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RSS Part 18: QuiteRSS is Dead

I have been happily using QuiteRSS for more than two and a half years. It is fast and only has minor issues, as described in my client impressions, day one, and update blog entries. I do not have the Qt artifacts issue on my current system, so I have had no complaints. Unfortunately, it looks like the project is dead.

QuiteRSS is built using Qt Webkit, which is deprecated due to many security vulnerabilities. It looks like it was deprecated more than eight years ago, and the last commits were made more than five years ago! This was before I reviewed QuiteRSS, but I did not know about it at the time.

Qt Webkit is replaced by Qt WebEngine, but the author of QuiteRSS does not have the resources/time to port the software. It has been more than three years since there has been a commit to the master branch. There is a switch-to-webengine branch, but it has little progress and has been inactive for more than two years. There are a few forks with relevant efforts, but time will tell if they are successful or not. Currently, it looks like the project is dead.

This has become an immediate issue for me, after a new ICU release broke the no-longer-maintained Qt Webkit builds. People are working on patches, but it is generally recommended to stop using Qt Webkit at all. That means no more QuiteRSS, so I once again need to switch clients. I do not really have time for this now, but I hope to work on it very soon. RSS is critical infrastructure for me, and I do not want to delay this.