Wednesday, November 17th, 2010, 1:09 pm
Konqueror in KDE 4.5: Huge Step Forward
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Y EARLIER experiences with Konqueror go back to ~2002 when I tried it at work under Mandrake, around the early versions of KDE3 or later KDE2. Konqueror had many menu options and was daunting in some ways compared to Netscape and Mozilla. In KDE 3.1 Konqueror had acceptance problems among Web sites that were simply IE-centric or IE- and Netscape-centric. This was not a problem in Konqueror itself, but it made life a little harder for Konqueror users like myself. I only moved to Firefox some time in 2004 and it is still my Web browser of choice, having tested Chromium and some other browsers for a while (they lack plugins).
Anyway, under Fedora 14 I am attempting to use Konqueror exclusively and it’s generally a pleasant experience. After over a week of use I’ve only experienced two issues; one is when opening a PDF which Okular tried to embed within the Web page/rendering frame (this is easily solvable by opening the PDFs in an external application like the excellent Okular); the second issue is repeatable and reproducible crashes under WordPress’ media management menu. It’s a Web application-specific issue and debugging would be needed.
Workarounds are quite simple to find and the general experience working with Konqueror is finally quite pleasant (I tried Konqueror exclusively for about half a week in KDE 4.3 but eventually gave up). Speed is not great and there is room for improvement, but for general-purpose light usage Konqueror would fit most people’s needs. Some time later this month I will write about KDE 4.5 as a whole.
November 17th, 2010 at 3:16 pm
Did you use Konqueror with khtml or webkit engine?
November 17th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Is this using khtml or the webkit renderer?
I think that in 4.5 the default finally went to webkit which would be a reason for the huge improvement
November 18th, 2010 at 1:08 am
I was trying to find this out earlier. I looked at all the menu items and Konqueror settings just trying to answer this question (in vain), but I ran through these widgets too quickly. I use Fedora’s default (maybe they changed KDE defaults).
November 20th, 2010 at 6:46 pm
Oh no, you have mistaken a strength as a weakness. The ability to view all sorts of documents is a great strength of Konqueror and this is especially true of pdfs. Being able to open pdfs in multiple tabs like any other document is a huge benefit to serious research. There are some problems with sites like scribd, which actually use Flash to display pdfs as a crutch for users of that other OS. It is generally backwad and inconvenient to use viewers outside of a browser the way browsers call Adobe Reader in Windows.
November 29th, 2010 at 12:40 am
I’ve been testing Fedora 14 when it was released and as far as I remember they use the KHTML engine as default.Other than that I also use Konqueror for almost all the browsing lately. It really works great and I love the integration into KDE Plasma and also loading other document types like PDFs right in the tabs. And in rare situation that some site gives me trouble I use Rekonq which is a nice WebKit based browser, still at its early phase so it has some nice features from Konqueror missing.
November 30th, 2010 at 11:45 am
I’ve only installed Firefox for rare cases when I need to enter stubborn online banking sites and such HTTP header-sniffing things.