[HN Gopher] Falkon: A KDE Web Browser
___________________________________________________________________
Falkon: A KDE Web Browser
Author : 0x54MUR41
Score : 163 points
Date : 2025-03-08 04:51 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.falkon.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.falkon.org)
| Y_Y wrote:
| > Falkon is a KDE web browser using QtWebEngine rendering engine,
| previously known as QupZilla. It aims to be a lightweight web
| browser available through all major platforms. This project has
| been originally started only for educational purposes. But from
| its start, Falkon has grown into a feature-rich browser.
|
| While I applaud competition among browsers, I think that the
| renderer/webengine is such a big external component nowadays
| (especially if you lump in the JavaScript engine) that it might
| be more accurate to say that you're providing a skin, rather than
| a new browser.
|
| Anyway I miss Konqueror and am happy to see any of its
| descendants carry on its legacy.
|
| (QtWebEngine is derived from Chromium -
| https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtwebengine-overview.html )
| okanat wrote:
| Qt doesn't upgrade WebEngine often enough. So it is possible to
| have lingering vulnerabilities in Falkon.
| notpushkin wrote:
| I'd really love to see a KDE-native browser based on Gecko
| instead of Chromium or WebKit.
| dismalaf wrote:
| I mean, WekKit started life as a fork of KDE's web engine so
| only makes sense they'd use it...
| notpushkin wrote:
| I'm not saying they shouldn't use it, of course! I just
| want there to be an alternative, too :-)
|
| (It could be a part of KDE - they do have multiple media
| players, why not multiple browsers as well? But it could
| also be an independent project. I might tinker with this
| idea sometime, although I don't have a KDE setup right now
| as my main laptop broke down.)
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Not likely unfortunately thanks to Mozilla, which in all its
| wisdom, dropped embedding support from Gecko. This means it
| effectively cannot be hosted outside of Firefox/Seamonkey and
| forks thereof. This is contrasted by WebKit, which is largely
| UI toolkit agnostic and can be dropped in just about
| anywhere.
|
| Funny thing, Epiphany (now known as GNOME Web) was originally
| built around Gecko, but when Mozilla axed embedding, the
| project had no choice except to switch web engines and so
| it's now built around WebKit instead.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I think that was a fine decision by Mozilla, even if I'm
| not happy with it. Firefox is already a web browser with
| barely enough market share to support it. Wasting resources
| on making even smaller special purpose web browsers
| integrate with the engine is not a move for a company that
| has been struggling with a lack of independent funding for
| years now.
|
| Of course the decision was made back in the Firefox 5 days,
| but back then Chrome was rapidly growing, mostly at the
| cost of Firefox. Had Firefox remained embeddable, I think
| it would've only been held back in important performance
| areas like threading and rendering because of the API
| around the web view.
|
| Interesting enough, with the Firefox for Android rewrite,
| Mozilla actually went back to making Gecko embeddable:
| https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView This design
| decision is also claimed to be the reason for them to
| disable about:config in production builds, because
| misconfiguring geckoview can disconnect it from the app and
| leave users with a broken browser (apparently).
|
| So now there is an official way of embedding Gecko in your
| application, but it's limited to Android only.
| homarp wrote:
| >Wasting resources
|
| talking about Mozilla wasting resources is quite funny.
| Do you think having a competitor to Electron would be
| worse than
|
| + Pocket
|
| + LLM
|
| + VPN
|
| + https://mozillalifeboat.com/
| EasyMark wrote:
| any proof that they are losing money on VPN or Pocket?
| That's my only concern, if they're profitable they should
| live, if they are cost centers, drop them (obviously
| they're outside core mission of the browser, internet
| standards, internet freedom)
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I think embedded gecko would have been the way they could
| answer electron, and that would have helped them stay
| relevant.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| Mozilla Positron, their attempt at an Electron-compatible
| runtime on top of Gecko, did not pick up any traction and
| was cancelled.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| That was quite late in the game, though. Kind of like
| closing the barn doors after the horses have already
| bolted.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| It was released in 2016, only two years after Atom and
| Slack and a year after VSCode. Not sure I'd call that
| late.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| By that point Electron had gained too much momentum and
| public mindshare to compete with without a big marketing
| push and flagship project at least as significant as Atom
| and VSCode were. Positron never got either.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| Electron apps were popular, not Electron itself. Even now
| there are only 4-5 dozen popular apps using it, while I
| probably run across that number of Qt/GTK apps a month.
