“Many KDE users tend to take the Konqueror Web browser for granted, but that’s a mistake. Konqueror may not be able to replace Firefox as a Web browser for every site, but it does a lot more than just simple browsing.”
“Many KDE users tend to take the Konqueror Web browser for granted, but that’s a mistake. Konqueror may not be able to replace Firefox as a Web browser for every site, but it does a lot more than just simple browsing.”
Not only it is a decent web browser (tho I miss all those nifty firefox extensions at times) it is also by far the best filemanager ever.
One of the primary reasons why I dislike Konq is that it tries to be much more than ‘just’ a web browser.
I respect the project’s developers and their effort so far, but cannot get over some of the quirkiness of daily use.
Huhhh.. its primarely a file manager and does what good filemanagers do and a little more.
Ironic said: “One of the primary reasons why I dislike Konq is that it tries to be much more than ‘just’ a web browser. ”
I never understood that argument. Don’t use it for the other uses then. You can make it as streamlined as you want.
It’s a huge misconception that the extra features makes konqueror “bloated”. The beauty of kioslaves, dcop, (soon to be dbus), etc., prevent this.
The question then, is why spend effort tweaking it to do what Firefox (or any other browser) does well out of the box? Konq is designed with the KDE mindset. Give it everything but the kitchen sink, and let the user decide to stream line it if they want. This approach may appeal to some users, but it puts off others. Thank goodness for choice.
evangs wrote: “The question then, is why spend effort tweaking it to do what Firefox (or any other browser) does well out of the box?”
Who said anything about needing to tweak? I haven’t had to change the default anything and konqueror works for all but 1 web site I need.
The problem is several web sites don’t work not because of technical reasons, but because the sites decide to only check for two user agents and block all others. If site were designed better and followed standards, this crap excuse of saying you can’t test all browsers would be nonsense.
There are some things I have to add extensions to Firefox to accomplish that are standard on konqueror. Why must I spend effort tweaking Firefox to do what konqueror already does out of the box?
These kinds of things can be argued both ways and don’t make for valid reasons for either browser.
(Plus defaults are often disto based, not just the browser.)
The standard setup looks like this:
If you click in KDE on the Konqueror which is represented as a globe, you get Konqui started with the “Browser profile”. Then it looks and behaves just like any browser you know. If you want, you can use the options in the “Window” menu to make Konqueror look like you want it to look like. This Menu however does absolutely not stand in your way to use Konqui as you would use Firefox or Opera.
If you click on local folder representation (like /home/username), Konqueror will open in its “File management profile”. Then it looks like a Windows Explorer, and nothing will stand in your way of using it just like any other explorer-like filemanager. But you will have the additional features available if you need them.
Konqueror is a pleasure to give to beginners and tell them: Give it a spin. If those beginners do not know what which file does or means, Konqueror will most likely do something with a file which explains what that file is for.
But Konqueror is also a pleasure for experts, because it is unlimited in what it can look like or what it can do.
Most astoundingly, Konqueror is NOT bloated. I think Konqueror is the best desktop application ever written, and I think it will hold this title for a long time to come.
I also invite you to give Konqueror a try. You will be astounded how much it resembles either an everyday browser or an everyday file manager, and simultaneously gives loads of features to the user.
not only is it a good webbrowser and filemanager (to which it adds all the goodies KIO gives), but it can combine those. and that’s where i think it really shines. i often have filemanagement and webbrowsing in one window – i download a file, ctrl-T – ctrl-Home – use file. clean, in one window.
I like Konqueror a lot, as a file manager and as a browser too… I don’t particularly care about FF’s extensions… but, I don’t use Konqueror as a browser because it doesn’t work with Gmail and with Meebo. I don’t use Opera because it doesn’t work with Meebo. And that’s why my main browser is the one I like the least: FF.
Konq works fine with gmail if you use User Agent spoofing, which mine does automatically when I’m on mail.google.com
I don’t know about Meebo, though.
Konq is perfectly capable of running gmail, but for some reason, google force html mode anyway.
I have tried this before, but no love. I can’t remembere which version of Konq I was using, but it was like 1 year ago. I will have to try again now.
one year is a long time in the computing world, and even more so in the open source world.
this is something is see people do over and over again, try a open source project ones, and then dismiss it forever as it wasnt ready for use at that time.
