[kde-linux] Konqueror KDE-4.8 BRANCH

[Duncan]

James Tyrer posted on Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:06:59 -0700 as excerpted:

> On 01/10/2012 08:39 PM, James Tyrer wrote:
> 
>> I also note that the KDE throbber is back although it is on the
>> Location Toolbar (putting it on the didn't seem to work with Qt.
> 
> That would be putting it on the MenuBar that didn't work.  Qt seemed to
> fight against it.

Ahh... Rather clearer now. =:^)

And yes, I had similar problems related to the throbber.  I moved it to 
the location bar myself some time ago as a result.  But ultimately there 
were much larger issues with konqueror as a web browser, at least two of 
which well demonstrated that the involved kde devs themselves consider it 
no more than a toy, unfit for "real" web browser use such as doing web 
banking, and I ended up solving them all for me personally, by switching 
to firefox instead.

Other than being more reliable and better supported by web sites, etc, 
there were two major results to that switch, one positive, one negative:

Positive: Both firefox and konqueror have extension support, but 
konqueror's userbase is simply too small to have developed a viable user 
extension community.  Firefox's is **MUCH** larger, and in addition to 
the previously mentioned konqueror bugs, a BIG factor in my switch was 
actively developed and supported extensions such as noscript.  I realized 
that there's simply no way konqueror could keep up with even that single 
extension let alone all the others, because they don't have the kde 
developer manpower to do it themselves, and they haven't developed a 
viable external extensions community as firefox has, in ordered to have 
an external entity provide and continue to support and develop the 
extension.  FWIW, that's one of the reasons I picked firefox over 
chromium as well.  Chromium's user base has arguably surpassed firefox's 
according to various statistics, and yes, there's an active user 
extension development community, but while it will very likely get there 
within a few years, the maturity and variety of available extensions at 
this point means firefox still has the lead in that regard.  Another 
chromium negative for those of us with strong personal emphasis on 
freedom of freedomware is that the majority of the focus is on the 
servantware/proprietaryware chrome browser, and that's likely to create 
problems with extension support for users of its chromium freedomware 
brother.  While firefox has a bit of that problem in terms of its MS vs 
*ix support, unlike chrome/chromium, from the viewpoint of the extensions 
developer, there's only the one firefox browser and it's freedomware.

Negative: I still prefer kde's integrated bookmarks and use them in 
preference to firefox's builtin bookmarks.  While kde's bookmarks now 
open in firefox so that's not an issue, creating a new kde bookmark for a 
page I'm currently visiting in firefox is significantly more difficult 
than creating the same kde bookmark from the same page visited in kde's 
konqueror.  But talking about extensions... I wonder if there's a firefox 
extension to fix that...  If not, perhaps I'll have to get even more 
deeply involved in firefox extensions and see about creating one...

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman