Hi everyone

I am a student software developer, and recently signed up as a developer for Konqueror. Perhaps my concerns are more appropriate on the Konqueror dev mailing list, but it would be good to hear some points here on the forums, too.

Konqueror is currently the browser I most often use, due to it being integrated into KDE and under the GPL (FireFox is not). However, I am getting slightly frustrated at how slow web browsing in Konqueror is.

After opening a few tabs (perhaps this is not the reason), browsing simply becomes horribly slow. Pages take long to open (it seems that it it loading page images that takes time...but these are not necessarily picture-heavy pages!), and sometimes Konqueror freezes temporarily (which cannot be due to RAM starvation as I usually dont open other apps when browsing) and even crashes.

When comparing this to Internet Explorer running on Vista, the difference is tangible. IE is simply much faster. I am not sure, but I also believe Firefox runs faster on my Fedora 10 system.

Has anybody run into these issues before? Are there any solutions out there? If there are not, I just might file a bug report. This must be resolved, as I think it is for reasons like this "ordinary Joe" users turn away from Linux as a viable desktop system.

Thanks in advance for any and all input!

EDIT:

Fixed a little in my text. Also, I forgot to mention my platform (not too detailed, sorry, I picked this out of the basement not long ago):

Compaq Evo N800W
Intel Mobile P4 2.20 Ghz
2 Gb DDR2
OS: Fedora 10 (KDE 4.1.2)

I recognize this has perhaps been resolved in KDE 4.2 or later, I dont know as I wanted to spare Fedora and KDE some bandwidth as Fedora 11 is out next week.

I remember a similar behaviour when there is a lot of animated gifs in a web page so I need to use other browser in a few forums. Try to deactivate gif animations.

About crashes, well, with KDE 4.2 things was worst in my case and Konqueror was unusable. In KDE 4.3 beta I'm not using Konqueror yet.

I usually have to restart Konqueror every hour or so ( especially after reading all the posts on the forums ). It doesn't seem that Konqueror releases memory properly as it is being used. I do find that some sites absolutely cripple Konqueror, especially those with animations. You may wish to try running Konqueror through valgrind or memcheck to find out where it is being inefficient.

I suspect most of the problems will be in KHTML.

Could you please be more specific? If you know the particular sites that are slow in konqueror and are fast in other browsers please report it as bug reports. Of course, any useful bug reports are welcome too.

bcooksley wrote:It doesn't seem that Konqueror releases memory properly as it is being used.

I agree, I have filled two bugs about this problem.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196051
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194847

Anyone who can contribute understanding the problem may comment on them. Or if the problem is different file a more specific report and leave a note about it here.

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