Bitwise works GmbH ( "Bitwise") and the Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation decided in October 2017 that OS/2 and ArcaOS needed a new web browser. Bitwise already ports and maintains a lot of open source projects; by now they maintain more than 260 DLLs which are used to compile and run open source applications on OS/2 and ArcaOS.

This screenshot is from the 21st of July 2020 on Dmitry his development system:

While this is not the targeted Falkon web browser, what this screenshot shows is that the QtWebEngine DLL is loaded by a small Qt Web Browser demo application. The new QtWebEngine DLL that the Falkon browser will be using can be found here: http://rpm.netlabs.org/test/Qt5WebCd.7z , unzipped its 350 MB big!

So the DLL is not displaying data yet. The following issues in 2020 so far had to be addressed to get this new QtWebEngine DLL compiled on OS/2/ArcaOS:

* Needed GCC 9.2.x compiler, QtWebEngine DLL needed the new GCC compiler features.
* Significant updates to LIBCn DLL, wide character support needed to be added for example.
* More DLLs ported to OS/2/updated to get the QtWebEngine to compile (ffmpeg, icu, libxml, etc).
* Open Watcom Linker WL.EXE had to be updated (and more updates to follow).
* AOUT to OMF converter EMXOMF.EXE used to compile with GCC needed updates (more to follow).

Portions of our toolchain: The GCC compiler and the Open Watcom Linker have never been used on OS/2 for compiling such large DLLs (hundreds of megabytes). The QtWebEngine DLL on a high end system with an Intel i7 CPU and with an SSD takes 12 to 16 hours to compile. The project is huge but also it takes that long because the tool chain needs updating. Compiling the same code on MacBook with a similar CPU takes about 4 hours.

Once the QtWebEngine DLL is working and displaying the rendered data the new browser will not take long. The reason for this is because most of the code the browser uses is in the Qt DLLs and the QtWebEngine DLL.