http://www.os2voice.org/membership.html#bwwAfter a very busy period organizing Warpstock Europe 2019 in May of this year and a busy period at work and vacation, here is a long overdue update on the status of QT for OS/2 and ArcaOS. Bww bitwise works GmbH (referred as "BWW") has released the Qt 5.13 GUI Toolkit for OS/2 and ArcaOS. It can be downloaded as an RPM from the rpm.netlabs.org.
 
For more information please visit the following page: https://www.bitwiseworks.com/news/#082019

Currently Qt 5.13.1 (the latest version from the Qt Company!) is being worked on to be released in the coming days. Qt has been released in RPM format and is being used by other developers. The Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation started with this journey with with BWW and the OS/2 community in October 2017. We first of all wanted an up to date set of Qt DLL's for OS/2 and ArcaOS. The Qt Toolkit is a big collection of DLL's that provide a lot of GUI elements. We can port a lot of a QT applications to OS/2 and ArcaOS using this toolkit.

The Qt project has so far been in line with the time frame BWW published in the roadmap about 9 months ago! BWW is now working on porting the Qt WebEngine DLL to OS/2, which is part of the Qt Toolkit. The WebEngine module in Qt is the core engine of a web browser. This is what loads and renders webpages to be displayed on your screen. ArcaOS and OS/2 users will have in  December of this year early access to a port of the Falkon web browser! You should simply be able to visit websites again without any issue's!

What we again would like to emphasize is that with Qt it does not matter which browser we port, it matters that we use Qt WebEngine. The Chrome web browser from Google uses a web engine called Chromium and it's exactly the same thing Qt WebEngine uses behind the scenes. The Chromium engine is so good that even Microsoft has decided to started using it: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/06/microsoft_edge_chromium/

For people concerned about privacy, the WebEngine DLL does not contain code that will send data back to Google (such as the Google Chrome browser does)! Of course when you visit Google.com with the new Falkon browser that will send your search requests to Google. But the ported browser does not have any "call home" code built in to contact Microsoft or Google.

As you all understand we more donations from the community finish this browser port! So please donate! OS/2 VOICE has been paying BWW about 2500 Euro per month, yes one developer working full time as coder costs money! I (Roderick Klein) as chairman of OS/2 VOICE has started to sell OS/2 donated software and other computers items on Ebay to collect additional funding https://www.os2world.com/past-news/79-general/22594-going-going-gone-os2voice-items-for-auction.html. This is an example of what was sold, items have shipped already!

Please make your donation here: http://www.os2voice.org/membership.html#bww

This article is a joint publication of OS/2 VOICE and BWW.