| It's a sort of weird dichotomy it finds itself it.
| mook wrote:
| Mozilla XULRunner, which was the thing that happened
| before Electron, wasn't too bad though. It had way more
| traction than Positron. It died because Mozilla didn't
| care about it.
| brnt wrote:
| Well, and XULRunner was based in XUL, something Mozilla
| was trying to get rid of for very good reasons.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I still find the decision questionable. No embedding
| meant that Gecko missed out by default on the wave of
| embedded WebViews in the early smartphone era as well as
| the "desktop web stack" boom that Electron/CEF came to
| dominate.
|
| Additionally, I believe that one of the reasons why
| Firefox has struggled to maintain market share is because
| it's a bit of an acquired taste. Relative to Chrome,
| Safari, etc it's kinda quirky and not to everybody's
| liking. Alternative browsers wrapping Gecko could've
| helped a lot here.
|
| Camino was a great example -- Mozilla couldn't justify
| building a Mac-specialized Firefox and that makes sense,
| so Camino filled that gap instead and became quite
| popular among Mac users. When Camino had to close up shop
| following the removal of embedding, most of those users
| didn't switch to Firefox but instead to Chrome and Safari
| because those were better suited to their needs.
| Jallal wrote:
| "Wasting resources on making even smaller special purpose
| web browsers integrate with the engine is not a move for
| a company that has been struggling with a lack of
| independent funding for years now."
|
| So says the narrative. Mozilla has money, but prefer
| using it for C-Level salaries : Mitchell Baker raised her
| salary from 2.5M$ to 7M$ within 4 years, all the while
| laying-off developers and spending a shitload of money on
| seminaries and others BS expenses. Meanwhile, the market
| share of Firefox dropped.
|
| And I assume you have noticed that privacy is not their
| main concern.
|
| Such a pity because Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox brought a
| lot to the Web. But I guess this happens when Corporate
| people take over any organisation.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah playing the whole corporate game really corrupted
| Mozilla. When you join them you start to think like them.
| And then it's game over.
|
| It was US tax issues that forced them to go corporate but
| as a result of the Google deal. So they tricked them into
| going corporate.
| colingauvin wrote:
| >raised her salary from 2.5M$ to 7M$ within 4 years, all
| the while laying-off developers and spending a shitload
| of money on seminaries and others BS expenses.
|
| Seminaries? Kagi turns up nothing. Could you explain?
| bionade24 wrote:
| Embedlite is still maintained, even though it's not a
| Mozilla project nor very active. Since it's the base for
| the Sailfish browser, it even does have Qt bindings.
|
| Relevant repos:
|
| https://github.com/sailfishos/qtmozembed
| https://github.com/sailfishos/embedlite-components
| https://github.com/sailfishos/gecko-dev
| raffraffraff wrote:
| What about using GeckoView?
|
| https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/
|
| I don't know what I'm talking about though. I just found
| that and have no idea how useful it is
| notpushkin wrote:
| It's geared towatds Android mostly, though it might be
| possble to adapt it for desktop.
| bitwize wrote:
| > While I applaud competition among browsers, I think that the
| renderer/webengine is such a big external component nowadays
| (especially if you lump in the JavaScript engine) that it might
| be more accurate to say that you're providing a skin, rather
| than a new browser.
|
| Makes me think of NeoPlanet. That was an online trend that
| ripped through my university[0]. NeoPlanet was billed as the
| "world's first skinnable browser", and Wikipedia attributes the
| coining of the term "skin" (in the UI sense) to NeoPlanet's
| developers[1]. But NeoPlanet itself was pretty much a skin over
| Internet Explorer's browser engine, embedding a COM component
| of the browser into itself. So to me at the time, it didn't
| count as a separate browser, just a UI for internet explorer.
