I'm not so sure he wouldn't regret it. Consider this: he'd lose spell-as-you-type in text areas. Settings would now be in the wrong place compared to most of his other apps. He'd have to put up with primitive file dialogues every time he uploads or downloads a file (btw, why doesn't Firefox in Linux know about ~/Desktop for downloading? It exists in both KDE and GNOME (and others too I believe) so really there is no excuse). He'd probably have trouble printing. Heck, he'd lose his clear location bar and Up buttons.

Remember - he's not switching away from IE, in which case there is no downside but rather away from Konqueror while using KDE. Not quite the same thing.

David, I've used Konquror. I'm confident he won't regret it.

Also, have you used Firefox recently? Firefox downloads to my Linux desktop just fine on Suse and Fedora. I have zero trouble printing and the results of long pages seem quite a bit better to me in Firefox than they do in Konqueror or Opera on Linux. You can get address field clear and up extensions at u.m.o in about 5 seconds (not to mention scores of other awesome extensions that can make Konqueror look like a child's toy). You can even get a text area spellchecker.

Firefox kicks Konqueror's butt, even for lots of diehard KDE users.

--Asa

Download to ~/Desktop is really fricking annoying. I use my desktop for absolutely nothing. If I wanted to be reminded of my Windows installation then I'd just boot into it. Everything I download goes into ~/

The only reason I don't use My Documents in Windows is because not everything I download is a "document" and I don't like having stuff in the "wrong" place, and that only leaves the desktop in Windows (or the root of the C drive, which is just stupid). I hate a cluttered desktop.

Asa, have you used Konqueror recently?

I love Mozilla and Firefox, but Konqueror 3.3 is really a fine browser and much better integrated in KDE than Firefox. It also starts faster than Firefox and uses less memory (remember, Mozilla and Firefox have huge memory leaks, I hope they will be fixed some time).

Altogether, Firefox is still the better browser, but please don't be so arrogant and treat Konqueror like the obsolete IE.

--Thomas

Thomas, yes, absolutely I've used Konqueror recently. It's got some fine integration with KDE, but that doesn't mean a lot to me. It's so overloaded with stuff I don't need and I often can't find the stuff I do need either because it's burried in some odd place or the feature doesn't exist.

I use Opera, Konqueror, Safari, and IE somewhat regularly. If I wasn't using them I wouldn't be making comparisons. All of the browsers I use (and that includes a few more than listed above) have some features or behaviors that I like, but none of them in total beat Firefox for me.

An example, I like how much of the web I can view in IE. It beats Firefox with that two or three percent of pages that I view which were designed for IE specifically. Is that enough to make me recommend IE? Heck no. Another; I like some of the integration that Konqueror offers with KDE, but I don't care much for KDE so that integration isn't a huge benefit for me. My web browser doesn't need to be fully featured file browser or a universal document viewing tool. It just needs to make browsing the web the best possible experience.

--Asa

Asa,

> It's got some fine integration with KDE, but that doesn't mean a lot to me.

Maybe this means not a lot to you, but honestly, do you really use Linux/Unix or KDE for your everyday work or do you start it only a couple of days in the month to do some tests with the Unix version of Firefox and other browsers?

One examples for the bad integration of Firefox in Linux: Click on a mailto: link in Firefox. What happens? Nothing! There isn't even an option for the standard MUA in Firefox.

> All of the browsers I use (and that includes a few more than listed above)
> have some features or behaviors that I like, but none of them in total beat
> Firefox for me.

I agree with you, I'm a Mozilla user and supporter since Milestone 12, until I switched to Phoenix 0.2 and I use Firefox 95% of the time, but...

> My web browser doesn't need to be fully featured file browser or a universal
> document viewing tool.

... isn't it useful to have web-related stuff integrated into the browser, like a real ftp-client for example? With Konqueror I can download, upload and edit files on the ftp-server, even MSIE is able to do that. And that's not all, Konqueror is also able to access SFTP or WebDav-Server, simply with sftp://, webdav:// or webdavs:// and if you want to access some local files, you don't have to switch to another tool.

> It just needs to make browsing the web the best possible experience.

There is one really important thing, that makes Firefox and Mozilla not the best possible experience in web browsing: The memory leaks. After some hours of extensive browsing, Firefox eats all of my 512MB RAM and also the 500MB swap. When this happens, Firefox and the whole system is very unresponsive and Firefox hardly frees any memory, even when I close all tabs until I quit the program. This is really annoying and isn't fixed for years.

--Thomas

Help! I can't get anything to print correctly via Firefox. I have to resort to the evil internet explorer to print anything. I am not particularly computer savvy but I can't seem to find an incorrect setting or anything like that. Any help would be appreciated.