Qupzilla 2.1.2 exists in the ceres repository (also in Sid) as a replacement to 1.8.9 that lies in jessie and ascii.
But it is prevented to install as it would cause breakage. I can't figure out why or which dependency conflicts.
Just letting you know. In Arch/Manjaro Qupzilla 2 has been in stable and works flawlessly for many many months.
The big difference with qz 1.8 and 1.9 is that the speller works again using hunspell transformed by qtwebkit which
the pkg relies heavily on.
Other than systemd free I like to run Google/Mozilla/Oracle free as well.