[tde-users] Re: Using Konqueror for the web

said Steven D'Aprano via tde-users: | It was so good that Apple used Konquorer's web engine as the basis of | Safari. Which is so good that everyone using Mac or IOS first thing gets another browser and commences bitching that it can't be made the default. | 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. Actually, msft got totally blindsided by the advent of the Internet, which is why there wasn't even a tcp/ip stack with stock Win 95 -- which is why the "Windows 95 Plus! Pack" thing got rushed to market. The market share of which you speak had to do with Microsoft including a basically unremovable IE in every copy of Windows, along with forcing computer makers to pay for a copy of Windows for every computer they sold, whether it had Windows on it or not. At the end of 1995, IE's market share was >3 percent; it was ~40 percent at the end of 1997 -- Netscape still had more than half of the browser market at that time. There was a vast amount of litigation in connection with it. Netscape at the time charged for the Navigator browser and the Communicator suite. | 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. No. First, from the beginning of KDE there was what amounted to Konqueror, KFM, which was a file manager as well as a browser (and really good ftp client). I've attached a screenshot I made in July 1999 of it displaying the KDE home page. The arrival of Konqueror with KDE2 marked functionally a port of KFM with a new name. Even so, we had other browsers. Netscape was packaged with most distributions, as was Star Office, which was a lot different from the OpenOffice and LibreOffice it would be decades later. Actually, the Star Office browser in SO-3.x, was pretty nice, though Star Office was an extremely strange desktop paradigm. The real issue for interoperability was that no one had good .doc filters, so the best most of us could so was save documents as .rtf -- that was a more important aspect of Linux's not being taken up at the time than the browser war was. | 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. Interestingly, Mozilla was the name netscape had reported itself as being, in browser identification, history, and such, pretty much from the beginning. And heaven help you if you were a Netscape user who had checked the KDE configuration box that applied KDE styles and colors to non-KDE applications. | 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/ I have no doubt that it's being picked at here and there, just as is the KDE office suite that got announced the day KDE 1.0 was released but that has never been ready for prime time, even though there are people still fiddling with it. https://kde.org/announcements/1-2-3/1.0/ As with KFM, its name has gotten changed. I've never heard of anybody using it for anything much, though, because there's other free stuff that's a world better, something it has in common with KFM, Konqueror, and so on. -- dep Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album Column: https://www.athensnews.com/opinion/columns/the_view_from_mudsock_heights/