I use konq for web browsing all the time. for file management I use mc:). there is a lot of development going on in konq, just look at the kde changelog. the only thing that ff does better is video – mplayer plugin and maybe rich text editing (but I don’t need the later). rest asured that nokia, apple, and the uberhackers from kde will make the best browser ever.
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; PalmSource/Palm-D053; Blazer/4.5) 16;320×320
miro: Have you tried installing kaffeine or kmplayer and enabling the integration with konqueror ?
Kaffeine has a Konqueror plugin? Where is it? KMplayer works well as a Konq plugin, and I really like it, but I just prefer Kaffeine.
Edited 2006-09-06 21:46
It has a plugin it’s called:
kaffeine-mozilla
I don’t understand what’s the problem with mozilla-mplayer-plugin? or something like that, it should work in konq as well since it can use FF plugins. The kaffeine-mozilla plugin is embedded in the browser when used with konqueror, it opens kaffeine separately when used with FF. The only thing I dislike about the kaffeine-mozilla plugin is that you don’t have any options (like volume tuning), which kmplayer has when embedded. But it works fairly well.
The mplayer plugin is fine, I just don’t like it because it’s not very pretty. If I can get the same function with a prettier interface (provided it doesn’t slow me down), I will.
I’ll stick with the KMplayer plugin. The Kaffeine one (as you said) doesn’t have controls inside the browser, and when it opens Kaffeine (like I had when I used it previously [konverted Firefox user]), it can be a pain (I don’t normally want it in another window).
There seems to be something in the KDE team that likes to come up with big projects that noone really begged them to produce, and yet they do it. We had filemanagers, and we had webbrowsers, and yet they make Konqueror. We had OpenOffice, and yet they make KOffice.
They have every right to do so, and there are lots of people that enjoy using KDE every day. And to be quite fair, some KDE programs are essential (to me at least): K3B, Kooka, to name a few.
In the same time, to make a desktop environment, imho, is about creating an intuitive GUI that people can use easily and fast, without all the bloat that stands in the way. And to many, it has to look good too. Gnome, that has its own deficiencies, seems to do a better job here. So I use it – sorry, hardly ever missing Konqueror.
If KDE wants to do something really innovative, let them do something about their main menu. It’s hard to think of anything less intuitive than a Windows/KDE style menu.
…And also hard to think of anything the trolls would complain about more if it were removed.
While Konqueror is getting to the point where you could say it’s obsolete, the same does not apply to KOffice. Ooo is very far from a good Office suite and the code for Ooo is probabaly the single worst OSS project. It is like and elaborate patchwork that hardly anyone understand and what’s worst is that the software does not perform up to par with commercial counterparts like MS office and even Corel’s X3. So to say that KOffice is reinventing the wheel is a huge mistake. As far as Konqueror goes … keep the engine for things like desklets and such ( if you really can’t stomach using Gecko ) and get rid of the browser in favor of Firefox. One universal standard is always better than 2 case specific ones.
Ooo is very far from a good Office suite and the code for Ooo is probabaly the single worst OSS project. It is like and elaborate patchwork that hardly anyone understand and what’s worst is that the software does not perform up to par with commercial counterparts like MS office and even Corel’s X3.
People said the same thing about Mozilla.
and they where right… it took a long time to clean up mozilla/gecko a bit, and if they would have put all these resources in khtml, we’d have a better browser by now.
But they didn’t, because Gecko was platform independent from the start, KHTML wasn’t (and arguably still isn’t). OpenOffice has the same advantage, so it would be foolish to assume that it won’t be successfully cleaned up at some point.
This doesn’t meant that I would disapprove of alternative native (what a terrible word-combo…) applications. I don’t even like Firefox as a GNOME user, but that doesn’t matter because Gecko can easily be integrated into a native GUI. Things are not that easy with office suites, so I believe there will always be a place for GnomeOffice and KOffice.
OOo isn’t platform independent, try compiling and running it native under AMD64.
