Lately I've been trying Rekonq to see what all the fuzz's about. In short it's an alternative web browser for KDE, which uses WebKit1 and aims to be lightweight.
I don't intend to judge it by how it renders web pages, since many web pages still don't follow the W3C standards, so I usually have several browsers installed, so I have KHTML, WebKit, Gecko and for emergencies text-only. Also Konqueror in the newest release already supports both KHTML and WebKit, so that's not a relevant question.
Here's in short what I found out when using Rekonq 0.5.0 for a few days/weeks as the default browser (compared to Konqueror 4.4.4):
pro:
- no menu bar
- no status bar, but the URL show in the bottom of the window the webpage when hovered – I love that! In fact, I'd like to see that everywhere in KDE – Konqueror, Akregator, KMail, etc. etc.
- adblock subscription
- rearranging tabs with mouse works
- page previews are nice
- location bar filling up when loading is a nice touch
- the hack with the forced bright background makes badly written web sites work also under dark themes
- searching only parts of the URL from the location bar works (although it's not as good as Firefox' yet)
con:
- scrolling not smooth, sometimes autoscroll doesn't work
- middle-click in window does not (always?) open the pasted URL
- missing keyboard shortcut to move tabs
- i don't like the close buttons integrated into tabs – I prefer Konqi's close button on the far right of the opened tabs and the new tab button on the far left
- missing bookmarks: KIO slave (and others, but those are not so much browser-related)
- favicons don't work always
- a lot of missing features. Amongst others a quick way to add AdBlock rules from browser (like via right-clicking an ad)
- sessions would be nice …maybe TabCandy is not the best way to tackle it, but it's not a bad idea
- I actually like that Ctrl pops up shortcuts in Konqueror
- the hack with the forced bright background does look quite ugly and still is just an ugly hack (works though)
Bottom line: for now I switched back to Konqi, but will continue to follow Rekonq's develpment closely. I feel comparing the two is quite similar to comparing the whole Mozilla Suite and Phoenix (= how Firefox was named initially) in the early 2000's – it's a clean, no bloat underdog, but as of now, feels underpowered and a bit clumsy compared to the beast it's trying to replace. I won't be as bold to predict their future to be the same as Mozilla Suite vs. Firefox, but I'll say I wouldn't be surprised if that happens.
Side note: both share the annoyance with how KDE handles cookies – the rules get wiped out every few days.
Also, it'd be a nice idea in general to have Stop and Reload in one single button. If the page (or anything else for that matter) is loading, reloading doesn't make sense; while if the page (etc.) is loaded, stopping it doesn't make sense. Therefore in turn one of these two buttons is always obsolete.
hook out → sipping my bloody well deserved tea and deciding to apply for the Gentoo License team…
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WebKit started as Apple's fork of KDE's KHTML (both are HTML layout engines) and is now used by Safari, Chrome and several other web browsers. ↩