will be using Qt's signals and slots.

It will be up to you to add plugins, I'm not sure how that works. So Flash will not be included out of the box. I'm not sure how hard it is to build in HTML5 video/audio (which is supposed to mean you don't need flash). I believe you need to include qt's phonon module for those multimedia pieces to work.

As said by the others, as long as you include the Qt dlls with your app, it will be standalone.

Answer 2

QtWebkit is just like the use of WebKit in Qt's way. If you are building an application on top of Qt, with webkit support for rendering some pages, with kind of all stuff you mentioned like script and flash - well all you need to make sure is that you have its all support binaries in the development environment is packed with the application you distribute. More over, the framework is doing the rest. If the target OS can start a Qt App, then the framework will have the Webkit adapting capability also.

Answer 3

As far as I know, Qt applications include all of the binaries that it requires when you distribute it, and they are installed to the host system with the application.

I can't see any reason why it wouldn't do the same with the WebKit rendering engine as well.