Konqueror web browser gets more attension

Frankly, people still pay no attention to konqueror. Web browsing, that is this excises to omit the wrong web pages and applets to avoid catching a virus using internet explorer. Or people started using firefox and now think they are on the safe side. But I was not going to talk about browser security. I just wanted to say that konqueror still is an unknown entity in the web sphere. And maybe that is exactly why konqueror was able to mature over the past seven years in the slipstream of all the hype around firefox and co.

Konqueror got a breeze of attention when apple decided to fork it to create safari and took yet another open source software to build their business on. Interesting those days was their evaluation of the firefox source code versus konqueror's stating that the latter was done much cleaner and leaner being a magnitude easier to maintain/fork. If you know about software development a bit you even notice it on the surface, not the gui differences I mean, but derived from the kind of quirks that show up here and there. Every time I use firefox I am surprised by new little glitches that simply should not exist making me wonder how the internals must look like that these things unveil now and never before or yet again after been fixed in previous releases. These errors are not the kind of disaster crash bugs, no, but just the little irregularities that make me worry. While firefox is done in C, konqueror is in C++ based on the great KDE/qt framework. I think that this distinction will pay off in the long run. I am not saying konqueror is more stable than firefox. I get konqueror crashing on me regularly, mostly related to embedding media. As I know about this weakness I am prepared to see it crash. It still does not put be off given all its benefits.

The recent stories about konqueror on linux.com and desktoplinux.com are fair and talk about its weaknesses too making me hope that the konq devs will pick them up and shift a few of their priorities to get these things done. But that's only the technical part, fixing bugs. The harder thing is to get people back on trying konqueror ... which they seem to do now ... hopefully. This browser really deserves more attention.

And you know what, I use it for every day work and development for a couple of years now; it is my nr.1 browser. Unfortunately I am obliged to use all of the browsers out there and test them on the web stuff I do. I start doing html and css using konqueror, then go into the next lap when testing on firefox and then check IE to receive yet another slap into the face. That's the typical trajectory and I always have to add tricks to work around problems that unveil even on firefox. The point is that while konqueror has to catch up on javascript it does a first class job on html and css. Firefox does not reach konqueror's robustness in that area! It's layouting capabilities are outstanding and things work out the way they should be according to the standards ... and my expectations. Therein lies its highest value and as a web guy I really really appreciate that. The articles cited above point out all of its extra features like file browsing, file viewing, split screen, sidebar applets, tab browsing, ad blocking and so on. But rendering plain html+css properly is why I love konqueror ... oh yes and realtime syntax checking in input textareas, cus my speeling really sucks sometimes.