Y EARLIER experiences with Konqueror go back to ~2002 when I tried it at work under Mandrake, around the early versions of KDE3 or later KDE2. Konqueror had many menu options and was daunting in some ways compared to Netscape and Mozilla. In KDE 3.1 Konqueror had acceptance problems among Web sites that were simply IE-centric or IE- and Netscape-centric. This was not a problem in Konqueror itself, but it made life a little harder for Konqueror users like myself. I only moved to Firefox some time in 2004 and it is still my Web browser of choice, having tested Chromium and some other browsers for a while (they lack plugins).

Anyway, under Fedora 14 I am attempting to use Konqueror exclusively and it’s generally a pleasant experience. After over a week of use I’ve only experienced two issues; one is when opening a PDF which Okular tried to embed within the Web page/rendering frame (this is easily solvable by opening the PDFs in an external application like the excellent Okular); the second issue is repeatable and reproducible crashes under WordPress’ media management menu. It’s a Web application-specific issue and debugging would be needed.

Workarounds are quite simple to find and the general experience working with Konqueror is finally quite pleasant (I tried Konqueror exclusively for about half a week in KDE 4.3 but eventually gave up). Speed is not great and there is room for improvement, but for general-purpose light usage Konqueror would fit most people’s needs. Some time later this month I will write about KDE 4.5 as a whole.