Hello guys, being a long time Linux user and Debian user, I've grown accustomed to using iceweasel during my gnome times.
Since last year I've jumped on to the KDE amazingness and didn't look back.
Things that I like most in KDE is the advanced configuration available and how neatly everything integrates so well in the desktop.
So if you've been around to KDE and Iceweasel, you know integration isn't the best part.
Lately I've been noticing a significant drop in performance while using iceweasel.
Anyway, I want to know how do you fare using Konqueror as your default browser, if there are notciable compatiblity issues, must-use plugins, how to get plugins (the ones from firefox are compatible right?), share bookmarks and everything else.

As you can see this mostly a general non-specific question on how you use this KDE app, any input is welcome.

Apart from that I just noticed that flash is showing different hue for colors, for example youtube video shows blue man, very weird.

Konqueror does have support for Mozilla (NPAPI) plugins, yes. It doesn't support Firefox addons.

In regards to the flash colours though - that is unlikely to be the fault of Iceweasel... it is more likely a bad reaction between compositing and flash. Have you got accelerated graphics enabled in the flash settings?

bcooksley wrote:Konqueror does have support for Mozilla (NPAPI) plugins, yes. It doesn't support Firefox addons.

In regards to the flash colours though - that is unlikely to be the fault of Iceweasel... it is more likely a bad reaction between compositing and flash. Have you got accelerated graphics enabled in the flash settings?

Hey there bcooksley, flash works quite fine in iceweasel, color is alright, its only in konqueror it got this blue tint on.
Maybe its using a different flash if thats possible? I only know that I'm using the non-free adobe package.
Also couldn't find any settings for flash, right clicking the box and 'global settings' only shows me unrelated stuff like, like mic and privacy.
Maybe this explains why iceweasel is being such a cpu hogger.

Anyway, I would like to know your experience with konqueror in general.

I'm afraid I don't use Konqueror
In terms of the plugin being used, you can check in Konqueror > Settings > Configure Konqueror > Plugins > Plugins to see what plugins Konqueror is aware of.

I've been experiencing the problem with the youtube video hues for some time, but just haven't bothered reporting it.
Doing some testing, I found the problem in all of the qt webkit-based browsers I have installed (konqueror - khtml and webkit, rekonq, arora, qupzilla), and not in firefox or chromium. Switching to use html5 video also displays the hues normally (go to youtube.com/html5 to switch - may not work for all videos or for all konqueror installations - see this bug)
Checking plugins, konqueror is using the same flash plugin that firefox uses.
I don't remember when I started getting the problem, but I think it was in the last couple of years, possibly when I upgraded to ubuntu 12.04.

airdrik wrote:I've been experiencing the problem with the youtube video hues for some time, but just haven't bothered reporting it.

So you too have the issue but haven't found any solution. I find it very distracting.
At least its already reported and we can expect to be fixed sometime.

What I've noticed, Konqueror is way smoother overall than Firefox, but sometimes has issues with flash, even not playing or crashing.
Firefox is being a constant cpu hogger, having a constant 20% usage, which means about 90% on one of my cores. Which also leaves the cpu temperature around ~10°C higher then idle.

This and the integration with is the main reason why I'd like to switch browser after years of using solely Firefox( iceweasel).

Unfortunately i've no idea why Flash is affected in this way. Could someone try to reproduce using KHTML in Konqueror? If Webkit is installed, then it will be preferred by default.

bcooksley wrote:Unfortunately i've no idea why Flash is affected in this way. Could someone try to reproduce using KHTML in Konqueror? If Webkit is installed, then it will be preferred by default.

Hey, thanks for taking the interest, I can reproduced this with KHTML and Webkit. Just out of curiosity, but webkit is supposedly the better one right?
I've also observed one funny behavior, when playing embedded videos they will play normally, even the in-video ads from youtube, only the main video is hued colored. It seems too this only affects youtube videos and other flash sites. Maybe this is relevant with newer engine that youtube is using?

Interesting. Can you check to see if HTML5 video is enabled for Konqueror on Youtube?

gfurst wrote:Hey, thanks for taking the interest, I can reproduced this with KHTML and Webkit. Just out of curiosity, but webkit is supposedly the better one right?

Well, I guess you can say that, yes. WebKit actually started as fork of KHTML by Apple for their Safari browser, and has been improved a lot by them.

I prefer KHTML, but some sites don't work well/have problems with it, so I have to switch to WebKit then (easy to do in the "View" menu, but I would really like to be able to configure which engine to use on a website basis, much like the javascript, cookies and user-agent spoofing.)

I've also observed one funny behavior, when playing embedded videos they will play normally, even the in-video ads from youtube, only the main video is hued colored. It seems too this only affects youtube videos and other flash sites. Maybe this is relevant with newer engine that youtube is using?

Well, youtube (with flash) works fine here, in both KHTML and WebKit on my radeon system.

I do remember that flash-player showed wrong colors if hardware acceleration was turned on when using the propietary nvidia driver some time ago.
This is working now in openSUSE again since somee time, but I'm not sure whether the fix was in flash player itself, the nvidia driver, or in any other software that's involved (libvdpau e.g. I think).

But this issue should affect _all_ browsers, if they use the same flash player. (it was not a browser bug)

Disabling hardware acceleration should help.
Probably you have disabled it in iceweasel/Firefox? That would explain why it uses more CPU...
A side-note: you have to right-click on a youtube/flash video and choose "Settings", then you should see the option to enable/disable hardware acceleration. "Global Settings" does not include anything about "Hardware acceleration", as you noted.

PS: I now saw the "enable_flash_uv_swap" option in /etc/vdpau_wrapper.cfg . Maybe try changing this, it sounds related to this issue.
Might depend on your version of libvdpau though.

wolfi323 wrote:Disabling hardware acceleration should help.
Probably you have disabled it in iceweasel/Firefox? That would explain why it uses more CPU...
A side-note: you have to right-click on a youtube/flash video and choose "Settings", then you should see the option to enable/disable hardware acceleration. "Global Settings" does not include anything about "Hardware acceleration", as you noted.

I tried this (after switching back to the default youtube viewer), and got the normal coloration. I don't pay much attention to CPU utilization (having a pretty beefy developer machine, I only notice if something starts using all 8 cores which generally doesn't happen)

Enabling/disabling this in Firefox had no effect.

(fyi, I have an nvidia card, using the proprietary driver)

I assume youtube does not use flash in firefox anymore (but html5 video) at all.
The blue color in flash is indeed because of hardware acceleration (vdpau) invocation. There's a workaround[1] in libvdpau (flash is simply broken) but it requires a certain commandline structure to apply - this could fail with the flash wrapper in konqueror?

[1] http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announ ... 02066.html

Hey guys thanks again, and sorry for taking way too long to reply here.
Now that you mentioned how to disable hardware accel, it indeed does work in proper colors. Thanks
Any other stuff from vdpau or anything you want me to test on?

The CPU thingy really isn't a issue too, I have AMD six-core and its smooth, but Iceweasel is always hogging up at least one core, this keeps the average temperature of the cpu a 10-15°C higher, this happens all the time even without youtube videos.

On another note, with the color issue solved I still would like suggestions on everyday konqueror usage, it is much snappier, opens files quicker and dont forget the overall integration with kde. ( the file picker really is something)