Table of Contents
Otter Browser
Otter Browser is a cross platform, free and open source web browser that aims to recreate aspects of Opera 12.x using Qt5 with QtWebKit/QtWebEngine as its rendering engine. It's licensed under the GPLv3 license and is on platforms such as Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, and Windows.
Crashes
Given its looks, it works pretty well with modern sites, assuming QtWebKit works as intended. However, for us… This isn't the case! QtWebKit has issues that take long to fix due to a mainly inexperienced person working on the issues. They're slowly getting fixed though.
Known Bugs
- WTFCrash crashes on sites sometimes
- SVGNames crashes (back after updating LLVM-MinGW and open-sourcing)
- Random crashes due to media validation (likely DRM?)
Fixed Bugs
- NTDLL missing symbols crash (fixed as of 08-08-2021)
- SVGNames crashes (back after updating LLVM-MinGW and open-sourcing)
- QtMultimedia crashes (switched from WMF to DirectShow to fix and implements wmffix)
Rendering
Otter can use 2 rendering engines, as mentioned before. QtWebKit or QtWebEngine. Given we're building for ARM32 Windows here, we're stuck with QtWebKit as Chromium (by default) does not build for Windows from Linux. Plus there's tons of other issues to account for.
WebGL Support
Otter's ARM32 builds DO actually have WebGL support! This is thanks to the usage of ANGLE and tricking Qt into “using” GLESv2 as its renderer. How well it performs is unknown currently due to the JavaScript JIT not working yet.
Why Otter?
Otter is an updated browser that still can use QtWebKit, unlike most Qt5 based web browsers. Qupzilla moved to QtWebEngine, which is why it isn't usable. Other Qt based browsers either use QtWebEngine, or they use QtWebKit from Qt4, which is much older. Otter is also friendly on resource usage while maintaining a user friendly UI.