QtWeb

» see qtweb.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

My years on machines I did not own ran from about 2002 to 2005, in internet cafes in Turkey, and the thing you wanted on those keyboards was a browser that forgot you the moment you stood up. QtWeb arrived in December 2008, built exactly for that, three years after I had stopped needing it. By 2008 I had my own machine and my own line, and a browser that fits on a keychain is for people who do not.

The product was a WebKit browser wrapped in Qt, from a small outfit called LogicWare and LSoft Technologies. It was one executable. You copied it onto a flash drive, ran it on any Windows box, and it kept its profile next to itself rather than in the host system, so there was no installer and no history left behind in somebody else's user folder. The same code ran on OS X and Linux, which in 2008 was still a selling point rather than an assumption.

It was also better than its obscurity suggests. Version 3.8 passed Acid3, which put a browser nobody had heard of on the same line as Chrome and Opera for standards compliance, and it did it from a folder you could copy across in a few seconds. The feature list leaned toward the same crowd that wanted the portability: private browsing on by default, and a build anyone could inspect under the GPL.

Version 3.8.5 shipped on 9 September 2013 and nothing shipped after it. There was no post, no notice on the site, no handover to another maintainer. A WebKit browser that stops being updated does not fail all at once; it just falls further behind the web every month it sits there, until the certificate handling is wrong and half the sites render as something from an older year.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

Portable browsers were a small genre with a specific user: the person at a library terminal, or the employee on a work laptop locked down by somebody in IT. QtWeb competed with the portable builds of Firefox and Opera, and its pitch against them was size plus the fact that nothing at all got written outside its own folder. Four years of releases came out of that pitch, and then the releases stopped.

~ the long decay ~

The interesting part of this grave is the gap between the product dying and the site dying. The Internet Archive has qtweb.net serving the same six kilobyte home page, download links intact, every month from the final release through 17 September 2020. Five days later, on 22 September, the crawler starts getting server errors, and from there the domain spends years returning 500s with occasional flickers of the old page when whatever host it lived on came back up.

Today it answers 403. Somewhere in that stretch the last copy of a 2013 browser stopped being downloadable, and for seven years before that anyone who found the page could still fetch a build that had been dead the whole time.

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