Description
First comes the Navigator, then the Explorer, and then the Konqueror. In a way the Konqueror indeed conquered the world as KHTML became WebKit and Blink, major browser engines! KDE kind of lost its browser over time however. The main other browsers Mozilla Firefox and Chromium are not using Qt/KDE libraries and integration is suboptimal.
I propose putting a native KDE browser forward as a central part of KDE again.
A native KDE browser will pave the road for closer integration in ways we may not even be able to imagine. Some ideas:
- handle different pages/web applications as different applications within KDE Plasma
- make it explicit when external/foreign applications are running in a sandbox and the restrictions that are imposed on this sandbox
- such indicators could become standard parts of the desktop environment
- possibly these indicators could be employed with different sandboxes as well (Snap)
What it will take
Take an existing native KDE browser and position it as a central/critical application within the KDE environment. Its status would be similar to that of Konsole and Dolphin for instance.
(Or port another browser over to KDE.)
Further ideas/integrations could be developed in small steps on top of this.
How we know we succeeded
A significant percentage of KDE users will use a KDE native browser as their primary browser (at least 15-20% of all KDE Plasma users).
Relevant links
Some examples of KDE native browsers:
https://www.falkon.org/
https://apps.kde.org/konqueror/
https://apps.kde.org/angelfish/
Champions
I am imagining more people might be interested in this goal and putting it out here for that reason. I do not have experience with developing on KDE myself. There is no group/team I described it to prior.
The team is:
- XXX
- XXX
- XXX
I am willing to put work into this
- add your name
I am interested
- Julius Schwartzenberg
- @ngraham