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++.
I also started using Falkon, but it still lacks too much for me, unfortuantely. And I wish it could import all history too. (
Btw KIO is now using QtNetwork for it's http implementation, instead of having it's own. So http2 is now also supported.
So let's say I'm building an app like Blender or Reaper - I'm sidestepping the need for most of the OS-specific/native-widget components, because I already need to do a whole lot of very complex and custom rendering, and that is the saner choice when going for portability. But I would still like to maintain a certain level of basic OS integration, for example a native menu bar on macOS, matching the light/dark theme with the OS, or perhaps... a native file picker?
What are my choices on Linux? Link with Gtk, and make the app look out of place on KDE? Link with KDE, and pull in half of it with me when installed on Gnome? Link both? Summon Cthulhu?...
Sounds like we've had a solution for a moment, and now we want to remove it, because think of the yaks?
Yeah, about that... fracturing at every possible level.
- Linux vs Free/Open/Net/Dragonfly BSD
- Linux distro 1 vs X vs A vs Ω vs ...
- glibc (with all its warts like versioned symbols) vs musl vs BSD libc
- systemd vs sysvinit vs rc vs OpenRC vs daemontools/s6/runit/...
- Who "owns" /etc/resolv.conf?
- apt vs (yum / dnf) vs pacman vs apk vs xbps vs emerge vs ...
- Flatpak vs Snap vs AppImage
- X11 (and libx11 vs xcb) vs Wayland (which protocols/extensions are supported?)
- OSS vs ALSA vs PulseAudio vs Pipewire vs sndiod vs ...
- Gtk (2/3/4) (with Gnome or without) vs Qt (with KDE or without) vs Tk vs direct X11 vs SDL/glfw/... vs an obscure toolkit last updated 15 years ago
inb4 it's about choice, the heck I'm supposed to choose as an app developer? inb4 "follow the standard", half of these are not standardised but still in widespread use? inb4 distro policies, which distro - top 10 on distrowatch looks like more work than macOS+Windows combined? Delegate to package maintainers, and my app is "fixed"/patched beyond me being able to debug/support? I choose what seems to work (for example, escaping via the XDG portal) and I'm getting rug-pulled?
This is exactly why we can't have nice things.
There are competing, incompatible and incomplete solutions across distributions and software ecosystems.
Media through a standard MPRIS implementation, and downloads through.. I don't know what the system is called, but it works
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.
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.
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 )
So chromium came from WebKit, which in turn came from KHTML which was ... a KDE web engine :D
Funny thing, Epiphany (now known as GNOME Web) was originally built around Gecko, but when Mozilla axed embedding, the project had no choice except to switch web engines and so it’s now built around WebKit instead.
Relevant repos:
https://github.com/sailfishos/qtmozembed https://github.com/sailfishos/embedlite-components https://github.com/sailfishos/gecko-dev
Of course the decision was made back in the Firefox 5 days, but back then Chrome was rapidly growing, mostly at the cost of Firefox. Had Firefox remained embeddable, I think it would've only been held back in important performance areas like threading and rendering because of the API around the web view.
Interesting enough, with the Firefox for Android rewrite, Mozilla actually went back to making Gecko embeddable: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView This design decision is also claimed to be the reason for them to disable about:config in production builds, because misconfiguring geckoview can disconnect it from the app and leave users with a broken browser (apparently).
So now there is an official way of embedding Gecko in your application, but it's limited to Android only.
Additionally, I believe that one of the reasons why Firefox has struggled to maintain market share is because it’s a bit of an acquired taste. Relative to Chrome, Safari, etc it’s kinda quirky and not to everybody’s liking. Alternative browsers wrapping Gecko could’ve helped a lot here.
Camino was a great example — Mozilla couldn’t justify building a Mac-specialized Firefox and that makes sense, so Camino filled that gap instead and became quite popular among Mac users. When Camino had to close up shop following the removal of embedding, most of those users didn’t switch to Firefox but instead to Chrome and Safari because those were better suited to their needs.
So says the narrative. Mozilla has money, but prefer using it for C-Level salaries : Mitchell Baker raised her salary from 2.5M$ to 7M$ within 4 years, all the while laying-off developers and spending a shitload of money on seminaries and others BS expenses. Meanwhile, the market share of Firefox dropped.
And I assume you have noticed that privacy is not their main concern.
Such a pity because Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox brought a lot to the Web. But I guess this happens when Corporate people take over any organisation.
It was US tax issues that forced them to go corporate but as a result of the Google deal. So they tricked them into going corporate.
Seminaries? Kagi turns up nothing. Could you explain?
Except for Internet Explorer.
talking about Mozilla wasting resources is quite funny. Do you think having a competitor to Electron would be worse than
+ LLM
+ VPN
https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/
I don't know what I'm talking about though. I just found that and have no idea how useful it is
(It could be a part of KDE – they do have multiple media players, why not multiple browsers as well? But it could also be an independent project. I might tinker with this idea sometime, although I don’t have a KDE setup right now as my main laptop broke down.)
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.
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
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.
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.
https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
people who don't complain about mozilla sorry state do move to chrome tho.
My least favorite thing about Firefox is the "you must restart Firefox to keep browsing" message when my package manager updates it.
It comes from me, I hate it. The constant begging to use pocket or whatever the frugg its called is a perfect metaphor for the browser as a whole.
(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?
This is also an area where browsers can differentiate.
I agree it would be better if one could just install the .xpi from a server you trust but Mozilla hates its users so here we are
Note: it's quite easy to create them using chatgpt, nowadays (of course you have to check them before using).
Then the KDE 4 enshittification came and they had to have a separate file manager with half the features. Bad times.
and if you think we were exaggerating in how bad our school route was, get ready for this one...
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.
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.
>It is built on the QtWebEngine, which is a wrapper for the Chromium browser core.
Wanted to code my own via electron, but damn, it was slow.
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.