rekonq 0.9: Tech Preview

Here we are, ready to announce the immediate availability for first technologic preview of rekonq 0.9 (rekonq 0.8.71). Here you’ll find a first view of the impressive list of news ready for the upcoming release.
In this post I’ll try to explain what we cooked for rekonq 0.9: I hope that, given the right testing/cleaning/bugfixing period we can provide the smoother and lighter browsing experience.
Here is the full list of news you’ll find in rekonq 0.9:

• rewamped urlbar suggestions mechanism, trying to guess as soon as possible your typed site, but also showing all possible desired sites. I just blogged about here and here and I find it is a nice improvement 🙂
• refactored User Agent code and UI.
• sync support, with a full sync mechanism for passwords, bookmarks and history. sync handler for 0.9 will include just ftp sites (eg: remote owncloud installations), but several people is just working to provide in the next series a lot of alternatives (that are: mozilla sync, remote git repo, google bookmarks, WebDAV, Digg.)
• web applications support. Why explain things when you have a video about?
• Rewamped webkit settings.
• add “tabs” in the rekonq pages, given an easy way to manage tabs. Probably not the best mechanism, but easy and fast.
• improves in download management and in the download page, showing when a file has been removed and when it really exists.
• icons retrieving fixes, now really working for all sites (you probably have to clear your favicon cache for that)
• Access keys, whose code has been imported from Arora and adjusted following konqueror’s implementation.
• User session management. So finally rekonq will restart well on KDE session restore.

Here you are. We now have a full month (or more, if needed) devoted to testing, bugfixing and improving rekonq performances. Please, help us testing 0.9 tech preview and reporting all bugs and/or unwanted behavior.

Enjoy rekonq 😉