|
| [0] Alongside AllAdvantage, which inspired some of the first
| mouse-jiggling simulation software because it paid users for
| active internet time while displaying ads on their screen.
| There was a whole universe of 90s Windows crudware that I
| wasn't all that privy to.
|
| [1] I think Winamp's use of "skin" preceded NeoPlanet's, by
| analogy with Quake "skins", textures that could be applied to
| your player character in the QuakeWorld online multiplayer
| service, which could be used to indicate clan affiliation, etc.
| Neikius wrote:
| This is so funny.
|
| So chromium came from WebKit, which in turn came from KHTML
| which was ... a KDE web engine :D
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| Been using as my sole web browser on a daily basis since it was
| called Qupzilla, maybe for 10+ years as I switched to it from
| reKonq.
|
| I really like it because it's fully and truly integrated with
| KDE, not needed a whole sort of patchs to integrate to it like
| Firefox needs to.
|
| It's actually great. Not sure about the "Qt doesn't upgrade
| WebEngine often enough" in other comment (what is "ofteh enough"?
| I got several updates for it over the year) and of course it can
| be lagging from stuff from mainstream, but I think for 99% of
| users it's just fine.
|
| Granted, you can't use Chrome/Firefox plugins, which may it seem
| not worthy to some people, but there's a basic adblock and
| greasemonkey extensions shipped with it with default which blocks
| most of stuff and even you can install a script to speed up
| youtube ads so that annoying ad will run out in a sec or less.
| Apparently you can write your own plugins for it but last time I
| wrote to one of its devs the api wasn't even documented.
|
| There are some quirks on it, though, like the user agent thing -
| I set up as the latest chrome user agent for every website except
| accounts.google.com where I left it as the one shipped with
| Falkon so it lets me sign in, and yet it shows a warning about
| "upgrading" to another browser.
|
| Ironically, such "warning" also shows up when browsing
| discuss.kde.org. Yes, the very KDE discussion board warns you
| against using KDE's own web browser.
|
| Since some years ago I have a silly idea about a plugin that
| transforms tabs into some sort of Vim buffer list thing that can
| be filtered by the url bar, but am too incompetent about C++.
| notpushkin wrote:
| > Granted, you can't use Chrome/Firefox plugins, which may it
| seem not worthy to some people
|
| Why is it granted? WebExtensions is an open spec, it is
| possible to implement it in any browser if needed. (Orion does
| this, although I think they don't cover 100% of the features
| yet.)
|
| But an ad blocker and userscript support can take you long
| ways, yeah.
| Ontonator wrote:
| Granted, as in "conceding a point".
| https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/granted
| kflgkans wrote:
| What does integrated with KDE mean? I use Firefox, but cannot
| imagine any type of integration that I really need.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Native file pickers, widgets, settings system . Not sure if
| it also uses the kparts system for handling protocols
| tetris11 wrote:
| Aren't these just handled with XDG libraries?
| holowoodman wrote:
| Not really. You can use XDG portals to have native
| dialogues in Firefox, but GTK developers call this an
| abuse of portals, so this will go away at some point.
| Portals are intended as a way out of sandboxes like
| flatpack, not to plug-and-play file picker dialogues.
| rollcat wrote:
| Wow, I'm not keeping up with all the new developments in
| the Linux desktop land, but that surely sounds like a
| step back.
|
| So let's say I'm building an app like Blender or Reaper -
| I'm sidestepping the need for most of the OS-
| specific/native-widget components, because I already need
| to do a whole lot of very complex and custom rendering,
| and that _is_ the saner choice when going for
| portability. But I would still like to maintain a certain
| level of basic OS integration, for example a native menu
| bar on macOS, matching the light /dark theme with the OS,
| or perhaps... a native file picker?
|
| What are my choices on Linux? Link with Gtk, and make the
| app look out of place on KDE? Link with KDE, and pull in
| half of it with me when installed on Gnome? Link both?
| Summon Cthulhu?...
|
| Sounds like we've had a solution for a moment, and now we
| want to remove it, because think of the yaks?
