It still has some of the same problems as the comic, though not to the same extent, it doesn't need to be a standard for the comic to make sense, it's also about market share. Having yet another browser has the potential of diluting the market and making people just go for the default.
I might agree if it was another Chromium browser or something, but this uses its own rendering engine and thus directly opposes Google's dominance on web standards. Currently, there are only 3 major rendering engines:
Those are the two biggest desktops on Linux. In fact, when I run Tauri (like Electron, but uses your system webview instead of bundling it), it uses GNOME Web on my system.
They absolutely do. A lot of distros package Firefox or Chromium or something as the default, but those browsers are default for their respective DEs.
Here are their most recent releases:
Konquerer - 24.12.2 2025-02-06
GNOME Web - 47.3.1 (Jan 2025)
They don't move very fast, but they don't need to since they just pull in upstream changes. Their main purpose is to provide a default webview and browser, but most people use a different browser for everyday use.
It had a release this month, that doesn't sound dead...
But yeah, it's unfortunate that Qt WebEngine is Chromium based. I get it though, it's probably less work to maintain and if users complain, you tell them it's the most popular embedded engine.
kwebkitpart
Maybe you're right though, the last commit on master seems to be 2 months ago. I wonder if it's officially dead or just maintenance only.