Next monday, next feature. The second for this summer series. This week I need to break the features order to talk about the one absolutely needing comments and opinions.
In fact I started playing a bit with our code SSL related, to try at least to improve dialogs and warnings. And so I did. I started taking a look at Firefox and Chrome UIs, kdelibs SSL code, konqueror code (we copied in our first implementation) and blah blah. After a couple of mornings playing with my code and testing against some real https sites and a local one shipping an unvalid certificate, here are the results:
– code has been merged in master five minutes ago (rekonq 0.7.57).
– a couple of screenshots are here down. All the others rekonq related are here.
SSL widget
SSL Dialog
Comments are welcome.
Enjoy 😉
adjam.weblog() 
Does it still ask about each certificate when loading the page?
Unfortunately, yes. In fact this does not depends on our code, but on kdelibs’s.
This problem will probably be involved in my next step about SSL code.
How about chrome extension support?
no news, sorry.
You are doing great work, much appreciated.
Hi Andrea Diamantini,
Please support firefox addons first; because most browsers, they are already doing what rekonq is doing now. arora, konqueror-kwebkitpart, midori, epiphany, webrender; they are just like rekonq;
To make rekonq stand above all the small-small web browsers and to make it main stream, useful and popular and special; rekonq should implement firefox addons (as firefox addons are the most popular).
Without add-ons firefox is just useless. but with addons life really becomes easy; for example, in my case: I use a few addons:
1. Downloading youtube or other videos for a site: addons like videodownload helper, really help
2. Download manager: Down themall, is the best download manager, kget, is no where near the ease and usability of down them all addon
3. integrated web mail notifier: it really saves me the time and effort to logon to my 3 accounts and check web mail (gmail., yahoo, etc.)
4. Adblock plus addon: The ads in youtube and other sites can be blocked using adblock plus, but rekonq or konqueror simply can’t stop the “video” ads in the youtube.
5. Flashblock: ads are now literally flashy using flash, flash block has better because it allows certain sites to load plugins; rekonq should have that, allowing some sites (session wise/ permanent) to load plugins.
6. Apart from that Firefox remembers multiple users and passwords; unlike rekonq’s only 1 user per website.
The features are availabe in firefox, chrome, opera, but unfortunately, opera and chrome do not have proper utf-8 (devanagari, Urdu, etc.) rendering.
Whereas webkit has the proper utf-8 (indic, urdu) rendering but do not have addons…
I’m not asking you to implement my features into rekonq, but requesting you to implement firefox addons (because all addons are available for firefox, opera, chrome) which can simply give all the features to users, instead of manually creating “load plugins”, “adblock”, “downloader”, ‘etc.’ features into the brower, those features and many more can be achieved with addons… saving your precious time and energy for even better things.
hi asifalirizvan,
I’m sorry to say we have no plans to support firefox plugins and I sincerely think it is quite impossible to support them for nothing but firefox itself.
All you’re welcome to contradict me. But come with code, please.
No problem Adjam,
I just feel bad that there is no Qt based browser which has full features like a moderm browser… my bad, I had hopes with rekonq that it will try to become a modern and useful browser instead of being a shell around qtwebkit, but it seems that all Qt browsers will remain just shells around qtwebkit with a few features here and there. for example: arora, webrender, rekonq, and many more at qt-apps, kde-apps… these all are basically just shells around qt-webkit; but empty shells don’t make users’ task easier or comfortable.
There are like hundereds of GTK, Qt, this toolkit, that toolkit based browsers, but only these three are liked, used, and appreciated by most users… Why? Because
Firefox, Chrome, Opera – These are the modern browsers, which are not just basic browsers but also help reduce the repetitive, and cumbersome tasks (like sync bookmarks, downloading videos, rss, and many many things);
For KDE integration I hope firefox-qt will be the answer for a feature-rich, extensible browser.
Till then all qt/kde browsers are same…
Very nice feature, well done.
@asifalirizvan
Many extension are already implemented in rekonq: that means better KDE integration (adblock works and you can load flash manually (works well)), if you have multiples mail account use kontact instead +_+ I think implement Firefox extensions in rekonq would be very hard (and I’m not sure possible: many plugins are Gecko dependant).
Another solution is that rekonq provides it’s own API for it’s own plugins (still hard XD).
My idea is that is better to have a well-featured browser without plugins: like rekonq (:P)
>My idea is that is better to have a well-featured browser without plugins: like rekonq (:P)
Then I can recommend you the best addon-less browser: “Konqueror with kwebkit part”; which is 10 times better than rekonq. Rekonq has to re-invent the usability, interface, behavior of konqueror. shorcuts, tabs, adblock, popup, and almost everything is better in konqueror; the only bad thing in konqueror… khtml (most sites do no support khtml) and no addons… no flash-video download support in kwebkit part.