Edited 2006-09-07 14:12
what’s not platform independent about KHTML? there is a mac browser, safari, build by apple within a short time, and it even runs on windows now… and KHTML will be ported to windows and mac in a short time for KDE 4 again! so that’s rubbish… and I’m pretty sure it’s easier STILL to add all openoffice’s features missing in Koffice to Koffice and improve it even more than cleaning up OpenOffice.
It still has to be ported, that’s why I wrote “arguably”. Hardly worth writing such an angry response to.
well, i’m not sure KHTML even had to be ported at all – it might depend on Qt (platform independent) which is why apple took some time to clean it up, and remove the Qt stuff, but that’s it. I don’t think gecko is anything more platform independent than KTHML. but maybe it is – but not really a reason to choose a larger, slower, messier codebase over KHTML.
The standard is set by w3 not by firefox and konqueror. When you use a browser as the standard you end up with a monopoly on that particular piece, such as IE.
Konqueror and KHTML are quite good actually.
I hope they start really defining different menu’s and interfaces for different tasks in konqueror though. While KParts is wonderful for reuse it seems that it can create these massive menu’s for each KPart in konqueror.
If they seperated out the KParts and put them each in their own unique shell so to speak I think it would make the interface much clearer. I like the fact that I can simply click a pdf file in konqueror and it opens. I hate how the settings menu for konqueror has 300 options no matter what kpart is being used, khtml, the file browser, or whatever. The menu’s and settings should be on a per-kpart basis. Not some massive jumble.
some recent talks on KDE blogs and mailinglists suggest many KDE dev’s share your opinion, and they’re about to do something about it for KDE 4
“One universal standard is always better than 2 case specific ones.”
No sir. The universal standard is the W3 proposed standard, not the IE/Firefox proposed ones. KHTML tries to adhere to the standard as much as possible. If that breaks some sites, that’s a problem of those site designers, that don’t code for standards but for faulty implementations.
KOffice was started in 1998, openoffice wasn’t a gleam in Sun’s eye at that point.
“KOffice was started in 1998, openoffice wasn’t a gleam in Sun’s eye at that point.”
OpenOffice is actually the open-sourced version of the old StarOffice… which started way before KOffice, and way before Sun bought it.
“OpenOffice is actually the open-sourced version of the old StarOffice… which started way before KOffice, and way before Sun bought it.”
StarOffice wasn’t open.
I realize this. But We didn’t have OpenOffice when they started KOffice. That’s my point.
KOffice is not an answer to OO.o at all.
KOffice is not an answer to OO.o at all.
KOffice was started before Open Office (that was the point), and Open Office doesn’t have the functionality and depth to the suite that KOffice does.
You may wish KOffice to be ditched in favour of the limited bloatware that is Open Office, but fortunately there is more than enough good things in KOffice for it to be continued and for it to really come good.
Responding to the wrong person…I didn’t want KOffice done away with…I think it’s leaner and better than OO.o
We had filemanagers, and we had webbrowsers, and yet they make Konqueror. We had OpenOffice, and yet they make KOffice.
The real beginnings of Konqueror the browser date far back to the times when Mozilla looked like a complete failure (or a bad joke, make your pick). KOffice had started far far before there there was any OpenOffice (although it was there as StarOffice back then, but that was something a bit different).
We had filemanagers, and we had webbrowsers, and yet they make Konqueror. We had OpenOffice, and yet they make KOffice.
The fact that they could build this stuff, with limited developers and resources, is true testament to KDE as a true developer’s platform.
In the beginning, there wasn’t a decent filemanager in an open source desktop. KDE came up with Konqueror, and Gnome had Nautilus, which despite the investment and time from companies like Eazel never reached the sort of quality and completeness you might expect.
When Konqueror was created there wasn’t really a decent web browser around. Firefox certainly didn’t exist, and even now, Firefox on Linux is a poor relation to it’s Windows cousin in terms of speed and in other areas. Out of Konqueror the world got KHTML, which is arguably now better and faster than Gecko or just about any HTML engine. It is set to get better.
KOffice has actually been around longer than Open Office, and has applications and functionality in it that Open Office can only dream of. Kivio, KPlato, Krita and Kexi. There’s also Task Juggler, which isn’t part of KOffice, but it’s the best free project management tool there is. Yes it has deficiencies, and I do bitch at open source software occasionally, but I can’t bitch at KOffice because producing an office suite is *hard*.
