Konqueror and Other Version 5 Browsers

Peter-Paul Koch,
maintainer of a JavaScript/DOM/CSS testing site, recently updated
his browser
section
. In it he reviews
Konqueror, together with
the other Version 5 browsers, Mozilla
and IE.
He concludes, "In short, the few remaining bugs in Konqueror are
details that no doubt will be solved soon. The development team has
succeeded in building an excellent, standards compliant browser from
scratch. Therefore I expect Konqueror to become a real competitor for
Netscape 6 on Linux: it has made an excellent start and can only
become better
."

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Comments

by Anonymous (not verified)

How come www.webreview.com still ignores Konqueror? It is not listed in their browser compatibility chart.
Perhaps some more users should point them to the fact that Konqueror is actually pretty cool and wide-spread among Linux users

by A (not verified)

I love Konqueror, however i believe that as long that we don't have a windows (and maybe mac) port, it will not be popular nor stable... (it's stable but could use more work)

by Anonymous (not verified)

Right, so how is porting it to other platforms going to make it more stable?

by anonymous code ... (not verified)

porting often uncovers obscure bugs that only rear their heads under certain ugly situations.

by Anonymous (not verified)

If there will be more users there will be more developers & more feedback, and when there will be a big user base nobody will ibnore it.

by Vadim Plessky (not verified)

Two statements from my side:
a)
> I love Konqueror, however i believe that as long that we don't have a windows (and maybe mac) port.

Indeed, Windows port for Konq (or Konq/Embedded) is nice to have.
My wife has to work with Windows in office, so adding option of running Konq would be very useful.

b) Re: webreview.com
It's apity that webreview.com and many other so-called "web-development"-centric sites ignore Konq and some other new browsers (Galeon and KMeleon come to mind, as well as iCab)
I personally tried to write to 2 web metrics agencies here, in Russia (http://top.list.ru and http://www.spylog.ru) in March-April 2001, but to no results.
They place Konq to "Other browsers" category, and sometimes add to "Netscape" in their reports :-((

Vadim

by Anonymous Cowar... (not verified)

There IS a mac port called Safari. Check out apple's site. I would like to see a windows port, though. (I only have access to windows boxes, and would like to try konqueror). Opera's great, but I want to try alternatives (Mozilla, on the other hand...)

by Alimin Bijosono Oei (not verified)

How about the website above? Who to blame? Konqueror or the website incompatibility with the standard? This has been a problem for me for a long time since I can't access that website's functionality because of the missing menus which are not loaded by Konqueror (compared with Mozilla and the difference will be noticeable). I hope this is not a bug in Konqueror and only the website to be blamed but if it's a bug, I can only hope this will be fixed soon as said in the posting by Dre above.

by Jon (not verified)

Hmm... nice to see that web-page has a good fallback if you're not running Javascript (it just doesn't bother displaying anything at all...).
In fact they seem to do everything with Javascript, which makes it very hard to find a decent page with content to try and validate...

I did notice that they don't include DOCTYPEs, which means that all their pages are not valid HTML. Very badly designed as well.

Even just checking the framesets with http://validator.w3.org shows loads of problems...

--

As an aside -- has anyone seen a bug with http://validator.w3.org and Konqueror in KDE 2.2.1 where the floating menu is *under* the title?

by Jacob Sparre An... (not verified)

Konqueror is so far in reaching complete MSIE compatibility, that it even clones the content negotiation deficiencies from (old versions of) MSIE.

When you surf, Konqueror claims that the only language you are able to read is the one your user interface uses at the moment. If you visit web sites, which use content negotiation for selecting the appropriate language for the reader, this deficiency will reduce the usability dramatically.

/Jacob

by Dawit Alemayehu (not verified)

Please feel free to check before making such statements! Starting with 2.2.1
you can change the language information that is sent to remote machines to whatever you want. There is just not GUI config option for it yet! In fact you can change this setting for per domain if you like! Anyways, if you want
to do this simply add

Languages= comma-separated-list-of-language-entries-in-order

to $KDEHOME/share/config/kio_httprc, where $KDEHOME is you own local KDE config directory which usually is ".kde". If you add the setting under a group with the hostname, then it would only apply to that specific domain. For example,

[somehost.com]
Languages= comma-separated-list-of-language-entries-in-order

Anyways, I probably will write a quick how-to since there are many more options that are configurable like this.

Regards,
Dawit A.

by Jacob Sparre An... (not verified)

> Please feel free to check before making such statements!

I DID check it out first. I just made the mistake of assuming that a graphical user interface can be configured through a graphical user interface.

I have edited the configuration file as you suggest, but it does not seem to have any effect. Is it necessary to log out to make it take effect?

/Jacob

by Dawit Alemayehu (not verified)

Well, it will enventually have a graphical configuration. What I meant by my statement was that you should ask before stating what you said as a fact. I did not mean for it to sound rude:) Anyways, for the changes to take effect you can either restart KDE or use the following command which will spare you that action:

dcop konqueror KIO::Scheduler reparseSlaveConfiguration ""

Hope that helps.

