Last week I briefly compared QTextBrowser and QWebView, the two Qt widgets which can be used for displaying rich text and HTML documents (and explained the differences between rich text and HTML). I concluded that QWebView should be used to display external web content, and for creating complex layouts, where QTextBrowser has limited capabilities. However, I also said that QWebView has its own problems. Today I will focus on these.
The entire QtWebKit component is based on WebKit, the web browser engine which also powers Safari and Chrome. However, keep in mind that the version used by Qt (especially Qt4) is quite old (last changes are from 2011). Also, in addition to common code, there are also lots of platform dependent components, so the Qt version of WebKit is not entirely the same as the one used by these browsers. What this means is that if you embed a QWebView in your application, it won't automatically have the same capabilities as Google Chrome.
The most annoying thing in QtWebKit is that printing is currently quite broken. When you print issue history or any other report in version 1.1 of the WebIssues Desktop Client, you can notice that sometimes lines are cut in half by page breaks. The same happens when exporting the report as a PDF document. This bug is already fixed upstream, but it still occurs in Qt 4.8. Unfortunately it seems that even in the latest versions of Qt printing is still broken.
Another thing to watch for when printing, though that's not really a bug, is the fact that printing the page immediately after calling setHtml() will sometimes produce no result. If the page contains any references to other resources, they are always loaded asynchronously, even if they are local files or embedded resources (which can be accessed using the qrc: protocol). The solution is to handle the loadFinished() signal from the QWebFrame.
QtWebKit has problems with certain Unicode characters. In version 1.0 of WebIssues I used the → character in history of changes, but in version 1.1 I had to replace it with », because → breaks the text layout. This is similar to this bug, however in my case this occurred not only when printing, but also QWebView rendered the text incorrectly.
Also tabs are incorrectly rendered by the QtWebKit and appear as spaces. This bug is apparently fixed in Qt 5, but not in Qt 4.8, so in the WebIssues Desktop Client I have to convert all tabs to spaces, because tabs may occur in issue comments. This isn't perfect, especially when using a non-monospace font, but it works in most cases.
I also found than the hasSelection() property of QWebView always returns true, even if there is really no text selected. Since I'm using this to determine whether the Copy action should be enabled, I'm simply checking if the built-in Copy action is enabled instead, in other words I'm calling pageAction( QWebPage::Copy )->isEnabled(). Fortunately the selectionChanged() signal is emitted correctly.
In general, I think that the whole API of QtWebKit module is quite limited, especially when compared to QTextBrowser and QTextDocument. Even though QtWebKit was first introduced in Qt 4.4, many useful functions are only available in the most recent versions. However, it is sufficient for my current needs, so despite the various bugs and problems, I'm generally satisfied with the migration from QTextBrowser to QWebView.