KOffice starts faster than Open Office and has less *bloat*, and because of its compact codebase it is far, far better to maintain than Open Office. The could be telling in the end.
And to be quite fair, some KDE programs are essential (to me at least): K3B, Kooka, to name a few.
More examples right there.
In the same time, to make a desktop environment, imho, is about creating an intuitive GUI that people can use easily and fast, without all the bloat that stands in the way.
You know, I think people use the word bloat without quite knowing what it means. Producing graphical interfaces (I’m assuming that’s the bloat you mean), even for those of us getting paid good money on big commercial projects, is hard. In fact, very few actually think about usability at all, and in complex systems like desktops it gets even worse.
Of course the easy way out is to chop functionality from your project and then tell everyone your user interface is more efficient. Well of course it is, but does it do everything an average user, system administrators and others in an average environment want. That’s debatable. That’s what KDE is trying to get right. Get more usable and better organised without losing the good, useful and novel functionality. That kind of usability and organisation is hard to achieve.
If KDE wants to do something really innovative, let them do something about their main menu.
And they will do. You can’t just cut stuff off as a solution. However, if you want something unintuitive look at SLED’s menu. If you have a handful of applications that will fit on the main computer menu, fine. If it isn’t then you’ll need to click on another button and then scroll through a large list of applications in another window. It doesn’t solve the problem.
Edited 2006-09-06 20:50
I apologise if I made the impression of thinking KDE is entirely on the wrong track. I didn’t know KOffice was so well-received by many, because I had had only trouble with it (I used mainly KDE on Suse for two years before switching). In my view, a good office suite must be good at handling multi-lingual input methods. Which was important to me. And in this aspect KOffice fails completely to me. But that might be a limited aspect to many others.
And, yes I do admit that OpenOffice is horrific bloatware. I guess I shouldn’t have used that example
But for stuff you need to use “outdoors” (.doc, powerpoint, etc.) we seem to just need it.
And I do agree there’s a lot of great developers working on KDE. Maybe I should not have posted anything in the first place, but then, I did enjoy the critical reactions.
Maybe I should not have posted anything in the first place, but then, I did enjoy the critical reactions.
Not at all. A lot of people don’t realise this stuff, and I didn’t at one time.
They have every right to do so, and there are lots of people that enjoy using KDE every day.
I think you hit the main point right there–you didn’t need to grope for a complaint.
“If KDE wants to do something really innovative, let them do something about their main menu. It’s hard to think of anything less intuitive than a Windows/KDE style menu.”
Don’t compare Windows menu with KDE menu. They are radically different. In Windows, all applications are in folders the installer created, which usually have the name of the creator. In KDE, they are put in categories, just like in GNOME. One click on K menu, one click on the category, one click on the application entry. Just like in GNOME: one click on applications, one click on category, one click on entry. Stop trolling.
He’s not trolling. It’s the basically same thing.
They’re nothing alike, as the post above explained. Do you have any argument to back up what you’re saying?
Argument: Properly named folders. Anyone can replicate this on Windows. If all apps on Windows were to originate from repositories, the Start menu could have categorized folder names.
It’s quite obvious.
I don’t disagree that you can tweak windows to give you a similar start menu. In fact, that is exactly what I do. However, I assumed we were talking about the default menus that are created and there is a distinct difference between a task-based menu system and one that is based on software providers. Your average user is never going to modify the start menu in windows or linux, they just use what is created for them.
You are correct in that you can conceivably restructure the Windows start menu to emulate the more efficient open source DEs. However, doing so is a lot of work, and every time you install a new program you must go behind it and adjust the menu yet again.
With KDE/GNOME/Xfce etc. everything is already done for you. Personally I prefer GNOME and Xfce’s simplistic approach over KDE’s, but that comes down to how many apps you want doing the same thing and is another discussion altogether.
