Falkon is a KDE web browser using the QtWebEngine rendering engine. It was previously known as QupZilla. It aims to be a lightweight web browser available through all major platforms.
Although falkon is now part of KDE, it can be installed without KDE (with the loss of kwallet functionality).
![[Warning]](../images/warning.png)
Falkon relies on QtWebEngine. That uses a forked copy of chromium, and is therefore vulnerable to many issues found there. The Qt developers have always preferred to make releases at the same time as the rest of Qt (rather than adding emergency fixes). Now that they are keen to move to Qt6, the 5.15.3 and later Qt-5.15 releases are initially only available to paying customers. QtWebEngine is something of an exception because of its LGPL licence, but getting the git sources (with the forked chromium submodule) to a point where they will successfully build on a current BLFS system can take a lot of effort. Be aware that future fixes for vulnerabilities might be very delayed, to the extent that you might wish to consider using a different browser.
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS 12.0 platform.
Download (HTTP): https://download.kde.org/stable/release-service/23.08.0/src/falkon-23.08.0.tar.xz
Download MD5 sum: d86443f954c7f02f90abb349fa91163b
Download size: 2.5 MB
Estimated disk space required: 130 MB
Estimated build time: 1.1 SBU (Using parallelism=4)
extra-cmake-modules-5.109.0, KDE Frameworks-5.109.0 (for karchive), and qtwebengine-5.15.15
![[Note]](../images/note.png)
Strictly speaking, only karchive is required to build falkon, but several other packages in KF5 can be used if they are present. To build only karchive, download that package from the directory specified in KDE Frameworks-5.109.0 and use the build instructions on that page changing the $KF5_PREFIX to /usr.
gnome-keyring-42.1, PySide2, and Shiboken2
Editor Notes: https://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/falkon
Install falkon by running the following commands:
mkdir build &&
cd build &&
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr \
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
.. &&
make
To test the results, issue: make
test. All tests should pass. If any fail, the full
results will be in Testing/Temporary/LastTest.log.
Now, as the root user:
make install
When upgrading this package, it is possible that the contents of
the application will remain empty even though everything else
appears to be working properly. In this case try removing
~/.cache/falkon and restarting the
program.
If you have installed Pyside2 you
will want to examine hellopython.py which is in the
scripts/ directory, and perhaps copy
it to your home directory.
-DBUILD_TESTING=OFF: This will save a
little time and space by not building the test programs, use this
if you do not wish to run the test.