Regards,
Dawit A.

by Vadim Plessky (not verified)

I have to say here that Konq started rendering my KDE page (http://kde2.newmail.ru) correctly around 8 months before Mozilla was able to do it.
I refer here to backgrounds in A and DIV tags (menu on left side).
Yes, Mozilla 0.9.2 which I have now installed can render page ok. But Mozilla M18, 0.8.x and all versions between *couldn't* do it.
Unfortunately my HTMLtests page was killed by provider, but *fortunately*
Max Moritz Sievers did backup copy of it (and even added several improvements)
So please go to http://htmltests.enddeluxe.de
and see how Konq 2.1beta was running against Mozilla and MS IE (in February 2001!). You can try Konqueror 2.2.1 from recently released KDE 2.2.1 and see improvement, and also compare to *old* screenshots.
I am now working on updated set of tests, stay tuned...
After all:
Konq is great, isn't it?

Cheers,

Vadim Plessky

by oliv (not verified)

I'm not sure to understand your test pages. Sometimes, you have links that are pointing to pages using valid CSS styles (w3c validated), and others pointing to pages that make Mozilla fail, but are not valid CSS.
Don't you think that if the CSS is not valid, it's the CSS that is responsible for the bad display, not the browser?

by Vadim Plessky (not verified)

> I'm not sure to understand your test pages. Sometimes, you have links that
> are pointing to pages using valid CSS styles (w3c validated), and others
> pointing to pages that make Mozilla fail, but are not valid CSS.

Tests were prepared in Jan.-Feb. 2001, in process of bug-catching in Konq for KDE 2.1 release.
"pages that make Mozilla fail, but are not valid CSS" are taken from real-world sites or from examples in several books.
It's not a secret that many people use books to study HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
So you should, probably, blaim here authors of those books, not me! :-)

What I did after all (finding that Konq and/or Mozilla fail on some pages) - I rewrote them, making W3C compliant.
It helped in many cases, while A/DIV background in Mozilla still was a problem.

In short, Mozilla has good CSS support, but Konq is better, IMO.

Cheers,

Vadim

P.S. As I have mentioned, I am working now on new, updated suite of tests.

by IP (not verified)

Konqueror is good and fast browser, but there are some things that i dont like. For example since KDE2.2 https through proxy does not work. Also some javascript is missing, so i have to use sometimes Mozilla.

by Dawit Alemayehu (not verified)

Please feel free to open a bug report on the https proxy stuff.
I can only attempt to fix any bugs I receive report on. Thanks

by not me (not verified)

Are you using Redhat RPMs? Some other people using Redhat RPMs were complaining about this. It's not a KDE problem because it works fine for many people, I think it is a problem with your KDE installation.

by Ranger Rick (not verified)

Have you tried 2.2.1? The https thing was a known bug in 2.2 and has been fixed (at least, it Works For Me(TM)).

by gandalf (not verified)

I just want to comment on this, since I saw someone talking about KDE 2.1, and would like to say that konqy 2.1.0, if left on for long enough, usually a couple days, will eat up RAM and swap space like there's no tomorrow. I don't have or need a clue on if this is fixed, since I moved over to primarily console(18) and in X, I use windowmaker and mozilla from cvs, which is sweet as hell.

Also, what would be really cool is, if someone doesn't have openssl on his machine, and installs kde, and then later decides to install openssl, has to rebuild kde just to allow the use of ssl. What would be better is, if ssl isn't found on konqy startup, don't use it...simple test....

Just another of my $.02

by Jon (not verified)

It's quite hard to build SSL support into your program if the SSL libraries aren't on the system -- you would have to incorporate an awful lot of information about the library which would probably no longer be true the next time the SSL library is updated.

But you don't really care about that, you just want to troll.

by gandalf (not verified)

Now, why would you have to do that, if you just build an api and use ssl as an ioslave....that shouldn't be to hard...well, I haven't tried it, but I'm gonna look it over soon....

here's what I was trying to describe:

have an ioslave for the ssl, and set it up so you can just d/l that source tree when you need it, and also have it in the kdebase with konqy.
then, wrap all your ssl calls around this ioslave, so that konqy doesn't have to really know much about the ssl itself, it just asks the ioslave for help.

just an idea....sorry if I sound like a troll...I just find it rather difficult to use if I need to have ssl already on in order to let konqy support it....
maybe you already do this...I haven't checked the source tree much, but I think it might be nice for those of us like me who build lfs, and just want to get the DE up, so he can go on the web and get the ssl support.

gandalf

by rob (not verified)

You really should just use Debian if you want this kind of automation.
Then it is just

apt-get install kdelibs3-crypto

to upgrade to openssl support. If you are a compiloholic, you are asking for extreme boredom,
and should not be complaining about it.

by Danie Roux (not verified)

Which looks quite cool. Konqueror doesn't

But yes scroll speed is bad under gecko.