Growing up in a DOS/Windows world made me accustomed to Microsoft’s vision of menu entries based on the software company’s name. When I went to Linux full force back in 1999/2000, I adapted to the category-based menu system within a few hours. It just made sense. After a year or so in nothing but Linux and BeOS, I went back to Windows out of necessity for work. I was helplessly lost; I couldn’t find any of my apps without several frustrating seconds of searching through each entry. If I was lucky I’d remember who wrote/distributed the software I was looking for, but usually I wasted far too much time sifting through menus. I eventually gave up and dragged icons to my desktop, making it cluttered and ugly. For a brief period I owned a Mac, and just dropped everything on the Dock.
To this day, I still take far longer to search for an app in the Windows menu than I do in Linux; I’ve never really gotten back into the Windows swing of things. I’ve often thought of dedicating several hours to restructuring the Windows menu, but since I now use Linux primarily for my at-home work and Windows only exists for gaming, I don’t think I’ll waste my time.
Wow, seeing all the reactions I have to say, I intended my original post on KDE/Konqi to be interpreted in a lot more nuanced way than some here have interpreted it.
And do forgive me for comparing the KDE menu to the Windows one. I didn’t know people are so sensitive about that.
I don’t think the Gnome menu by the way is fundamentally better, but at least it is more nicely organised.
Nor did I realise it’s a violation of a taboo to express the opinion that KDE could be a lot more intuitive to use.
And then think I even praised a couple KDE programs to be able to get away with it.
Edited 2006-09-07 07:51
>> We had filemanagers, and we had webbrowsers, and yet they make Konqueror. We had OpenOffice, and yet they make KOffice.
And I thank KDE developers every day for that, so I don’t have to use clunky programs that look and feel completely alien in my otherwise nicely tight desktop. And by the way, when Konqueror and Koffice were started Firefox did not even exist, and neither Mozilla Foundation or OpenOffice.
>> In the same time, to make a desktop environment, imho, is about creating an intuitive GUI that people can use easily and fast, without all the bloat that stands in the way.
From the very first moment, since the day KDE was announced, the goal was clear: create a _complete_, coherent, integrated desktop. (Read: http://www.kde.org/announcements/announcement.php ). To reach that goal, every application commonly needed must be a KDE app. And I should say they’ve done an incredible job towards that goal.
If you do not understand or share these goals, it’s not problem at all. It just means KDE is not for you.
h3rman said “There seems to be something in the KDE team that likes to come up with big projects that noone really begged them to produce, and yet they do it. We had filemanagers, and we had webbrowsers, and yet they make Konqueror. We had OpenOffice, and yet they make KOffice.”
We had Windows, yet people make Linux. We had Office, yet people made OpenOffice. We had Mosaic, yet people made Internet Explorer and Mozilla. We had steam engines, but people developed the gasoline internal combustion engine. We had quills, but people made ball point pens.
Everything is open to reinterpretation.
I absolutely love konqueror, and its one of the reasons why i use kde. I mostly use it for web, file, ftp and pdf, and i think its great to have them all available within the same app (just a “next tab” away).
People complain that they think it does “to much”, but i dont really see how that is a valid compaint as the user interface isn’t bloating with useless options, when you change from one type of browsing to the other, the toolbar changes aswell. Also, it isnt even using memory for the other browsing components, thanks to the kio tech.
I very often have a few pdf documents open, a few local disc tabs open and alot of web tabs open, its a great way to work i feel, i very rarely change application.
Its all a part of how kde allows me to work the way _I_ want to work, not the way others think i should work.
Edited 2006-09-06 19:47
exactly. i couldn’t live without konqi anymore. the integrated views for files (photoview, or graphical filesizes) are a must-have, the split-window functionality, kpdf and others embedded – how can anybody work with Explorer, or those other silly filemanagers and/or webbrowsers???
Konq is great when used for browsing. But using it as a file manager is a bit problematic.
For example, if you open an instance of Konq as a file manager and then you click on the Home button, you would expect it to go to ~/user. But hmm, it just loads your home page. And if you set the Home button to ~/user, it will keep that behavior even when you’re browsing the web.
And using their so-called Profiles doesnt help much. Anyway, just minor issues that can be fixed easily!
But using it as a file manager is a bit problematic.
if you open an instance of Konq as a file manager and then you click on the Home button, you would expect it to go to ~/user. But hmm, it just loads your home page. And if you set the Home button to ~/user, it will keep that behavior even when you’re browsing the web.
