Migrating from Konqueror to Firefox

Konqueror has been my web browser of choice for many years now. I still think the font rendering looks amazing, the web shortcut features are brilliant, I can customise the tab behaviour to behave exactly as I want it to and of course it’s seamlessly integrated with KDE.

Things have had to change though and I could no longer convince myself that for all its excellent features it simply fails to correctly render the web pages I use all the time – Yahoo! Mail and enterprise web gui’s for work. Not to mention the poor stability which seems to have been introduced since KDE4.

Reluctantly, but with conviction, I decided the switch to Firefox3 was upon me.  The main question was now I have forced my hand into using Firefox, can It replace all those features I love in Konqueror?

Webshortcuts

Webshortcuts is one of my favourite features ever. Luckily after some quick googling, Firefox supports it too, it’s just called “Keywords” instead.

Here’s an example of adding a uk google search a.k.a. web shortcuts

• Goto Google
• Right click on the search field and select “Add a Keyword for this Search”
• Give it a name, e.g. Google UK
• For the keyword use the shortcut name you would use in Konqueror e.g. “gg:”
• Click add

Tab Navigation

CTL + Page Up / Down – Navigates the tabs from left to right.

Once I had these two features sorted out I was pretty content with most of my day-to-day browser usage. There are however some things I really miss though and don’t see being sorted out in the near future, a list of these follows.

• Kwallet Integration – I really miss this and for some reason I just don’t trust my passwords in the Firefox password manager. Surely someone could write a plugin for this?
• KIO Slaves – OK so its not really fair to expect this from a non KDE application but this is sooooooo handy.
• Filemanager and “download manager” – Rubbish. Just give me a decent file dialogue instead, the GTK one sucks!
• GTK – It looks horrid side-by-side with QT/KDE
• Security Exceptions – Do me a favour! I know that the certificate is self signed by us, why should it take so many mouse clicks to “Add an exception”
• “Get me out of here” button – Please, unless you are going to take me to a tropical island, i dont think this really has a place.

In conclusion then, it has to be said for the all things I love about Konqueror, the fact I can go to any website in Firefox and it will just work, really is the feature that wins the day. So-long Konqueror, you rock; just with not enough stability.