I’ve decided to try and give up using Firefox for at least one week. In it’s place I plan on using Konqueror and in some cases where I’m using OSX, Safari or perhaps Camino. The real test for me though is to see if I can make Konqueror do everything I’m used to doing (and worry that I can’t live without) with Firefox.

I’ve been falling slowly out of infatuation with Firefox for a while now. Version 2.0 left me mildly underwhelmed and dealing with much of the same-old including an annoying memory leak. Since I use KDE as my desktop environment, I’ve always had Konqueror kicking around and have been very impressed with it’s abilities as a file manager. In my job, where I often have to migrate many files from server A to B, Konqueror’s view splitting features kick serious ass. As a web browser that I’ve had access to for almost two years, I’ve probably used it a handful of times, mainly because of my dependence on Firefox extensions.

This reliance on extensions bothers me. The fact that enough people use it now that exploits are starting to show up isn’t great news to me either. Granted, they’re generally addressed pretty fast, but whatever. Really cool people use fringe, obscure browsers like Konqueror or Lynx.

So, to make this transition, I took a tally of all things extension-wise in Firefox I deemed necessary. The bottom line ended up being:

• Adblock: To get rid of advertisements
• SwitchProxy: To manage a few proxies I occasionally use
• Uppity: So I can navigate up a site’s directory tree easily
• Numberfox: Which lets me navigate without a mouse
• Image Zoom: For those up-close image moments
• del.icio.us extension: Makes posting my del.icio.us links easy
• Passwordmaker: I manage my online passwords with this ingenious extension

Some initial investigation showed that ad-blocking, del.icio.us integration, numbered linking (what Numberfox does), directory tree climbing , integrated image viewing (albeit opening in a new tab, but you can zoom your ass off) were all present in Konqueror. So far so good. All that remained was passwordmaker. I looked around for an plugin or something but found nothing. So, I downloaded the javascript version, edited it slightly so that my preferred settings would now be default and made a local bookmark. Not so flashy, but it works fine.

Now that I’m off extensions, all that’s left is compatibility issues. I already noticed that gmail’s fancy features are hamstrung in Konqueror. However, changing the browser ID to something else, like FIrefox 1.5* got everything working again (like gmail’s keyboard shortcuts), albeit not as smoothly. I need to manually click in the browser window, even if it’s currently active to get the keyboard shortcuts to work. Gtalk from within gmail is non-working, but that’s fine since I always use an external client like Kopete to connect to it anyway.

It looks like I’m all set to go. After one week, I’ll decide whether to go back to Firefox, stretch another week to test things out more or stay with the switch. In the meantime, I’ll be doing a lot of reading up on what Konqueror can do.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 1:23 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.