A while ago I blogged that I left Firefox for Rekonq. Sadly that didn’t last long because Flash keeps causing crashes.
So for a while I used Konqueror in KHTML mode. While Flash didn’t crash there, it did other weird stuff such as painting over the toolbar when during scrolling.
So I tried Chromium… gosh, that GUI is really unbearable when using under a KDE environment.
Then I went back to Firefox but being so fed up with FF3, I tried FF4. To my surprise at least its performance was immensely improved. The GUI however was not. Well, at least I could restore most functionality (status bar via an extension, real stop/reload button via rearranging). Thanks to SUSE’s KMozillaHelper application I also have some Plasma Workspace integration but FF3 had that as well, so no news there.
When I’ve read yesterday that a Qt version of Firefox is now available, I decided to try it. After all, the screenshots on that website didn’t look so bad, right?
Well, time to put them into a KDE perspective:
Default window after first launch.
Accessing a menu (context menus don’t work at all, bzw)
Firefox-Qt’s Open/Save window
There you have it: Don’t bee too exited, yet. FF-Qt still has a long way to go.
EDIT:
I just made the mistake to scroll in one web site. Half the page turned white.
My Little Blog 
I thought Mozilla abandoned Firefox Qt?
Nokia is porting the Mobile variant for MeeGo (they don’t seem to be confident in QtWebKit…).
I guess this desktop version is just a byproduct.
Just making sure, when you tried Chrome did you use Oxygen-like themes, KDE borders and oxygen-gtk? It could be just me but I think that Chrome looks pretty good when configured right:
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Krome?content=122774
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Oxychrome+(Chrome+theme+%2B+scrollbars)?content=136314
But yeah, can’t wait for rekonq to get ready or Konqueror for that matter.
Look is one thing, behaviour is another:
– Chromium doesn’t work with KWin (it either draws its own title bar or has none) and as a consequence doesn’t follow the button settings.
– Chromium doesn’t quit with Ctrl-Q.
– Chromium doesn’t use KDE Open/Save windows (FF does with KMozillaHelper)
– Configuration possibilities are too limited.
I’ll note that Opera addresses every one of these concerns. Closed source though, of course.
(Ctrl-Q quit was annoying enough — pressed it instead of Ctrl-W about once a month — that I actually disabled it.)
There’s also a click-to-run feature for Flash, though iirc Rekonq has this as well.
Opera’s GUI is even worse. It never looked and behaved native on any platform (I know because I used Opera also on Windows, BeOS, and Mac OS X).
Recently? For one thing, I don’t think there’s been a BeOS version for *quite* a while now. The UI went through a pretty major overhaul from 10.5*, starting from which they put significantly more effort into integrating with the native environment. (It’s far from full or perfect, of course, but it’s nice enough for me.)
* which incidentally meant the Linux version was buggy as all hell for a few versions afterwards, but that’s basically cleared up by now, as of version 11
You mean when Opera started to put tabs where they don’t belong? 😉
Some versions (esp. BeOS) were longer ago than others. Last time I tried Opera roughly 6 months ago. Still didn’t like it.
However, unless Opera blows my mind, I won’t use it anyway. I only use closed source software when I see no choice – currently NVidia drivers, Flash (Lightspark looks promising, though), and occasionally Skype (luckily that fades into obscurity thanks to Jabber-based Facebook chat)
I find Chromium to be the best out there…looks don’t matter to me in the slightest and Markus’s comments, while correct, are insignificant to me. Chromium gives me speed and does not get in the way and as for configuration…it has all the extension capabilities I need while avoiding too much useless cruft. It fits my purpose well.
How can they screw up widget rendering so massively?
No idea but I guess the chances are better for Lightspark to become mature (and use that with Rekonq) than to wait for Firefox-Qt.
Mostly by not using Qt Widgets at all:-)
All the widgets are the firefox XUL widgets rendered by cairo to Qt painter into one Qt widget. Firefox Qt is just a wrapper to feed Qt events into the browsers own event system and to provide a surface of pixels to Firefox.
Does the KDE integration work in FF 4? If so, can you tell me how?
It works with FF4 and openSUSE has FF4 + KDE integration available in its Mozilla Beta repo.
I’ve created a pkgbuild for Archlinux. It would be great if you could provide us with a folder “last” or something with a symlink to the latest version.
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=45473
I just wish I could get a native Firefox for KDE/Qt already…really, most Qt browsers really have fallen short.
Well it’s full of bug’s. Need a lot of work BUT the iniciative is good. Firefox need to be compilated in both libraries QT and GTK and let the people make their choice XD. Anyways where is the source three of mozilla?
Nice to know that there is progress on porting Firefox 4 to QT4! Firefox is my favorite browser, I would really like to compile it on KDE4/QT4 environment as use it as native browser in KDE4 🙂