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Falkon: A KDE Web Browser
- Y_Y 2y ago> Falkon is a KDE web browser using QtWebEngine rendering engine, previously known as QupZilla. It aims to be a lightweight web browser available through all major platforms. This project has been originally started only for educational purposes. But from its start, Falkon has grown into a feature-rich browser. 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 https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtwebengine-overview.html )
- okanat 2y agoQt doesn't upgrade WebEngine often enough. So it is possible to have lingering vulnerabilities in Falkon.
- notpushkin 2y agoI’d really love to see a KDE-native browser based on Gecko instead of Chromium or WebKit.
- dismalaf 2y agoI mean, WekKit started life as a fork of KDE's web engine so only makes sense they'd use it...
- notpushkin 2y agoI’m not saying they shouldn’t use it, of course! I just want there to be an alternative, too :-) (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.)
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoNot likely unfortunately thanks to Mozilla, which in all its wisdom, dropped embedding support from Gecko. This means it effectively cannot be hosted outside of Firefox/Seamonkey and forks thereof. This is contrasted by WebKit, which is largely UI toolkit agnostic and can be dropped in just about anywhere. 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.
- jeroenhd 2y agoI think that was a fine decision by Mozilla, even if I'm not happy with it. Firefox is already a web browser with barely enough market share to support it. Wasting resources on making even smaller special purpose web browsers integrate with the engine is not a move for a company that has been struggling with a lack of independent funding for years now. 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 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.
- homarp 2y ago>Wasting resources talking about Mozilla wasting resources is quite funny. Do you think having a competitor to Electron would be worse than + Pocket + LLM + VPN + https://mozillalifeboat.com/ https://mozillalifeboat.com/
- EasyMark 2y agoany proof that they are losing money on VPN or Pocket? That's my only concern, if they're profitable they should live, if they are cost centers, drop them (obviously they're outside core mission of the browser, internet standards, internet freedom)
- bitwize 2y ago> 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. 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.
- Neikius 2y agoThis is so funny. So chromium came from WebKit, which in turn came from KHTML which was ... a KDE web engine :D
- Gualdrapo 2y agoBeen using as my sole web browser on a daily basis since it was called Qupzilla, maybe for 10+ years as I switched to it from reKonq. 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++.
- notpushkin 2y ago> Granted, you can't use Chrome/Firefox plugins, which may it seem not worthy to some people 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.
- Ontonator 2y agoGranted, as in “conceding a point”. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/granted https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/granted
- kflgkans 2y ago
- thom 2y agoCan I open a KWord document in a tab though?
- mrweasel 2y agoProbably not... but why would you want to?
- milliams 2y agoPresumably referring to Konqueror, the old KDE web and file browser which could embed all sorts of viewers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konqueror#File_viewer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konqueror#File_viewer
- milliams 2y agoThose were the good old days.
- seba_dos1 2y agoFalkon's fine, but it's important to remember that it's just Chromium with KDE/Qt UI on top.
- Quiark 2y agoyeah but Chromium is just the web engine from KDE with a bunch of things on top :P
- tbet33 2y ago[dead]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ksec 2y agoFrom Wiki Falkon (formerly QupZilla[5]) is a free and open-source web browser developed by KDE. It is built on the QtWebEngine,[6][7] which is a wrapper for the Chromium browser core.[8]
- bandrami 2y agoWhich Chromium browser core was itself developed from QtWebEngine
- franze 2y agoWhat I want: I want a browser without security restrictions, that can run node.js code as well as not CORS restricted fetch. Wanted to code my own via electron, but damn, it was slow.
- crowselect 2y agoBecause you want to get hacked? 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.
- webstrand 2y agoI also want this, but only to run my own apps which I build for my private use. If you don't assume the user is incompetent, you could build a secure browser that provides permission prompts to opt out of cors.
- immibis 2y agoIt should be safer if it doesn't send cookies, but you can still get in trouble for "hacking" because you visited a website that contained code that sent "hacking" requests to another website.
- holowoodman 2y agoNot really. There is still same-origin-policy and CSRF tokens.
- endofreach 2y agoYou can run chromium/chrome with many security features (eg cors) disabled. If that helps whatever security hell you wanna swim in...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- butz 2y agoThere is another web browser build on KDE libraries - Angelfish. While it is marketed as "webbrowser for mobile devices", it has a desktop interface too. This one could be more easy to get into and help with development, as it is quite recent and does not have a lot of legacy features.
- cardanome 2y agoI still remember fondly the KDE 3.5 times when we had Konqueror. The best browser AND file manager in one. It was amazing. Then the KDE 4 enshittification came and they had to have a separate file manager with half the features. Bad times.
- milliams 2y agoIt feels rather rude to the volunteer developers to accuse them of enshitification. Especially when it's not even true in this case as enshitification implies trading the user experience for shareholder value - there's no share holder value being extracted here. The developers made the decision based on its merits. Furthermore, as I remember KDE4 did still have Konqueror - though it became slowly less maintained throughout its lifecycle as the web browser bit was hard to maintain in the changing web climate and Dolphin was providing a good user experience for many users.
- redmajor12 2y agoThey traded user experience for developer egos. Ego is the equivalent of wealth in the OSS world, just as it is in academia. KDE 4 developers had some grand ideas to push on the world, such as the semantic web, regardless of whether or not their users cared for them.
- wkat4242 2y agoYeah just like gnome 3 with its grand ideas that's now more barebones in terms of configurability than macOS.
- amelius 2y agoQuestion. What modern browser gets containers right? (Firefox was almost there, but the containers don't sync over multiple devices.)
- 1oooqooq 2y agogoogle deal killed containers internally. politics explained it as "user will get confused" and we never got full isolation, just 4 sub profiles (and never even a final UI)
- sundarurfriend 2y ago> (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/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containerise/ and then syncing that addon's settings effectively solve this problem?
- Sunspark 2y agoI took a look at Falkon, it's not for me. The autoscroll is not as smooth as the regular browsers and their adblock isn't as good either.
- holowoodman 2y agoI'd like that with a portion of vimperator please :)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sdsd 2y agoI feel so trapped in this current computing paradigm where we're all running Chromium and Firefox is bad. I don't think it's substantially better than the days when sites were built to run in IE, since the solution to incompatibility has apparently involved moving the "browser" is really just a VM now. 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
- lolinder 2y ago> we're all running Chromium and Firefox is bad. 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.
- cozzyd 2y agoIt's strange, Firefox gets so much criticism because they don't pass various purity tests while Chrome is completely exempt because nobody expects it to not be evil.
- redmajor12 2y agoIt's not strange. Mozilla Foundation is a non profit and Google is not.
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- snvzz 2y agoFrom wikipedia, the missing important bit of information in falkon.org: >It is built on the QtWebEngine, which is a wrapper for the Chromium browser core.
- pabs3 2y agoDoes QtWebEngine have security support?
- IYasha 2y agoCan't install it due to outdated glibc now. How's the download manager today? Can it at least pause and resume (+from different source)?