| miohtama wrote:
| There is no Linux desktop.
|
| There are competing, incompatible and incomplete
| solutions across distributions and software ecosystems.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| * The KDE system for network protocols ist called KIO.
| KParts is for user interface components. AFAIK, Falkon
| isn't using KIO because QtWebEngine has no extension points
| for that (and if it did, somebody would need to write HTTP2
| and HTTP3 implementations or Qt wrappers for KIO).
| ognarb wrote:
| Yeah Falkon is not using KIO. Same for Konqueror for
| network request. In the old time of QtWebkit and even
| older time of KHTML, the webview would reuse the Qt
| network stack, but now it's reusing the implementation
| from Chromium.
|
| Btw KIO is now using QtNetwork for it's http
| implementation, instead of having it's own. So http2 is
| now also supported.
| bandrami wrote:
| Download and media playback integrated with the taskbar,
| mostly
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| That works with FF as well.
|
| Media through a standard MPRIS implementation, and
| downloads through.. I don't know what the system is called,
| but it works
| drwu wrote:
| I'd like to see the feature of preventing the OS from
| sleeping before downloading has been finished.
| thom wrote:
| Can I open a KWord document in a tab though?
| mrweasel wrote:
| Probably not... but why would you want to?
| milliams wrote:
| Presumably referring to Konqueror, the old KDE web and file
| browser which could embed all sorts of viewers:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konqueror#File_viewer
| milliams wrote:
| Those were the good old days.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Falkon's fine, but it's important to remember that it's just
| Chromium with KDE/Qt UI on top.
| Quiark wrote:
| yeah but Chromium is just the web engine from KDE with a bunch
| of things on top :P
| guy234 wrote:
| what
| milliams wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
| tuananh wrote:
| but we dont want some of that "things on top" by Google.
| rzzzt wrote:
| It's things on top of other things all the way down.
| ksec wrote:
| From Wiki
|
| Falkon (formerly QupZilla[5]) is a free and open-source web
| browser developed by KDE. It is built on the QtWebEngine,[6][7]
| which is a wrapper for the Chromium browser core.[8]
| bandrami wrote:
| Which Chromium browser core was itself developed from
| QtWebEngine
| franze wrote:
| What I want: I want a browser without security restrictions, that
| can run node.js code as well as not CORS restricted fetch.
|
| Wanted to code my own via electron, but damn, it was slow.
| crowselect wrote:
| Because you want to get hacked?
|
| Seriously. Without cors, js on any site you visit can make
| requests _as you_ to anywhere. The only thing protecting you
| would be security through obscurity.
| webstrand wrote:
| I also want this, but only to run my own apps which I build
| for my private use. If you don't assume the user is
| incompetent, you could build a secure browser that provides
| permission prompts to opt out of cors.
| immibis wrote:
| It should be safer if it doesn't send cookies, but you can
| still get in trouble for "hacking" because you visited a
| website that contained code that sent "hacking" requests to
| another website.
| holowoodman wrote:
| Not really. There is still same-origin-policy and CSRF
| tokens.
| endofreach wrote:
| You can run chromium/chrome with many security features (eg
| cors) disabled. If that helps whatever security hell you wanna
| swim in...
| butz wrote:
| There is another web browser build on KDE libraries - Angelfish.
| While it is marketed as "webbrowser for mobile devices", it has a
| desktop interface too. This one could be more easy to get into
| and help with development, as it is quite recent and does not
| have a lot of legacy features.
| cardanome wrote:
| I still remember fondly the KDE 3.5 times when we had Konqueror.
| The best browser AND file manager in one. It was amazing.
|
| Then the KDE 4 enshittification came and they had to have a
| separate file manager with half the features. Bad times.
| milliams wrote:
| It feels rather rude to the volunteer developers to accuse them
| of enshitification. Especially when it's not even true in this
| case as enshitification implies trading the user experience for
| shareholder value - there's no share holder value being
| extracted here. The developers made the decision based on its
| merits. Furthermore, as I remember KDE4 did still have
| Konqueror - though it became slowly less maintained throughout
| its lifecycle as the web browser bit was hard to maintain in
| the changing web climate and Dolphin was providing a good user
| experience for many users.
