I've recently seen the news that Konqueror is unmaintained since August, and that many people reacted along the lines of "good riddance". In this post I try to present my arguments as to why Konqueror should still be relevant today, and why "single issue" applications like Dolphin or Rekonq are not proper replacements for it.

Any protocol, any data type
Many different tasks and activities come down to this scheme: access some data through a protocol (locally (file:/), or ftp, http etc.), and present it depending on its type (directory, plain text, html etc.). Most of these combinations are possible: managing files on an SFTP server, viewing a PDF file located on an FTP server etc. Granted, some are particularly common, such as managing local files, or viewing HTML files through HTTP (i. e. web browsing).

On most platforms each application only handles a single combination, or a few specific ones; most combinations are not dealt with. Uniquely in KDE, using KIO and KParts, Konqueror can handle any protocol and file type (as long as the appropriate software are available).

Tabbed interface
Thanks to KIO, in KDE we can still open files from the network in each application. However, most people like the tabbed interface of web browsers, for grouping related pages. There is no reason, from the user's point of view, to restrict this to a single format or protocol. Opening a couple of lecture note PDFs on my computer alongside a couple of related web pages is a natural thing to do. Opening a few files in tabs from a local directory is not so much a different task from opening a few links from a web site.

Any decent KDE browser is essesntially Konqueror
Actually most web browsers support (een if poorly) local files and FTP in addition to HTTP, support PDF and other file types through plugins, as well as rudimentary directory listings. In a new KDE browser that is to support even just the same things, protocol access is obviously done through KIO, and additional file types through KParts. So it is technically pretty similar to Konqueror.

More features
Konqueror has many small features not available in Dolphin or Rekonq. Here I mention two:

• Up button for web browsing (as strange as it may sound). URLs are directory structures too; while on many web sites it doesn't work properly, on some (such as Dropbox and some wikis) it makes perfect sense. And at least it can be used to get back to the main page on any site. I regularly find myself missing it when I use an other web browser.
• File size view. This feature didn't make it into Dolphin (afaik), and the only way to access this nice kpart is through Konqueror.

Do one thing and do it well
This Unix principle is often used in favor of the Dolphin/Rekonq approach, however IMHO that is a misunderstanding of the principle.
Take a typical Unix command line:

Code: Select all

sed "s/ /\n/g" | sort | uniq -c

From the user's point of view, this does a single task: counts how many times each word appears in a space separated list. But technically it is a sequence of several different tasks. According to the Unix principle, there is no single "word statistic" program, but programs that do one technical task, and a flexible mechanism of pipes and shell commands by which the user combines them to do pretty much anything.

In our case, one task is accessing data through a certain protocol, or handling a certain file format. The analog of the pipe is Konqueror which connects the protocol handler and the kpart.

Why did Konqueror lose popularity?
I don't think that, as often suggested, Konqueror lost its popularity due to its do-everything approach. It lost most of its users when KHTML couldn't keep up with current web sites any more, and the WebKit KPart wasn't available yet. Then, because of the small number of users, it lost the interest of the developers too, leaving it with some annoying bugs.

Adding Konqueror functionality to Rekonq
Konqueror's codebase may be pretty hard to maintain, at least so was said a few years ago. Rewriting it could be a better approach than maintaining it and porting it to KF5. But starting from scratch is actually probably not necessary. Not surprisingly, Rekonq already uses KIO and integrates KParts. So it may not take too much to make it reproduce Konqueror's functionality.

Though the Rekonq developers probably hate the idea, I will probably look into creating such a patch set if Konqueror doesn't get a maintainer in the coming months. Of course the minimalist interface needs to be preserved for those who like it that way. The Konqeror-style interface could take the form of either just a few switches, or a separate "profile" where one can easily choose between the two interfaces.

Here are the main changes that would need to be done:

Technical changes: (these don't obstruct the interface in any way, so IMHO they could be added by default)

• Embed kparts for local files too. (It seems to me that this just requires deleting about 5 lines in the source.)
• Embed kparts for directories instead of webpage-style listing. (Here we have to recognize if the address is changed from the kpart.)
• Embed kparts for non-http remote protocols. (Note that HTML files over such protocols are already supported, as well as kparts over http.)
• Embed kparts for webkit-supported formats, e. g. katepart for text files. (Not essential, it is broken in Konqueror too when the link is coming from the WebKit kpart.)
• Embed kparts for (i)frames. (Not necessary, probably difficult, and it doesn't work in Konqueror either when using WebKit.)