I agree with asifalirizvan when he says that extension support is must have; I don’t think that firefox and chrome are most used because they are rock solid, but simply because have extensions; nowdays every user uses one or more of theme to make the web experience more productive. Even Opera increased its user base in the moment it included the new extensions system (I don’t have the link right now).
So, I’m not saying that you (rekonq developers) should support firefox/chrome/opera extensions but if you want really “steal” users to these monsters and let rekonq become the default browser at least among kde users you should dedicate a release (it’s to late for 0.8, as planned in roadmap) only to this subject.
Hi Andrea,
quite impressed by rekonq so far… thank you, really!
Just my two cents: for security and stability seperate processes for tabs, and plugins would be just too ubercool.
IMHO browser-crashes, especially if the whole app dies, really can frighten users off – even more than some minor missing feature.
Markus
Hi Markus, many thanks for your words.
About security: I’m sorry to say “separate processes per tab” (read, the “Chrome” solution) is not possible in current QtWebKit. The QtWebKit improvement called “webkit2”, available with Qt5 will have instead a “separate process per engine” (a UI process, a rendering process, a JS process: I’ll call it the “Safari” solution).
@asifalirizvan, rekonq already haves a feature that makes it stand above, being integrated with kde, I know konqueror already does this, but konqueror it’s not a web browser. it’s gui has much more stuff in it, it can’t give the simple experience a lot of people want without making a fork of it which removes non-used features, but that work might be harder than doing it again, and doing it again is what rekonq is.
Extensions are needed for most, I agree, but AFAIK, it would be impossible without firefox, but chrome extensions are not bad.
But I think that before extensions, a good simple working browser is needed, for example I’m using chrome with no extensions on my pcs, and it feels great, it just doesn’t get in the way, if rekonq could do this while being integrated with kde, it would be awesome, it’s almost there, so keep up the good work! (for me the only thing it needs is a better webkit).
@asifalirizvan
Why is rekonq just “some empty shell” just because it doesn’t support your precious firefox extensions??..
If you like firefox so much, why don’t you keep using that then..
Also, rekonq IS going to get extensions support, hello!.. But chrome extensions instead, not firefox!.. Firefox extensions are too crappily made to try to implement support for them in rekonq, which is why chrome extensions will be supported instead..
Rekonq is still in its infancy, it has a lot more coming down the road if you would just wait, so please stop calling it just a shell when so much work has gone in to it!..
@Andrea Diamantini
Rekonq is by far my favorite browser now because all of the decisions about how to make it have a lot of common sense in them.. It takes every thing I love from all of the various browsers, and none of the bad things, and combines them in to the best browser in my humbly opinion.. That is probably why it is the default browser in kubuntu.. I use it much of the time already, but after it has chrome extensions support, and after 1.0 is released, I will probably use rekonq 100% of the time..
Firefox is gtk, and it doesn’t copy unicode links correctly! and it is slow..
Chrome isn’t qt either.. and doesn’t have enough options, and is controlled by google too much instead of people..
Konqueror is open-source, and lots of options, but I think some bad decisions were made in its making.. It is very clunky to use, like having to type “gg stuff” to search for stuff on google, and doesn’t have any REAL extensions support..
Rekonq is fast, light-weight, and lots of options, open-source, going to have extensions support, designed well, and is QT!..
The only thing I miss from firefox is the search-bar thingy where you just select some thing (google, youtube, wikipedia, google-maps, torrent sites, et cetera) and then just type in what you are looking for and push enter.. I use that a lot..
Any way, thank you for making rekonq very awesome!..(ﾟ▽ﾟ*)
it seems I have a fan 😉
@9: Rekonq will get a chance once it finally gets extensions support. It was announced, I suppose, over a year ago and we see no progress yet
.
@Jakub: you are right about that. And there is a simple motivation about: There were a lot of more important things to do. Bugfixing, missing basic features, real life…
We planned to work about for 0.8 (and we started evaluating the best strategy for), but we could reach a satisfactory starting agreement yet. So, you’ll have to wait some time more.
About last year announce: it wasn’t me doing it, but another contributor now not more active. It’s our free time, after all…
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Thanks for your hard work. I love rekonq!
One idea I had, I don’t know if you have planed something like that. I think will be awesome if rekonq adds support for bookmark and password sincronization via ftp, ssh or others. Is only an idea.
Regards.
PS: Sorry for my bad English.
Rekonq is pretty awesome, and it’s the browser I try to use the most. It crashes quite a bit for me (4.7.00) some days and works perfectly on others, though. The bad days I switch to another browser (kind of have to :P). If I were to request something, I’d like to know if it would be possible to create syncing in Rekonq, so I can sync my netbook and desktop.
I too try to use rekonq as much as I can. I extensively use google docs in the office, and sometimes the crashes require me to use firefox or chromium. Other than that, I am with rekonq all the time.