| redmajor12 wrote:
| They traded user experience for developer egos. Ego is the
| equivalent of wealth in the OSS world, just as it is in
| academia. KDE 4 developers had some grand ideas to push on
| the world, such as the semantic web, regardless of whether or
| not their users cared for them.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah just like gnome 3 with its grand ideas that's now more
| barebones in terms of configurability than macOS.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Konqueror has always been clunky as hell in my opinion. It was
| like an open source version of Internet Explorer except with
| tabs. I thought people would've realised mixing files and web
| pages in one single program was a mistake somewhere around
| 2000, but I guess it stuck for a while.
|
| Ubuntu still has Konqueror in its repos, though. You can still
| download it if you want to go back to the early 2000s UI. I
| think they're using Chromium as a render engine now? EDIT:
| nope, they use KHTML and KDEWebKit.
|
| > Then the KDE 4 enshittification came and they had to have a
| separate file manager with half the features
|
| That sounds rather entitled. As if they're doing it just to
| spite you, or because they need to maximise shareholder value.
| There are plenty of services that got enshittified because they
| saw chances to earn more money over their users' backs, but
| most people using that word just want to complain that the
| thing they got for free (especially open source stuff) or for a
| price that will obviously never cover the basic service costs
| (Youtube, all kinds of hosting, various streaming services,
| every AI product I know) now doesn't work like it used to, or
| tries to seek funding to continue existing.
|
| Clearly the team decided it was better this way, and thanks to
| the power of open source, everyone could've disagreed and
| forked KDE 3.5 to stick to the old design.
| nosioptar wrote:
| > if you want to go back to the early 2000s UI.
|
| Seamonkey's also a great choice for that.
| tmtvl wrote:
| > _thanks to the power of open source, everyone could 've
| disagreed and forked KDE 3.5 to stick to the old design._
|
| And thus was born the Trinity Desktop Environment.
| redmajor12 wrote:
| That was a bad time for KDE. They pushed 4 out with a lot of
| fanfare and it turned out that GUI wise it was a bad windows
| vista clone that broke every great established KDE 3.5
| application.
|
| Definite enshitification. They took something great and
| replaced it with a craptastic DE that didn't reach feature
| parity for a decade!
|
| I bailed for XFCE at the time, never gone back to KDE, wouldn't
| trust them to not do the same thing again.
| amelius wrote:
| Question. What modern browser gets containers right?
|
| (Firefox was almost there, but the containers don't sync over
| multiple devices.)
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| google deal killed containers internally. politics explained it
| as "user will get confused" and we never got full isolation,
| just 4 sub profiles (and never even a final UI)
| wkat4242 wrote:
| How do? I can make a lot more than 4 containers in Firefox
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > (Firefox was almost there, but the containers don't sync over
| multiple devices.)
|
| I haven't really tried this, but will setting up your container
| config via an addon like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/containerise/ and then syncing that addon's
| settings effectively solve this problem?
| amelius wrote:
| Sorry, but I don't trust add-ons. They sometimes change
| ownership, and I don't want to keep track of them.
|
| This is also an area where browsers can differentiate.
| mdaniel wrote:
| If that's your threat model, the cited add-on is MIT
| licensed so you can generate an id of your own <https://git
| hub.com/kintesh/containerise/blob/3.9.0/src/manif...> and
| publish it for yourself, thus controlling its update and
| ownership lineage
|
| I agree it would be better if one could just install the
| .xpi from a server you trust but Mozilla hates its users so
| here we are
| amelius wrote:
| I think add-ons are an added complexity that needlessly
| increases the attack surface. I'd rather not use them,
| just like some people don't like to use Javascript. I
| have a bunch of bookmarklets that do everything I want.
| Something as essential as managing containers should imho
| be fixed at the browser level, not by an add-on. I don't
| like it when essential security features are bolted on
| top of software as an afterthought.
