Rekonq 0.4.0 with Ad-Blocker and Plugin Controller

Mar 18, 2010

Marcel Hilzinger

Based on the Webkit engine, the KDE browser Rekonq concentrates on providing the best possible web experience. Version 0.4.0 comes with a variety of new features.

A new tab displays favorites, history and bookmarks

Andrea Diamanti has released a new version of his Webkit engine, Rekonq. New features include an ad-blocker, password controller and support for kwallet, FTP and file handling and an option that enables Flash and other media plugins to be loaded when needed.

Default browser for KDE?

Most Rekonq fans would like to see the slimline browser as standard in KDE 4.5 or 4.6. For this to happen, the former one-man project has to improve its integration into the KDE community. This is why Andrea Diamanti will soon be speaking with the KDE Project to get his codebase transferred from the Playground repository to KDE Extragear. The move also complies with a condition laid down by the openSUSE project.

Many KDE developers appear doubtful if Rekonq could ever serve as a true replacement for Konqueror. The Webkit browser has no KIO slave support and besides, no one inside KDE really wants to maintain two browsers.

Comments

Rekonq

Jonathan Archer
Sometimes pretty cool things happen and yet almost nobody knows about them. One of the coolest things I came to learn recently is the development of web browser rekonq. Like Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari, rekonq is based on WebKit, which is itself a derivative of KHTML, the engine behind Konqueror. I’ve always admired WebKit-based browsers for the speed at which they render HTML. To my disappointment, rekonq wasn’t quite able to live up to the performance of Konqueror or even Firefox 3.5 in the speed test at scragz.com, but it was still certainly acceptable. This site http://www.florist-flowers-roses-delivery.com/ was developed with Rekonq users in mind.
Konquer's better anyway

molecule-eye
Rekonq is a decent browser but there's no point in developing two browsers. As of now, Konqueror does a better job, albeit slower, with page compatibility and other things.

It would be nice if Rekonq got more developers so that it could be usable as a primary browser, without recourse to Firefox, Chrome or Opera for "problematic" sites. The same could be said for Konqueror.