30 Jun
2021
30 Jun
'21
12:55 a.m.
On Tue, Jun 29, 2021 at 07:01:33PM +0000, dep via tde-users wrote:
In my estimation Konqueror is not only the worst web
browser ever made but
the worst from its very inception and the worst imaginable.
In the early 2000s, before the KDE 3 -> KDE 4 redesign that lead to the
creation of TDE, I used to regularly use Konquorer on the web. At the
time, it was very possibly the best or second web browser available, up
there with Opera.
It was so good that Apple used Konquorer's web engine as the basis of
Safari.
(To be precise, it was technically KHTML and KJS that were forked to
become Webkit, the core of Safari.)
A bit of browser history for the kiddies who may not have been alive
back then, and the grown-ups who may have forgotten :-)
In the late 1990s, most of the web was designed for Internet Explorer
only, which had over 90% marketshare. Most web developers thought that
IE *was* the internet. If you found one that acknowledged the existence
of Netscape Navigator, you were doing well. If you found one who tested
their web pages on Navigator, you celebrated.
On the Mac, you had IE for Mac. Until Safari came out, Apple's web
browser was a version of IE for Mac. Chimera, which later rebranded as
Camino, didn't come out until 2002, and Safari in 2003.
On Linux, there were a couple of text-only browsers, lynx and links,
Netscape Navigator (which was them forked to Mozilla), Opera, and
Konquorer (which came out in 2000). Konq, and Opera, were by far the
better of the options. But Opera was closed source and couldn't be
distributed with Linux, and Konq only worked with KDE. Midori didn't
come out until 2007. So if you wanted a desktop-independent open source
graphical web browser in 2000 on Linux, your only choice was Mozilla,
even though it was big, bloated and slow.
Mozilla later became the name of the foundation overseeing the former
Netscape software products, and the browser renamed as Seamonkey. The
web browser parts of Mozilla/Seamonkey were forked into Phoenix, which
was then renamed to Firebird, then Firefox.
Firefox changed the world of the web, breaking IE's near monopoly, but
that was still many years in the future.
There was no Chrome or Chromium. Opera was closed-source, there was no
Vivaldi yet. There was no Brave, and in the glory days of 2000, "privacy
on the internet" meant "don't tell people your home address".
In those early days, Javascript was still optional, most web pages were
static HTML, and Konquorer was an unknown treasure, unknown outside of
the KDE community, and Apple, which took notice of it and forked it for
Safari.
It's a good
file browser, though for anything critical I prefer mc in a terminal or
Krusader, which is an X mc. And I very much hope that no one ever tries to
make Konqueror a browser anymore -- the idea of it as a web browser was
abaodoned by KDE about five years ago, to the regret of no one because it
really sucked in that function.
Somebody ought to tell KDE then, because Konquorer's last update was one
day ago:
https://invent.kde.org/network/konqueror
https://apps.kde.org/konqueror/
--
Steve