Konqueror 4

[Edulix]

Hello people!

This is my first post in this maling list since I entered on it some time ago 
=). I've been a long time KDE user and I'm also a CS student. This year I've 
entered into the first edtion of the "free software competition" [1] for 
spanish university students which is really coolbecause hey, I even know the 
organizers. For my project, I proposed improving konqueror (the web browser) 
instead of creating one application from scratch unlike most of the remaining 
projects.  Actually, the title of the proposal is "Konqueror on steroids", 
but don't take it too seriously.

After sending the proposal I talked aboutit to a colleague andfinally he, Dani 
from now on, entered also in the team so we are two which is  always funnier 
than one. He has some  expertise in developing with C++ and GTK and I have 
some konwledge of C++, Qt3, Qt4 and KDE. Last year I developed a simple 
sudoku in Qt4, and this summer I toyed with "KDE RSS Manager" for KDE3 
although it's in a very early stage as it was only a test-bed to me. In case 
youare wondering, yes! I started it because I didn't know what to do, and I 
read the suggestion of Aseigo inkde-devel - I inmediatelly liked the idea 
because it was simple, there was none in Linux and there was even some 
demand ;-).

Although I have already KDE4 compiling and running in Xephyr, we haven't 
started yet developing and we will be able next week when I get my new laptop 
and dani (which works in a ppc) achieves to run KDE4. Since then, it's 
interesting to notice that we have a reasonably large period of developing 
time - until the 9 of April.

We belive in free software - that's why we are here doing this - and we don't 
want to develop in vain just to get it done. We want everyone to see 
konqueror on steroids and we would love to collaborate with konqueror 
developers. From your viewpoint, this is about two new people willing to join 
forces and spend time coding. We would like to know who is working in similar 
tasks to ours and to get all your sugestions to do it right.

These are the points I mentioned in the proposal, although they are can be 
modified and extended at will:

* A new bookmarks system

I don't like too much the hierarchical bookmarks systems. I find it difficult 
and a bit time consuming to orderthe items and I've ended up putting all 
bookmarks in / and finding the correct one searching acroosthem in the panel. 

But that is far from ideal. The bookmarks menu turned out being impracticable 
because the large list  of items and the loading time of the sidebar is 
considerable. We want to improve this situation. We want to implement a new 
bookmark system which uses tags instead of hierarchies, which searches also 
across the stored content of the pages, and  which must be faster. Also it 
will be key to be able to sync with del.ici.us, google bookmarks and similar 
places.

Is anyone working on this? There are various search engines "in the table" for 
kde 4: Nepomuk, tenor, ?, ... what do you recomend? Any ideas?

* Improving session management

When konqueror crashes, which unfortunatenely some times happens, session is 
lost. I'm not the only one [2]. Also, maybe every thursday sometimes you want 
to read teletext for all the TV channels you can see, and don't want to waste 
time openning the corresponding teletext.com pages all the time. The solution 
is implementing some session manager as for example opera does. You can save 
sessions to open them later, and last session can be restored when konqi 
crashed.

Some other improvements, including:
* Recycle bin icon easily accesible to recover recetly closed tabs. And also a 
shortcut available.

* Stdying how to improve the performance of the adress bar.Try to enter and 
url, and then try to erase some end characters  with <back> button. Sometimes 
it's not snappy.. and must be some way to fix it

* Easier way to Clean privacy data like in Firefox, and a stealth mode where 
pages don't touch the history or the cache and don't enter into the history 
of the address bar nor  anywhere. Also this could lead to working in the new 
preferences.. window for the "browser only" version of konqueror. Because  
getting that right is essential 

* Mouseover Preview on tabs
Well this is a copy from other web browsers, but hey wouldn't it be nice?

Thanks for your time,
                      Edulix.

[1] http://concurso-softwarelibre.us.es/ (in spanish)
[2] http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83803