Let’s hear it for Konqueror

My browser of choice on the desktop has been Firefox for many years. Firefox uses the Gecko rendering engine. As a backup Web browser I use Konqueror but configured to use WebKit, rather than KHTML, as the rendering engine. I’ve tried Chromium, Opera, Midori, rekonq, SeaMonkey and a bunch of others, but always found them lacking in some way in comparison to Firefox (I find Opera Mobile better than Firefox for Android on my mobile phone, though).

However, Firefox sometimes lets me down. For example, some months ago I wanted to book tickets online for a concert but Firefox would not display the seat map correctly, stopping me from being able to select seats. Konqueror saved the day. And, recently, Firefox no longer displays the video component of trailers on Rotten Tomatoes; only audio works. Firefox correctly plays videos from virtually all other sites I visit (YouTube, IMDb, iTunes Trailers, Vimeo, eTelegraph etc.) so why the sudden inability to display Rotten Tomatoes trailers? Today Firefox wouldn’t play a product video on an Amazon page either. So I launched Konqueror and it can play Rotten Tomatoes trailers and the Amazon video. What gives? They are both running on the same laptop in the same OS (Gentoo Linux) and desktop environment (KDE), using the same version of Flash, the same video driver etc. The only thing I can think of is that the Firefox rendering engine Gecko is the culprit. I assume WebKit in Konqueror is more capable than Gecko, although I don’t know enough to be certain that Gecko is the cause of the problem.

Anyway, if you want to configure Konqueror to use the WebKit rendering engine instead of the KHTML rendering engine, click on ‘Settings’ on the Konqueror menu bar, select ‘Configure Konqueror…’ and click on ‘General’. You’ll see ‘Default web browser engine’ in the right pane. Select WebKit and click ‘OK’. You’ll also need to have WebKit itself installed, of course. I have the packages qt-webkit (the WebKit module for the Qt toolkit) and kwebkitpart (a WebKit KPart for Konqueror) installed.