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| Do you have a git repo or something for the bookmarklets
| you use? I haven't used a single bookmarklet in like a
| decade so I'm curious what you still use them for.
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| I've heard that Zen has improved on them over Firefox, but
| haven't tried it yet, so I can't comment on it myself
| Sunspark wrote:
| I took a look at Falkon, it's not for me. The autoscroll is not
| as smooth as the regular browsers and their adblock isn't as good
| either.
| holowoodman wrote:
| I'd like that with a portion of vimperator please :)
| sdsd wrote:
| I feel so trapped in this current computing paradigm where we're
| all running Chromium and Firefox is bad. I don't think it's
| substantially better than the days when sites were built to run
| in IE, since the solution to incompatibility has apparently
| involved moving the "browser" is really just a VM now.
|
| On mobile it's even worse, with computing largely being removed
| entirely, replaced by "apps" that just deliver "content" and
| monetize their control over the algorithm. Or even worse, don't
| monetize it, but leverage it as a source of power. Zuck and Elon
| openly say govs were doing that with their platforms, but they
| hardly seem reliable. Maybe it's much much worse, maybe they
| exaggerated.
|
| Urbit is more fun in theory but the community is just a bunch of
| rw chuds trying to get thiel bucks. Maybe computers just aren't
| that interesting now. At least, you have to be more creative than
| before. I've been doing _some_ fun stuff. Anyway, /rant
| lolinder wrote:
| > we're all running Chromium and Firefox is bad.
|
| FWIW, I'm genuinely unsure where the "Firefox is bad" narrative
| comes from. I use Firefox as my primary browser across Android,
| MacOS, Windows, and Linux (KDE) and have not had any
| significant trouble with that setup in years outside of an
| occasional hiccup with a Google property. Mozilla acts like an
| ADHD squirrel and can't seem to help but burn through their
| market share, but for all the terrible management and business
| execution the engineers at Firefox have been consistently
| improving the product.
| cozzyd wrote:
| It's strange, Firefox gets so much criticism because they
| don't pass various purity tests while Chrome is completely
| exempt because nobody expects it to not be evil.
| redmajor12 wrote:
| It's not strange. Mozilla Foundation is a non profit and
| Google is not.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Sure but people decide Mozilla is not meeting their
| standards and then switch to.... Chrome. (Or a browser
| based on chromium which is just a filtered version of
| Chrome).
| cayley_graph wrote:
| Yeah, Firefox is quite good. It's fast and gets good battery
| life. It has the occasional bug, but so does Chromium, with
| any nontrivial usage. I wish Mozilla would focus on Firefox
| and on their messaging/what their users want (I don't want
| another chatbot, personally...). The Mozilla management is
| the only really bad thing about Firefox, but I'd take them
| over Google's any day.
|
| Even the privacy preserving ads stuff is like... fine to me.
| I wish they would do other things, but I'm glad they're
| trying to make an internet monetization framework that's less
| awful for privacy. I don't have any inherent beef with ads,
| besides the surveillance apparatus around them. Whether
| they'll be able to stick to their core mission with the
| financial allure of ads lurking around the corner, though,
| I'm not sure.
| sdsd wrote:
| >I'm genuinely unsure where the "Firefox is bad" narrative
| comes from
|
| It comes from me, I hate it. The constant begging to use
| pocket or whatever the frugg its called is a perfect metaphor
| for the browser as a whole.
| cayley_graph wrote:
| I removed the Pocket button from the toolbar with 2 clicks
| when I setup Firefox a couple months ago and haven't
| thought about it since. It takes me about 5 minutes to
| change the Firefox settings to my liking from a fresh
| install. Firefox sure isn't perfect by a long shot, but the
| constant haranguing makes me a bit sad
| rmwaite wrote:
| To be fair, I think this is a misinterpretation of what the
| parent was saying. I read it as: "we're all running (Chromium
| + Firefox) is bad".
| lolinder wrote:
| That doesn't actually work as a parsing of the sentence in
| English, and besides, they responded to be with a
| confirmation that they think Firefox is bad:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302877
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(page generated 2025-03-08 23:01 UTC)