Firefox is great but since I visit several websites that Firefox is unable to render properly I have no choice but to find an alternative. I am starting to hate Firefox and forcing myself to love Konqueror and Galeon but still whenever I am using Firefox I feel like using a familiar application. Like when I want to create bookmark folders or search the web I know how to do it in Firefox quickly. I am still unable to get full control on either Konqueror or Galeon.
Galeon renders pages just as good as Firefox. But I don’t like its simplistic approach. I can not customize it as much as I can do with Firefox and Konqueror. So the main competition is between Firefox and Konqueror.
There are many features in Firefox that I miss in Konqueror:
- Konqueror is not among the Gmail supported browsers. Many web applications such as writely, gmail and others (that I haven’t discovered yet) do not work with Konqueror. It has a ‘change browser identification’ feature which changes the browser identity to anything you want. Like mozilla, Internet explorer, etc. I tried this feature with Gmail, the default CSS view loaded but page didn’t appear as it does in Firefox. mail snippets were running over timestamps and it didn’t look pretty.
- In Firefox I place items on the file menu bar I can not do this in Konqueror.
- Ctrl+F opens a find utility in both browsers. Firefox opens it at the bottom above the status bar which I find more usable than Konqueror’s popup.
Features where Konqueror beats Firefox:
- I thught that Firefox has made it incredibly easy to search the web but Konqueror has amazed me with its built in search shortcuts. One can extend firefox by installing extensions and adding search engines but Konqueror is clearly way a head.
- Though I can not place items on the file menu but Konqueror makes it easy to hide the file menu and then display it again.
- Clicking on feed icon in the status bar adds the feed for the page to Akregator default KDE news aggregator. I find it more usable than firefox’s live bookmarks. What I don’t like in both browsers is that they do not show the feed URL in a way so that a user can copy the url and paste it somewhere else manually.
A web browser is perhaps the most crucial software that an end user wants. If I am going to use Konqueror then it would be better for me to use Kubuntu since it integrates well into KDE. But what about the cool web 2.0 applications? I don’t want to miss anything so I just want to stay on the safe side. I am quite confused in this situation.
Konqueror is truly faster than Firefox. No wonder its engine – KHTML – has been chosen by Nokia for the mobile browser, where speed is crucial.
I started using Konqueror because it’s faster and eats less memory than Firefox… and then I started to discover a lot of things, here and there.
First, the ad-block works pretty the same way. Firefox’s better, but there are practically no difference. Second, the split view is great, and I didn’t see anything like it in Firefox. The actions are really cool, and I am starting to use them a lot, there are scripts to what you can do on a link. The search engine is beautiful. You can add what you want to see as a search engine in the search box with a great dialog. If you mark a web address, konqueror recognizes it automatically and offers you via context menu to open it, even if it hasn’t a link. It is pretty cool, and really better on the everyday browsing.
Two things I love in Firefox: Live bookmarks and Dom Inspector.
I fully agreee with above comment by McButterbuns.
I hate GTK dialogs.
Infortunately, we still lack of a good extension set for Konqueror. I use Stumbleupon and mouse gesture for example.
Maybe the konqueror C++ Api is to hard to use.
A Ruby (for example) wrapper around KDE 4 C++ API would be useful.
I just recently started using Konqueror over Firefox and I love it. Don’t get me wrong, I think Firefox is great but for me, the speed is horrible. I dont like how Firefox (rather gecko, I believe) uses the GTK. I have never like the GTK or how it looks. I prefer the QT style much more.
Konqueror seems to render pages much quicker than firefox ever has however, the tough thing about Konqueror is that it doubles as a file manager. Thats where I think its downside is. It seems its trying to be two application rolled into one.
Granted, file managing and web surfing share some common similarities as far as “locations” are concerned but I just feel that the two be separate. For me, I use firefox when I have to but if I don’t, I use Konqueror.
I have also switched from Thunderbird to KMail on Linux for the same reasons (plus KMail has a lot more functionality). Thunderbird is just too slow for me. I’ll use it at work (on Windows) but I try to limit the number of GTK applications I use because of a) its ugly b) its slow (for me anyways).