The return of Iceweasel

The return of Iceweasel

I shall start out with full disclosure: I am an ardent, long-time
supporter of Konqueror.

> Maybe. It's kinda odd that people ended up with a webkit fork of khtml
> instead of actually contributing back to khtml or something like that.

I think this had a lot to do with differing goals of KDE and Apple. The
impression I got was that Apple wasn't always fully committed to
cooperation; additionally, they made certain bug-fixes and advancements
in 'get it out the door fashion' rather than 'make it right fashion'. The
KHTML guys didn't want to pull in every change that seemed like a hack
that they did not understand or trust, and so the two code-bases
diverged.

Of course, things weren't always totally out of sync; for example,
Konqueror started passing ACID2 shortly after Safari CVS did because the
code shared enough heritage to share the ACID2 work.

The Unity project has mixed reactions from the KDE community. Some people
are uneasy about switching from the KHTML 'we made' to the WebKit 'they
forked'. But it was pointed out that if we don't like where WebKit is
going, we're free to fork it back to KHTML.

What I love about Konqueror is that the memory footprint is tiny,
especially compared to Firefox, the performance is absolutely
outstanding, especially compared to Firefox, and the standards compliance
is thorough, especially compared to Firefox. Firefox consumes lots of
memory, leaks more and renders pages a lot slower than Konqueror does.

In years of heavy browsing with Konqueror, it is rare for me to have to
reach for Firefox in order to use a website. There are a few limited
exceptions, but it's always been the case that the web developer has done
something catastrophically dumb and wrong. And there is an occasional
site which tries to feed code based on User-Agent:, but these sites tend
to work just fine when you tell Konqueror to pretend to be Firefox or IE
when talking to them.

> And firefox is pretty secure browser. I wouldn't trust konquerer
> anymore then I'd trust firefox.

It is my personal observation and opinion that Konqueror is a trillion
times more secure than Firefox. You don't tend to hear too much about
Konqueror or Safari in terms of security vulnerabilities, but Firefox has
been fighting hole after hole after hole. It is particularly troubling to
learn more about how their political practices interfere with the
distribution of security patches. That alone would be enough for me to
slap a huge black mark on the browser's security status.

I used to be a huge fan of the 'fox when I used Windows, but after
switching exclusively to the GNU/Linux desktop some years ago, I couldn't
help but notice Konqueror is better in pretty much every way.

Knowing now what I have just learned about the Mozilla Foundation, I'm
even more convinced than ever that I didn't make the wrong choice.