KDE Browswers Part 2: Rekonq

So I’ve been using reKonq for about 3 weeks now.  (Regardless of what the date of this blog post is in relation to the previous one - I usually write these ahead of time and then stick them into the queue)  So here we go:

The Good -Appears to have “Download them All” built-in if you enable the KGet settings in the preferences -Integrates perfectly with KDE -When you start up a new tab and then click on “recently closed tabs” the list of tabs has thumbnails of the sites.  I think this is great because it helps you quickly find the site you’re looking for.

The Bad -No spell checking in text boxes -When I’m typing in the URL box there’s no auto-complete.  (Maybe I missed a check-box somewhere in the preferences?)  That’s really annoying.  I don’t want to type the entire URL of my blog’s admin page - I want to type “s” and then arrow to it -The “favorites” section of the new tab doesn’t automatically fill in your most visited sites as your favorites.  You have to do it manually and the process is awkward. -It’s slower than Chrome.  The pages were slower to load up on the first day before the cache built up.  Then it was only slightly slower than Chrome to render a page.  But everything else about the interface remained slow.  So the code needs to be revisited for some UI speedups.

-Google Docs behaves strangely.  I can’t use control-A to select all the text, for example

The Verdict I’m going to be switching back to Google Chrome for now.  reKonq looks like it’s off to a great start.  It really needs to become the new default for KDE so it can gain even more love and coding.  I know there’s a new release that hasn’t made its way into Fedora yet, so I’ll be looking to see how they’ve improved.  The reKonq team has impressed me enough that they’re now on my watchlist.  I’ll keep it installed and I may launch it whenever I need to download a bunch of files.  (I don’t think I downloaded more than two in the past three weeks)

• Chrome
• Rekonq