Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

Today I heard about a Linux distribution called Linux Mint. More specifically, I was interested to read about their release of a KDE Edition of their distribution. On the page talking about their KDE edition, they mention the software that is included with their distribution. But something seemed out of place. It took me a moment to realize what it was: … the default Web browser is Firefox 2.0.0.3.

I find it very odd that the KDE-based edition of a Linux distribution would choose to go with Firefox as their default web browser. KDE already comes with an excellent web browser: Konqueror.

Konqueror is actually more than just a web browser. It is also the KDE file manager. Nevertheless, it is a very capable browser, and can often act as a complete replacement for a browser such as Firefox. When running the full KDE desktop, it would in fact make a lot more sense to use Konqueror rather than Firefox. Konqueror integrates very well with the rest of the KDE environment, which is just not the case with the typically GNOME/GTK+-based Firefox.

A further reason to use Konqueror rather than Firefox when running KDE is a reduction in memory usage. When using KDE, many of the shared libraries that Konqueror depends on will already be loaded, and shared with the rest of the KDE environment. But Firefox typically does not make use of these libraries. Instead, it will require the GTK+, GDK and GLib libraries to be loaded. This is wasteful, as these libraries only really duplicate much of the functionality already offered by the already-loaded KDE and Qt shared libraries.

The performance of Konqueror versus Firefox is a contentious issue. Although I have not performed any formal benchmarking, I do tend to believe that Konqueror offers better performance than Firefox. Konqueror has also seemed more responsive. This may be due to it directly using the Qt widget library, rather than adding something like the XUL layer that Firefox uses.

It makes little sense to me why Linux Mint’s KDE edition uses Firefox rather than Konqueror. Feature-wise, Konqueror is comparable to Firefox. In terms of performance, Konqueror is better than Firefox. And finally, Konqueror integrates better into KDE than Firefox ever will. So why do they use Firefox?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 1:45 am and is filed under Firefox, GNOME, KDE, Konqueror, Linux, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.