Oxide WebView on EGLFS QPA

Oxide WebView is a QML wrapper of Chromium content API, just like QtWebEngine. I've been following Chris' development for a while now, it's (surprisingly) usable if you consider its early stage. For those who doesn't want to build Chromium but would like to try, here's the package oxide-qt PPA for amd64/i386 and armhf architecture.

Oxide was designed to be a replacement of QtWebKit and using on Ubuntu Touch, so it's no surprise it supports Mir, Ubuntu (legacy) and XCB QPA by default. As a big fan of Qt's EGLFS plugin, I couldn't be happier to have a Chromium rendered web browser running on bare-metal with nothing but framebuffer and EGL.

So here it is, enable_oxide_on_eglfs.patch. To use it you'll need a fbdev backend enabled Mesa, also Qt 5.2 configured with -opengl es2, and start qmlscene like:

export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=eglfs
export EGL_PLATFORM=fbdev
export EGL_DRIVER=egl_gallium 

qmlscene ./web.qml

Which web.qml may look like this:

import QtQuick 2.0
import com.canonical.Oxide 0.1

WebView {
    width: 800
    height: 600
    url: "https://duckduckgo.com"
}

My talk proposal of SlateKit just got accepted by FOSSASIA 2014, so more information on this matter will be published here later. Stay tuned. :-)