UI changes:

• Add a normal menu bar as an option (necessary to embed the menus of kparts).
• Make the toolbar embed the kparts' toolbar.
• Add an option for switching kpart for the current document (like View/View Mode in Konqueror).
• Add an Up button (to the available actions the user can put on the toolbar).
• Make file associations and file management settings available in the settings.
• Implement various missing features (such as pasting an url by middle clicking on the tab bar)

Just one note:
Konqueror has been ported to KF5 already recently. But at the moment it can only use KHTML (which is still part of KF5) for web browsing there, as there's no kwebkitpart for KF5 yet AFAIK.

wolfi323 wrote:Konqueror has been ported to KF5 already recently. But at the moment it can only use KHTML (which is still part of KF5) for web browsing there, as there's no kwebkitpart for KF5 yet AFAIK.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Do you know where is the KF5 repository for Konqueror (or applications in general)? It appears to me that git://anongit.kde.org/kde-baseapps (https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/a ... e-baseapps) still contains KDE4 stuff. (Or is it supposed to be compilable against both KDE4 and KF5 libs? Then I have to figure out how to tell it to use the KF5 ones.)

groszdani wrote:Do you know where is the KF5 repository for Konqueror (or applications in general)? It appears to me that git://anongit.kde.org/kde-baseapps (https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/a ... e-baseapps) still contains KDE4 stuff. (Or is it supposed to be compilable against both KDE4 and KF5 libs? Then I have to figure out how to tell it to use the KF5 ones.)

There haven't been any releases of KF5 based applications yet (some will be part of the upcoming December release, but not Konqueror).
So you'd have to download the source code from git ("frameworks" branch).
https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/a ... frameworks

But there are packages available for openSUSE, in the KDE:Unstable:Extra repo.
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:KDE_reposit ... s_Unstable
Those conflict with the corresponding KDE4 packages though.

OTOH, I provide an additional repo with KF5/Plasma5 packages (including Konqueror) that do not conflict with KDE4, so you might use that.
See here e.g. for more details:
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-kde/ ... 00068.html
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread. ... eping-kde4
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread. ... -5-on-13-2

Great! I was annoyed when KF5 ceased to be coinstallable with KDE4 too. Your repo also has a lot of applications not in the regular KF5 repo, and most of them actually work.

groszdani wrote:Great! I was annoyed when KF5 ceased to be coinstallable with KDE4 too. Your repo also has a lot of applications not in the regular KF5 repo, and most of them actually work.

Yes.

But they are also available from KDE:Unstable:Extra, as mentioned, I branched them from there actually.

I'm a relative novice as a programmer, but if you decide to carry forward with this project and need help I'll do anything I can. I think Konqueror is almost certainly going to be abandonware in a year or two, which from my point of view is a disaster. If you think you can turn Rekonq into a replacement for it's functionality let me know what I can do to help.

@2ndhandband: As Konqueror has been ported to Qt5, I don't currently expect it to be dropped on the short term. I wait until KDE5 becomes widespread to see if kwebkitpart gets ported.

groszdani wrote:@2ndhandband: As Konqueror has been ported to Qt5, I don't currently expect it to be dropped on the short term. I wait until KDE5 becomes widespread to see if kwebkitpart gets ported.

Konqueror has been ported, but konq-plugins (without which Konqueror is effectively useless) has been ported with only a couple of functions in place. I'm running it with Plasma 5 from the Manjaro KDE development iso. I've been kinda following the mailing list and get the impression that there are some barriers to a full port of the plugins. I suppose it's worth waiting awhile to see if they get it sorted out, but I do know the project is short on developers and I don't think they've found a new maintainer yet.

2ndhandband wrote:Konqueror has been ported, but konq-plugins (without which Konqueror is effectively useless) has been ported with only a couple of functions in place. I'm running it with Plasma 5 from the Manjaro KDE development iso. I've been kinda following the mailing list and get the impression that there are some barriers to a full port of the plugins.

I don't know which plugins in particular you are missing, and I have no idea what porting problems exactly you are talking about.

But many of the plugins have been ported recently, in the last days/weeks:


If I compare the filelists of my installed konqueror-plugins (from KDE4) and konqueror5-plugins, only those are missing still:
adblock, khtmlkttsd (text-to-speech), rellinks, and the uachanger plugin.
Not really a big list...

Personally, regarding Konqueror5 I only miss the WebKit part, the search bar, and the mentioned uachanger plugin at the moment.
Oh, and the sidebar is still missing as well, I'm not really using that regularly though.

But I'm sure somebody will be able and willing to port those too...