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Been using as my sole web browser on a daily basis since it was called Qupzilla, maybe for 10+ years as I switched to it from reKonq.
I really like it because it's fully and truly integrated with KDE, not needed a whole sort of patchs to integrate to it like Firefox needs to.
It's actually great. Not sure about the "Qt doesn't upgrade WebEngine often enough" in other comment (what is "ofteh enough"? I got several updates for it over the year) and of course it can be lagging from stuff from mainstream, but I think for 99% of users it's just fine.
Granted, you can't use Chrome/Firefox plugins, which may it seem not worthy to some people, but there's a basic adblock and greasemonkey extensions shipped with it with default which blocks most of stuff and even you can install a script to speed up youtube ads so that annoying ad will run out in a sec or less. Apparently you can write your own plugins for it but last time I wrote to one of its devs the api wasn't even documented.
There are some quirks on it, though, like the user agent thing - I set up as the latest chrome user agent for every website except accounts.google.com where I left it as the one shipped with Falkon so it lets me sign in, and yet it shows a warning about "upgrading" to another browser.
Ironically, such "warning" also shows up when browsing discuss.kde.org. Yes, the very KDE discussion board warns you against using KDE's own web browser.
Since some years ago I have a silly idea about a plugin that transforms tabs into some sort of Vim buffer list thing that can be filtered by the url bar, but am too incompetent about C++.
What does integrated with KDE mean? I use Firefox, but cannot imagine any type of integration that I really need.
Native file pickers, widgets, settings system . Not sure if it also uses the kparts system for handling protocols
With kdeconnect when I have some sound playing in firefox, e.g. a youtube video, I get audio controls directly from my phone. There's a million features, check it out here: https://kdeconnect.kde.org/
I'd like to see the feature of preventing the OS from sleeping before downloading has been finished.
KDE has integration with Firefox/Chromium too, via plasma-browser-integration. You can search browser tabs and history via the KDE menus, and share URLs with KDE via the browser context menu.
Firefox is GTK-based. With all its UI garbage like disappearing menus, CANCEL-OK dialogs (normal for Mac users), disrespect for system themes/styles/fonts, etc.
I also started using Falkon, but it still lacks too much for me, unfortuantely. And I wish it could import all history too. (
Download and media playback integrated with the taskbar, mostly
> Granted, you can't use Chrome/Firefox plugins, which may it seem not worthy to some people
Why is it granted? WebExtensions is an open spec, it is possible to implement it in any browser if needed. (Orion does this, although I think they don’t cover 100% of the features yet.)
But an ad blocker and userscript support can take you long ways, yeah.
Granted, as in “conceding a point”.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/granted
and yet it shows a warning about "upgrading" to another browser.
Ironically, such "warning" also shows up when browsing discuss.kde.org. Yes, the very KDE discussion board warns you against using KDE's own web browser.
Such is the propaganda of Big G, that user-agent discrimination is actively encouraged to further Chrome's marketshare.
> Falkon is a KDE web browser using QtWebEngine rendering engine, previously known as QupZilla. It aims to be a lightweight web browser available through all major platforms. This project has been originally started only for educational purposes. But from its start, Falkon has grown into a feature-rich browser.
While I applaud competition among browsers, I think that the renderer/webengine is such a big external component nowadays (especially if you lump in the JavaScript engine) that it might be more accurate to say that you're providing a skin, rather than a new browser.
Anyway I miss Konqueror and am happy to see any of its descendants carry on its legacy.
(QtWebEngine is derived from Chromium - https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtwebengine-overview.html )
This is so funny.
So chromium came from WebKit, which in turn came from KHTML which was ... a KDE web engine :D
I’d really love to see a KDE-native browser based on Gecko instead of Chromium or WebKit.
> While I applaud competition among browsers, I think that the renderer/webengine is such a big external component nowadays (especially if you lump in the JavaScript engine) that it might be more accurate to say that you're providing a skin, rather than a new browser.
Makes me think of NeoPlanet. That was an online trend that ripped through my university[0]. NeoPlanet was billed as the "world's first skinnable browser", and Wikipedia attributes the coining of the term "skin" (in the UI sense) to NeoPlanet's developers[1]. But NeoPlanet itself was pretty much a skin over Internet Explorer's browser engine, embedding a COM component of the browser into itself. So to me at the time, it didn't count as a separate browser, just a UI for internet explorer.
[0] Alongside AllAdvantage, which inspired some of the first mouse-jiggling simulation software because it paid users for active internet time while displaying ads on their screen. There was a whole universe of 90s Windows crudware that I wasn't all that privy to.
[1] I think Winamp's use of "skin" preceded NeoPlanet's, by analogy with Quake "skins", textures that could be applied to your player character in the QuakeWorld online multiplayer service, which could be used to indicate clan affiliation, etc.
Qt doesn't upgrade WebEngine often enough. So it is possible to have lingering vulnerabilities in Falkon.
I feel so trapped in this current computing paradigm where we're all running Chromium and Firefox is bad. I don't think it's substantially better than the days when sites were built to run in IE, since the solution to incompatibility has apparently involved moving the "browser" is really just a VM now.
On mobile it's even worse, with computing largely being removed entirely, replaced by "apps" that just deliver "content" and monetize their control over the algorithm. Or even worse, don't monetize it, but leverage it as a source of power. Zuck and Elon openly say govs were doing that with their platforms, but they hardly seem reliable. Maybe it's much much worse, maybe they exaggerated.
Urbit is more fun in theory but the community is just a bunch of rw chuds trying to get thiel bucks. Maybe computers just aren't that interesting now. At least, you have to be more creative than before. I've been doing some fun stuff. Anyway, /rant
> we're all running Chromium and Firefox is bad.
