Rekonq default

[todd rme]

On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Eike Hein <hein at kde.org> wrote:
> The lack of the menu bar was foremost on my mind, 'cause
> that creates problems with keyboard navigation and so on.

Currently some KDE applications have implemented the ability to show
or hide the menu bar (usually with a ctrl+m keyboard shortcut), but
many do not.  Making this a built-in part of KDE that is automatically
available in all applications would eliminate this inconsistency and
would provide an opportunity for applications like rekonq to conform
to the HIG guidelines (it would just need to provide an optional menu
bar that would turned on and off with ctrl+m by default).  There is
already a pretty popular brainstorm idea about this, actually.

> Perhaps. I have to admit that I see Konqueror mainly
> as a web browser today, and would be happy if its
> mission were redefined as such. It was important to
> reassure our users that Konq's file management prow-
> ess wouldn't just disappear as we introduced Dolphin,
> lacking many advanced features initially. It was un-
> derstandable that trust in Dolphin wasn't there yet
> at the time: It was new and unproven. But I think it
> has proven itself by now, and I've seen many stead-
> fast Konqueror holdouts switch to Dolphin over time.
>
> I think the desire for Konqueror to be a file mana-
> ger is far less today than it was back when we first
> introduced Dolphin, thanks to all the improvements
> Dolphin has seen. I think we should reevalutate whe-
> ther to focus Konq more strongly on browsing alone.

There are two problems with this.  One is, if you read the forums,
there are still many people who absolutely hate Dolphin.  There are,
right now, probably 3 or 4 active threads with people demanding we
drop dolphin entirely and make konqueror the default file manager
again.  They feel betrayed by what they consider an unfulfilled
promise of having no feature regressions in Konqueror's file browser
mode (there are some IMHO pretty serious feature regressions in
konqueror 4.x).  These are probably a vocal minority, but I think it
would seriously hurt there loyaltly to KDE if not only did developers
break what these people consider to be a promise of no feature
regressions, but go further and break the promise of keeping konqueror
available as a file browser.  I just don't think you can make a clear
promise like that and then go back on it without seriously hurting
peoples' trust in KDE as a whole.

Second, Dolphin still lacks many features that konqueror has.  As far
as I understand, there is still the intentional design decision by
Dolphin developers to exclude many of the more advanced features
present in konqueror.  Whether that is still the goal or not, the fact
remains that Dolphin lacks a number of features present in konqueror's
file browser.  These are not minor features, either, they have a major
effect on how someone uses the file browser.  Eliminating konqueror
would either require making dolphin much more complicated, or leaving
people with no way to make use of features they have grown accustomed
to having.  I use dolphin as my primary file browser, and frankly
don't like konqueror as a file browser very much, but I still use it
sometimes when I need to make use of some of its more advanced
features.  Such features include kpart support in the file browser,
file view plugins, and infinite splitting of views.