Rekonq 2 Web Browser Enters Development For KDE

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Rekonq 2 Web Browser Enters Development For KDE

Work on version 2 of Rekonq, the popular QtWebKit-based web-browser focusing upon the KDE desktop, is now underway...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTIwMDY

[Zorael]

I'm not sure if it's because of locking resources or threading done bad, but in my experience rekonq suffers from becoming very unresponsive when it's loading pages. KDE has otherwise taken the ideal of separation of logic and presentation well to heart, so I can't imagine it being single-threaded.

It's a good fallback browser and its feature-set is actually impressive (though it could use greasemonkey support), and its (reference Qt) webkit engine only rarely fails to render pages completely. Graphical oddities such as oddly-sized elements are very common, mind.

But the performance that Chromium offers is just... too compelling.

[TheBlackCat]

I'm not sure if it's because of locking resources or threading done bad, but in my experience rekonq suffers from becoming very unresponsive when it's loading pages. KDE has otherwise taken the ideal of separation of logic and presentation well to heart, so I can't imagine it being single-threaded.

According to the blog post, this is a limitation of the current qtwebkit. One of the goals of rekonq to is to support the new version of qtwebkit shipping with Qt 5, which supports putting the ui and page rendering in different threads.

[frampone]

I'd really love to switch (chromium is the only gtk software I use) to rekonq.
In my experiences rekonq didn't really worked properly and I had performance problems and random crash (especially on old machines).
Qupzilla works remarkably better IMHO.

Chromium has v8 and a slick interface and greasemonkey plugins so it's pretty much perfect. I don't like how it manages memory but that's a problem (and a minor one) only on my netbook.

The cool thing is with Qt5, v8 support in QtWebkit should be ready.

[Awesomeness]

I dislike tabs above toolbars. It's totally inconsistent with the rest of KDE.
On top of that Rekonq neither supports user scripts nor extensions. At least extensions will arrive sometime in the future (promised to arrive soon? since years) but user script support was not even announced yet.
I really like KDE but web browsers have always been their weak spot (with the notable exception of KHTML being the base for WebKit). Konqueror always sucked and Rekonq is just a bad Chrome clone which for now at least has tabs at correct position (but that will be gone in Rekonq 2.0).

But what's even worse is QtWebKit's completely absent infrastructure for quick update delivery to respond to security flaws in WebKit. Only once QtWebKit received a release outside the regular Qt release cycle and new Qt releases take their time.