I have always been one of those people that only uses the bundled browser in an operating system. This was IE until about 10 years ago. I started using KDE and Konqueror then. Konqueror 3.x was fairly slow and incompatible but my systems were able to handle running it. I still have not found a system that can handle running Konqueror 4.x.

The higher-than-Crysis system requirements battle of the day is http://www.airspacemag.com/articles/god ... 30/?no-ist . KDEinit4 has been churning at 100% for around 30 minutes now. 20 years ago it took about a minute to load a web page. Now, with Konqueror it takes an hour. Admittedly, this is with an older Dual Core gaming laptop. My 4.0 ghz Phenom II x6 system is crippled by Konqueror as well.

I have also seen some trends in the way Konqueror crashes and misbehaves now. Most "mainstream" sites work well, but when you start to trod off the beaten path the browser begins to start placing restrictions. In my admittedly paranoid mind, Konqueror seems to crash more on sites that perhaps, politically, one should not be viewing according to some. Very interesting perceived censorship through software! Clever! Can someone more knowledgeable speak to whether the Konqueror codebase has been intentionally compromised? Every new version seems slower than the last so if there is nothing malicious going on, the software is surely going in the wrong direction.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any good solution here. Konqueror versions are not improving one after the last and the nature of the software is such that the entire DE needs to be upgraded when the browser misbehaves. I will only use Konqueror because I don't like the idea of ignoring and bypassing a preinstalled feature. I hate the way it works now though.

Konqueror works fine here on a single-core Athlon64 3000+ CPU (1.8 GHz).
KHTML does indeed have problems with specific web pages, but those should work fine with the WebKit engine.

But if _kdeinit_ is using 100% CPU, you have a different problem on your system, that has nothing to do with konqueror I'd say.

Anyway, I can confirm that the webpage you linked to hangs Konqueror (with the KHTML backend) for a long time here and then it eventually crashes.
Would be worth a bug report I suppose.
The page loads fine with WebKit though.

You can set the backend in Konqueror's Settings->Configure Konqueror->General->Default web browser engine, or in the View->View Mode menu.
Or just right-click on a link and choose Open With->WebKit.

Please note that the Webkit backend is not distributed with Konqueror itself, although most distributions install it by default. It is included as part of 'kdewebkit' which is an Extragear package.