George Wright's Blog: QtWebKit vs. KHTML - again...

QtWebKit vs. KHTML - again...

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0100

After reading Will’s latest post, I feel I have to chip in.

I am a long time user and huge fan of KHTML. I still use KDE 3, and my day-to-day browser is still Konqueror from KDE 3, using an old version of KHTML. For 99% of websites that I visit, this is sufficient. Notable exceptions are YouTube and Facebook, both of which are very AJAX-heavy, and I keep a separate Firefox (well, Iceweasel) window open for them on a permanent basis.

Why do I keep both browser windows open? Well, for general Googling, random surfing, wikipedia, etc, I love the sheer speed of Konqueror, and its configurable web shortcuts (such as gg:, wp: etc) are insanely useful. Scrolling is blisteringly fast on just about any webpage and everything happens instantly. This is one of the major reasons why I don’t use KDE 4 yet - Konqueror 4 just doesn’t seem that fast anymore. I realise this is all very subjective, but things don’t quite feel so fast anymore.

However, this is a very suboptimal solution. As Will says, KDE needs a good web browser that can integrate with the rest of the desktop, and people shouldn’t need to resort to alternatives like Gecko. Personally, I hate Gecko. It’s got a massive memory footprint and it’s not as fast as I would like.

I’m not going to be flavour of the month for suggesting this (am I ever?), but I’d say the best thing to do at this point is for the developers to forget about KHTML, and start working upstream on WebKit, as well as work on integrating WebKit with Konqueror. Yes, there are probably some very good reasons as to why this is not great for KDE, but are they good enough to justify hindering the entire project’s success? WebKit Qt isn’t perfect yet (it can’t handle Facebook Chat particularly well, for example), but it’s still a lot better than KHTML at the moment. There’s a KPart being developed to allow WebKit to render inside Konqueror, and all it needs is a bit of polish before we can maybe start using it full time. In fact, now that I have time and I’m going to be working on WebKit as part of my job, I’ll look seriously into getting into core Konqueror development.

Call me crazy, but back in ‘02 Konqueror was the browser to have - it was fast, it worked on every website (back then), it was slick and it was KDE. I’d like to be able to go back to that, but fast forwarded 7 years!

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"QtWebKit vs. KHTML - again..." by stockers

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 23:52:38 +0100

Hi, I know it’s a bit late, but anyway…. I had been using Gnome for years and switched to KDE for a try. I really like it.

In Konqueror 4.4.1 (on up to date - of today -) you can choose the rendering engine : khtml or webkit.

dynamicaly : go in view>type> and choose. However, you’ll have to do that at everystartup. To make this behaviour static :
static : in a terminal (sorry : a Konsole :)), execute : keditfiletype text/html and move “WebKit (webkitpart)” in the “Embedding” tab to the top.

However i don’t see much difference…

I actually switched to konqueror because my usual webbrowser, google-chromium, use gtk as a file manager when you download stuff. This was pretty irritating cause sometimes the file you just download are not displayed in Dolphin… So now, thanks to konqueror, i have a really good webkit browser. Actually it’s even faster then chromium. As i don’t use the “themes and plugin stuff”, it’s very conveniant to me. However, it’s sad it’s so tied up to KDE. I like my tools to work as well on any Unix or even Windows. Konqueror will never go farer than KDE. I really like it’s fine tuned configurator!

Cheers

"QtWebKit vs. KHTML - again..." by Shizzle

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 09:56:49 +0100

Check out rekonq (for kde 4). Its a qtwebkit based browser (like arora) that aims for full kde intergration. It really is the future of kde web browsing IMHO! Though its not very feature ritch at present.