I smell broken settings, or crooked fingers. My home button always takes me to ~/, regardless of the profile / mode. Twighlight zone….
I use Konqueror as my main webbrowser. Actually there are sometimes pages that do not render perfectly but thats about it. Gmail works fine (you have to set the page identification to firefox though), in full AJAX mode that is, maps.google.com also works flawlessly. What I like especially about konqueror is that one can enable/disable java/javascript/plugins on a per page basis and whats even better you can configure plugins to start on demand only. I have a slow computer, so it matters to me if a page starts about 10 flash animations or if konqueror lets me decide which to start.
As second browser I use Opera, which unfortunately lacks a good os intregation (KDE integration that is). On that issue I don’t like Firefox at all, the default gui is ugly, and installing themes really slows it down.
By the way: if you have tried Konqueror some time ago, try again. The webbrowsing part was really not that good some releases ago (3.0 for example), there have been big improvements in the recent ones.
I use 3.5.4 and like it.
Edited 2006-09-06 20:35
Tabbed browsing support is great for viewing multiple sites one at a time, but Konqueror kicks it up a notch with split windows. Its window can be split horizontally or vertically (or both), and you can browse different sites in each pane.
I used to use Konqueror, before I switched to Firefox. But I may just have to go back.
Fascinating article.
they didn’t even mention the locking feature, where you can lock and unlock two panes, so they follow each other (or not)…
Konqueror has done right, I have been using various filemanagers over the years (Total Commander, Explorer, Nautilus, Finder, Konqueror)
And all I can say is from alle of them Total Commander and Konqueror are the ones I love to use, while the others are usually a pain to use, especially Nautilus which has become worse and worse over the years with its, dumb it down to uselessness mentality.
It’s still FF for me because of all the sweet shortcuts and “find while typing” and what not.
This makes it easy to browse the web whithout using the damn pointing device way to often.
On the other hand I think it’s a great idea of the KDE people to create a uniform way of access to all sorts of files, be they local or on a different continent…
> It’s still FF for me because of all the sweet
> shortcuts and “find while typing” and what not.
Try the following keys in Konqi:
/ starts an incremental search for text on a web page
‘ (single quote) starts an incremental search for links on a web page; Hitting enter activates the found link
Thanks a lot!
Now if you can tell me how to do this in Konqueror you’ve made my day:
In FF I got several bookmark folders and one of them is called NEWS and contains the sites I check whenever I turn on my pc.
Now in FF all I do is “alt-b n o”
because there’s only one item in bookmarks starting with “n” and then “o” of course stands for open in tabs.
Well, if the sites provide RSS why not use akregator? Just browse the site with konqueror. If the site provides RSS there should be an icon on the bottom right. Klick it and you will be asked if you want to add the feed to akregator.
Afterwards you can open akregator or kontact to access the news. To preview the site in konqueror directly you should right klick on the feed -> proporties. Then there should be an load whole site or something button.
Or you can add knewsticker to the taskbar and add some feeds there.
G’day,
The easiest way to set up your browser to open several tabs at once is to save a profile:
Setup Konqueror how you want it with the tabs loaded, then select “Settings”, “Configure View Profiles”.
When the “Profile Management” dialogue opens, click “Web Browsing” in the list and make sure the “Save URLs in profile” box is checked.
Click save and you’re done. Next time you open Konqueror as a web browser, the profile will open as you set it with all tabs loaded.
If Konqueror opens as a file manager, click “Settings”, “Load View Profile”, “Web Browsing” (or press Alt-S, V, W… or better yet, assign a keyboard shortcut).
I got frustrated with Firefox on my Kubuntu system because it would periodically lock up. KDE already uses Konqueror as their file manager, so I figured why not just go ahead and use it as my web browser too?
I’ve never looked back. It’s fast and reliable. There are a couple of sites (Google and Yahoo, as others have noted) that force me to spoof them as Firefox, but once they don’t know I’m in Konqueror, they work just fine.
I don’t see Konqueror as bloated. It’s pretty elegant, if you ask me.
I wish Konqueror used Gecko instead of KHTML.
Why?
Because most if not 99% web sites render fine in Gecko, and are broken in KHTML.
