I dream of a better browser, a lightweight freedom respecting one. With Konqueror, when it finally made obsolete the outdated khtml and switched the QTWebEngine, we had that. But sadly it is still also a file browser, so it implements unnecessary functions and loads these. Furthermore I'd like fine grained control over javascript, to disable it, and allow it per domain, with fine grained controls even there. Konqueror has this function by default, but it is extremely unhandy to use. A slight fix of that would make it better than something like noscript. And any self respecting browser must have a spam (ad) blocker, konqueror HAD that too, but it doesn't work anymore. And Ublock would be a better thing to integrate in the browser than something like old adblock.
Furthermore, a browser should not leak information about you, with "fingerprinting" and all kind of revealing user agent stuff. Konqueror has had this function for decades that you can customize a "fake" user agent and pass on whatever you want, it was a default part of the browser. But now they removed it!!! The browser shouldn't leak any information about the user, except what the user allows or chose.

Konqueror is almmost a perfect browser, but it's very much imperfect and now unmaintained. Imagine how good it could be if all these things worked as they used to and should, and just as a web browser. To add to it, it could do things like integrating "lynx browsing" tabs, which would very much please the geeks, and it could force/allow media to be played externally and handle this in a very different way to what most browsers do, which means you could keep video you have played if you so wished.

There are a bunch of things that are almost possible with such a browser, and it really could please enthusiasts as well, by adding exotic features like that (ex. Lynx tabs), and other kind of functions particular to GNU/Linux and other *nix style operating systems.

But well, nobody wants to fix Konqueror, and it's a huge mess, but a huge mess that almost works and almost is great, and with a few small changes could be a fantastic web browser. I'm not a hypocrite, I don't have the ability to fix it..

Ps. I'm aware of Falcon, but it doesn't have the basic javascript handling of Konqueror, nor the user agent parts (that Konqueror had before)..

I prefer privacy over anything else. Only Firefox (and derivatives) fits the bill. Currently with seven tabs open FF takes 3.5GB, KDE Plasma takes 812MB.
I can get CRUX as main OS and have ~100MB used by OS, but I can't replace FF as nothing comes close in terms of data leakage. Anything Chrome based is a joke. Konqueror looks better that chrome but still not in par with FF so no Konqueror for me. I guess this is just personal choice in my case, I understand a quest for small footprint of course however I am not sure what would work:

did you try lynx? It is text based so memory usage is better that standard browsers.

What do you think of Ungoogled Chromium?

When running VPN chromium ungoogled still leaks original ip address as per https://ipleak.net/ you have to leave site open for some time for test to complete. I don't know if it is possible to completely de-google chrome. Maybe there is a way, but it is much easier to find stuff for FF than chrome based browsers e.g. good user.js plus uBlock origin with some modifications works great. Bloking all unwanted stuff has great effect on memory use too.
I also trimmed KDE Plasma and most importantly kernel. Default kernel loads all modules related to the current hardware. I disabled this option so modules are loaded as needed. If module behaves, one can force specific modules to load and leave the rest to load on demand. This also affects memory use.

Of course there are better ways to trim memory use than what I do. No doubt about it.

How about Vivaldi? They claim to be privacy oriented.

Vivaldi is worth a look. It's my favorite LOOKING browser.

Privacy wise, however, I don't think it's so great.

You can try this just for grins:

Install Brave and Vivaldi. This is completely painless since there is a SlackBuild for both.

Now load each of them with all the add blockers you can think of. Maybe a Privacy Badger and finger print blocker as well. Now dance around the internet for awhile. You will find that Vivaldi extentions light up light a christmas tree everywhere you go. Brave, however, has about zero activity going to the same places. No contest! Brave does a much better job out of the box.

One other problem I've had with Vivaldi for quite some time. About 30% of the time when I do an upgrade it wipes out my saved passwords. I still haven't figured out a solution for this yet besides wiping out their configuration directory and setting up everything again from scratch. A real PITA.

Worth looking at also is librewolf. If you like firefox this is a GREAT option. It looks much like firefox but is a bit more hardened. Fortunately there is a SlackBuild for it as well.

1 members found this post helpful.

Have you tried Privacy Browser PC? While it is still pretty new and a bit of a moving target, I'm maintaining a SlackBuild for myself, but I can share it here or upload it to SBo if there is interest.

https://www.stoutner.com/privacy-browser-pc/

1 members found this post helpful.

Vivaldi as well Brave include analytics.
FF needs to be customized to get good results though. Not difficult or time consuming but still. At the end everything is a compromise between convenience and privacy.

1 members found this post helpful.

I don't know if this is a problem that comes from Salckware or Firefox, but saving a web page in pdf format can give something ugly.

https://filetransfer.io/data-package/Omovd1hj#link
kernel.org.pdf
made with the firefox menu
the colors are very poorly rendered.
(look at the bottom right and tell me that it's not evil, it's not a fake)

kernel.org.png
made with "firefox -headless -screenshot kernel.org.png https://www.kernel.org/"
perfect

When you: Print / Save to PDF
Before Save, check the box at the bottom :
Print backgrounds

1 members found this post helpful.

Neither, this would be your settings. I don't see this problem.

marav
Senior Member
When you: Print / Save to PDF
Before Save, check the box at the bottom :
Print backgrounds

thank you, this solved the problem
I always went through "print preview" and never saw this option.

Let's ignore the VPN aspect for a minute. If I disable javascript going to ipleak.net in both firefox and chromium, most of the stuff does not work at all. All that is left is standard HTML request advertising and of course your IP address. They look essentially identical.

Since I don't use a VPN, can you answer this: If you load ipleak.net with javascript disabled in both firefox and chromium, are you saying the chromium leaks your local IP anyway? How? If this has to do with the WebRTC leaks, that seems very much addressable, and irrelevant without javascript.

When did these removals happen? In the KDE 4.x series? 5.x? I used to use Konqueror before Firefox/Seamonkey, before Mozilla had really any controls other than click javascript globally on/off. The fine grained controls on javascript and cookies still seem like it is in Konqueror when I last checked it a few weeks ago. I hadn't noticed the user agent option being missing. I guess the ad blocker is gone, but no browser really has a proper ad blocker out of box anyway.

Konqueror was nice before Mozilla really started ramping up, and that changed when Mozilla started adding features, and then got noscript, and finally uBlock. And had good standards compliance and recognition.

1 or 2 years ago, I think. First they added QTWebEngine as the default engine (khtml was still there but constantly crashed browser), then some time after they removed user agent.. Or perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps they did not remove it? I was just sure, because 1 feature I really liked was removed around that time.. I was using Konqueror as my main browser.. Maybe it was adblock, but that didn't work anyways at that time.

Javascript control works fine, if you want to go into a menu and then 3 submenus just to add an accept rule. This is not convenient in practice (same with cookies) if you by default disable all javascript and want to add an accept list. This feature could easily be made very usable, it's really a great thing built right into the browser, it just needs a little re-imagination.

The browser could be great if they fixed these 3/4 things. Javascript/cookie easy/usable interface, remove filebrowser functions, and fix an adblocker (ublock preferably), and if possible add a "lynx browsing tab" option (that you can browse pages with lynx in Konqueror tabs if you want). Would probably already make it the best browser on the market if they did that. Bonus, add advanced media options based on youtube-dl project, and make option to play media files in external programs (like Dragon, vlc, mplayer or whatever option).

The irony in all this is that ALL the big browsers (Chrome, Safari, Edge) are derivative browsers from khtml (Konqueror), in the forms of blink and webkit browser engines (forks of khtml).