FWIW, I'm genuinely unsure where the "Firefox is bad" narrative comes from. I use Firefox as my primary browser across Android, MacOS, Windows, and Linux (KDE) and have not had any significant trouble with that setup in years outside of an occasional hiccup with a Google property. Mozilla acts like an ADHD squirrel and can't seem to help but burn through their market share, but for all the terrible management and business execution the engineers at Firefox have been consistently improving the product.
It's strange, Firefox gets so much criticism because they don't pass various purity tests while Chrome is completely exempt because nobody expects it to not be evil.
Yeah, Firefox is quite good. It's fast and gets good battery life. It has the occasional bug, but so does Chromium, with any nontrivial usage. I wish Mozilla would focus on Firefox and on their messaging/what their users want (I don't want another chatbot, personally...). The Mozilla management is the only really bad thing about Firefox, but I'd take them over Google's any day.
Even the privacy preserving ads stuff is like... fine to me. I wish they would do other things, but I'm glad they're trying to make an internet monetization framework that's less awful for privacy. I don't have any inherent beef with ads, besides the surveillance apparatus around them. Whether they'll be able to stick to their core mission with the financial allure of ads lurking around the corner, though, I'm not sure.
There is another web browser build on KDE libraries - Angelfish. While it is marketed as "webbrowser for mobile devices", it has a desktop interface too. This one could be more easy to get into and help with development, as it is quite recent and does not have a lot of legacy features.
Falkon's fine, but it's important to remember that it's just Chromium with KDE/Qt UI on top.
yeah but Chromium is just the web engine from KDE with a bunch of things on top :P
Can I open a KWord document in a tab though?
Those were the good old days.
Probably not... but why would you want to?
I took a look at Falkon, it's not for me. The autoscroll is not as smooth as the regular browsers and their adblock isn't as good either.
Question. What modern browser gets containers right?
(Firefox was almost there, but the containers don't sync over multiple devices.)
> (Firefox was almost there, but the containers don't sync over multiple devices.)
I haven't really tried this, but will setting up your container config via an addon like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containerise/ and then syncing that addon's settings effectively solve this problem?
I've heard that Zen has improved on them over Firefox, but haven't tried it yet, so I can't comment on it myself
Another issue with Firefox containers is there's no UI to manually add or remove sites from the container assignment list. Very annoying when so many sites and services use tracking/pass-through domains.
google deal killed containers internally. politics explained it as "user will get confused" and we never got full isolation, just 4 sub profiles (and never even a final UI)
I still remember fondly the KDE 3.5 times when we had Konqueror. The best browser AND file manager in one. It was amazing.
Then the KDE 4 enshittification came and they had to have a separate file manager with half the features. Bad times.
It feels rather rude to the volunteer developers to accuse them of enshitification. Especially when it's not even true in this case as enshitification implies trading the user experience for shareholder value - there's no share holder value being extracted here. The developers made the decision based on its merits. Furthermore, as I remember KDE4 did still have Konqueror - though it became slowly less maintained throughout its lifecycle as the web browser bit was hard to maintain in the changing web climate and Dolphin was providing a good user experience for many users.
That was a bad time for KDE. They pushed 4 out with a lot of fanfare and it turned out that GUI wise it was a bad windows vista clone that broke every great established KDE 3.5 application.
Definite enshitification. They took something great and replaced it with a craptastic DE that didn't reach feature parity for a decade!
I bailed for XFCE at the time, never gone back to KDE, wouldn't trust them to not do the same thing again.
Konqueror has always been clunky as hell in my opinion. It was like an open source version of Internet Explorer except with tabs. I thought people would've realised mixing files and web pages in one single program was a mistake somewhere around 2000, but I guess it stuck for a while.
Ubuntu still has Konqueror in its repos, though. You can still download it if you want to go back to the early 2000s UI. I think they're using Chromium as a render engine now? EDIT: nope, they use KHTML and KDEWebKit.
> Then the KDE 4 enshittification came and they had to have a separate file manager with half the features
That sounds rather entitled. As if they're doing it just to spite you, or because they need to maximise shareholder value. There are plenty of services that got enshittified because they saw chances to earn more money over their users' backs, but most people using that word just want to complain that the thing they got for free (especially open source stuff) or for a price that will obviously never cover the basic service costs (Youtube, all kinds of hosting, various streaming services, every AI product I know) now doesn't work like it used to, or tries to seek funding to continue existing.
Clearly the team decided it was better this way, and thanks to the power of open source, everyone could've disagreed and forked KDE 3.5 to stick to the old design.
Can't install it due to outdated glibc now. How's the download manager today? Can it at least pause and resume (+from different source)?
I'd like that with a portion of vimperator please :)
From wikipedia, the missing important bit of information in falkon.org:
>It is built on the QtWebEngine, which is a wrapper for the Chromium browser core.
From Wiki
Falkon (formerly QupZilla[5]) is a free and open-source web browser developed by KDE. It is built on the QtWebEngine,[6][7] which is a wrapper for the Chromium browser core.[8]
Which Chromium browser core was itself developed from QtWebEngine
What I want: I want a browser without security restrictions, that can run node.js code as well as not CORS restricted fetch.
Wanted to code my own via electron, but damn, it was slow.
Because you want to get hacked?
Seriously. Without cors, js on any site you visit can make requests as you to anywhere. The only thing protecting you would be security through obscurity.
You can run chromium/chrome with many security features (eg cors) disabled. If that helps whatever security hell you wanna swim in...
Does QtWebEngine have security support?