I’ve been using konqueror for years now. There’s only a few sites which don’t work in khtml these days, and its usually because the site checks for the browser and believes khtml can’t render it right so it uses some crap version of it. Granted a year ago that may not have been the case.
They are not broken in KHTML if you set the ID of your browser to IE or Firefox. KHTML is quite capable of showing the stuff, the sites just demand a Firefox ID to show it all. Besides KHMTL is moving a lot faster than Gecko, I’ve seen Firefox become slower and slower, and I’ve seen Konqueror render more and more sites faster and correcter during the last 1,5year. If they keep it up like that Firefox is doomed when Konqueror comes to Windows… (Kidding, don’t see that happen too soon).
I’m glad that they didn’t. KHTML renders faster and (generally) more correctly. It also uses quite a bit less memory. KHTML is maturing much faster and each update uses less resources and renders faster and more correctly. I believe by most objective measures it already supercedes FireFox.
Konqueror’s most serious limitation is a lack of extensions. It can use FireFox plug-ins but not extensions (yet).
How many of you are basing your comments on anything less the the latest version of konqueror and koffice?
Sure are a lot of statements that are may have been true in the past, but aren’t with konqueror-3.5.4 and koffice-1.5.x
“Sure are a lot of statements that are may have been true in the past, but aren’t with konqueror-3.5.4 and koffice-1.5.x”
Agree 100%. I’ve always used konqueror as my file management GUI (It took a while to un-learn DOS). It worked well even back in the 1.0 days, and works even better now. KHTML was ‘serviceable’ as a quick web browser browser in the KDE 2.0 days– Especially compared to the Netscape ‘blob’ or Mozilla M* builds. As of KDE 3.1 KHTML really started to come into it’s own… Now it’s the only browser I use. Especially when you load it on a KDE desktop beside Firefox (Load a g* site in each and watch top for a while…).
The road to a solid KOffice has been bumpy. But it does have the fine virtues of being fast and usable. IMHO, the biggest development there has been ‘Krita’. That’s shaping up to be an honest to god Photoshop / GIMP killer. The first stable release of it (Koffice 1.4?) was a little shaky, but now about the only reason I have to fire up ‘the GIMP’ is for some of the web-logo script stuff… And Koffice does well enough with opening Word stuff, and since I’m not a student I’m happy to keep my own stuff in Kword’s ODF.
I couldn’t be happier with the state KDE is in right now.
I think one misunderstanding that people have expressed and has been somewhat corrected here is that of bloat.
I would like to explicitly add that Konq is NOT bloated. Konq is just a thin shell that can load various plugins (kparts) when needed. Konqueror itself takes up very little in terms of resources and can embed all sorts of functionality on demand to preview almost anything in an integrated format.
Personally I love the ability to mix my browser and my file manager. I also really love the ability to open a pdf directly in a new tab like any other document so that I can think about it as a document rather then a format, all without having to use the ram when I am not reading pdfs.
And if you want to open your documents in a separate app, it is easy to change and with no ram lost
I also have only very rarely come across sites that don’t work in Konq.
Seth
And this is the beauty of KDE. There may be a plethora of applications available in a KDE release, but it’s not really bloated when you consider how much code is reused via KIO slave, KParts, DCOP, and so on.
Everyone complains that Konqueror is bloated because it it’s a web browser, PDF viewer, text viewer/editor, file manager, music player, video player, and more …… except that Konqueror is actually none of those.
It just loads KParts (KHTML, KATE, KPDF, KMPlayer, etc) as needed. The same KParts that a bunch of other apps use for the same purpose.
People go on and on about how great and wonderful Firefox extensions are. What they don’t realise is that KParts -> KDE is the same as extensions -> FF. There’s a KPart or KIO slave for just about everything out there, and all the KDE apps can use them all.
Now, if that isn’t the very definition of code reuse and proper use of frameworks, then I don’t know what
I find Konqueror indespensible as a file manager, but I encounter a usage problem when using it as a browser. Since I’m a developer, I’ve associated *html and other web files to open with Kate. If, however, I try to use Konqueror as a web browser (say by opening http://mysite.com in the location bar), clicking links to *html and web files still opens them in Kate rather than in the browser as a web page.
