One of the drawbacks of using a non-mainstream browser is that it is often not supported. For example, I’ve just been rejected by the MyUA portal for using Konqueror, a web-browser/file-manager for the K Desktop Environment (KDE) on Linux systems.
Another disadvantage — though perhaps this is more a disadvantage of using Linux? — is that extensions (and other functionality) are harder for me to get working. I wanted to view a site that required Adobe Flash. I had no problems installing Flash according to Adobe’s instructions; however, those instructions installed Flash into a Mozilla-related directory, and I’m not sure how to get Konqueror to now acknowledge it.
However, Konqueror is neat in how it is integrated with the rest of KDE. If you find, say, a PDF file that you’d like to keep, you can simply click-and-drag it to your desktop (or to whichever folder you’d like to keep it in). Or, if you’d like to open such-and-such a file (that you’ve found on the Web), you can click-and-drag it onto the icon for your preferred application. For example, rather than open your HTML document in the browser you’re using, you might want to open it in an HTML editor like Amaya; with Konqueror, it’s easily done. Uploading is just as easy: click-and-drag the file icon from your desktop into your input field, and all the location information is put there automatically.
That I can see, Konqueror offers only a handful of extensions, something that Firefox excels at — or, better to say, that its users excel at. Maybe there’s a massive Konqueror community, coming up with extensions, but the seem to be flocking around Firefox instead. I dunno.
Opera is not bad. I’ve browsed its widgets, and they look like they’re not only fun, but functional, too. Though perhaps not so weighted toward practical functionality as Firefox’s extensions… I have to look through several pages before finding something that looks worth downloading. Opera did come up with “Speed Dial” — though somebody has now emulated that for Firefox as an extension.
My recollections from playing with Opera before are that (1) I couldn’t understand the difference between the “one-arrow” back button and the “two-arrow” back button (which could doubtless be solved by a little patient reading), and (2) it would not keep my bookmarks in the order I wanted them. However, that was back in the Opera 6 and 7 days, so perhaps it’s worth a shot.
I think that “Customizing your Firefox browser with extensions” would make a good part of this lesson in the future.
Read Full Post »