There’s bound to be a solution (probably an obvious one at that!), but I’ve yet to find it. Until then Konq as the web browser isn’t usable to me.
I’ve a similar problem, but I just made my editor (quanta) the second preference for .html, and right click on them and select the editor.
In the years I’ve been using KDE on FreeBSD the one thing noticable, or not, was using Konq. I just use it, no thinking about it being the browser or the filemanager, it’s just there and works. I give much less thought about using it compared to FF and IE.
I do have FF installed, but I hardly ever use it.
Also this was pointed out already I would like to comment on this too.
Technically speaking Konqueror is just an frontend for the kioslave Plugins. For Konqueror it doesn’t make any difference if you browse a website (with kioslave html), a filesystem (kioslave file) or accessing a ftp site (kioslave ftp). So Konqueror can easily be extended with any protocol you like just writing a new kioslave (as with man-Pages mentioned in the article).
And I just love to use the webdavs kioslave to access the GMX Mediacenter to put and get files. For example I upload Files at work and download them at home.
A little cumbersome but isn’t Konqueror in the 3rd button menu?
File a feature request? Maybe Konqueror could have view specific overriding file associations?
Or try with scripts. Two for setting different flags and starting konq as web and file browser resp. And a third that is associated with html and launches konq or kate depending on the flag? Or maybe dcop can be used to identify the current view profile?
The article doesn’t mention the web short cuts like gg:. Also very usefull. Another feature is preview or rather prehear of soundfiles.
What is the stupid fascination with file managers acting like a browser? One of my biggest complaints about windows is Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer. The average user gets them confused all the time. I have no desire, none what so ever, to use my file manager as a web browser. They do completely different things. You end up with a bloated hodge podge that does neither well. They made a car once that could act as a boat. They didn’t sell well. Why? Because they were piss poor boats and ugly cars. One of the things I like most about linux is the “separate good tools for separate jobs” mentality instead of “one crappy tool to do everything” that windows tends towards.
What is the stupid fascination with file managers acting like a browser?
The two activities are not entirely dissimilar. In Konqueror’s case, however, everything is a slave except the interface itself (which can be used in single pane, split-view and distinguishes between HTML and file browsing). It’s not a stretch to say that Konqueror is equally good at both, and unlike Explorer, it doesn’t try to force viewing the file system into some horrific web analogy.
Konqueror it’s against the Unix philosophy.
…
*Write programs that do one thing and do it well.*
…
That is why i dislike konqueror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
Konqueror is exactly like that : one kpart for one task.
Now, you love Konqueror as well, welcome to the team !
Thanks, but… no.
Hmmm… You misunderstood it. Konqueror is more like the pipe, that you can mix and match small tools and get the job done in a true Unix fashion.
Cause crash after crash. From what I can determine (without a debug version running a trace) is the Netscape plugin architecture needs some updating or a layer needs to be added that if a plugin isn’t recognized immediately and verified that it doesn’t attempt to load it. It dumps daily on such sites.
It’s definitely easier to convince KDE to implement a workaround like this than to convince the folks at MySpace and other social sites to stop letting any damn non-compliant code embedded into peoples personal pages.
Perhaps it’s easier, but if you do it like that this problem is going to exist for a long long time. It’s just completely wrong to base you site on one or a few browsers, instead of basing it on standards. The browser has to follow the standards, not set them. So do the sites. There are sufficiant sites that prove that you can get a flashy new eye candy whatever you want site using the standards.
I’m in complete agreement with your view. I share it as a developer. I get extremely annoyed that no pages on the most popular sites are XHTML/CSS compliant whether transitional or strict compliance.
Firefox must have some additional trapping code that protects it from dumping to core when there are obvious flaws in the code being embedded within that social community.
It’s bad enough the content on the site is 99% crap but when the coding standards by a site that received over $1 Billion are crap it just hits way below the belt. If someone has the social network connections/persuasion/influence towards standards with the dev team of MySpace and other social networking sites I would hope they materialize and get standards implemented. Such crap continues to make the idea of many-to-many social networking still a pipe dream and more a way to be just a bunch of voyeuristic brats rambling on and on about their narcissistic tendencies.
At the very least, these MySpace kits/themes should be encourage to be W3C Compliant.