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Falkon browser poor performance (diyrpg.org)

submitted 1 year ago by Yora@diyrpg.org to c/kde@lemmy.kde.social

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I do quite like the look and use of Falkon and would gladly ditch Firefox for it.

But page load times seem pretty bad.

When I use the scrollbar to move a side up and down, it seems rather sluggish or even lagging.

And the Lemmy website interface does not seem to work at all in Falkon. It keeps loading for a very long time or forever, and once it loads the new content from a new page, it still displays the content from the previous page at the top. Falkon also makes these weird orange borders around the main area of any Lemmy page when I click anywhere inside it.

It feels like a broken mess, and since I don't think anyone would recommend a browser like that, I feel that there has to be something broken on my end.

I'm running Fedora 38 with KDE on my computer. If Falkon runs well on any computer, this one should be one of them. Any idea what the issue might be?

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[–] Grangle1@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I would switch to Falkon as my main browser if it allowed for either Firefox or Chrome/Chromium extensions (I think it's a Chromium base using QtWebEngine) but sadly it doesn't allow for that, the actual working extension offerings are incredibly sparse, and the AdBlock built in is not nearly as good as uBlock or Privacy Badger, so I only keep it around for those few things that LibreWolf really messes up anymore. Looks great, but not a daily driver if you regularly use extensions, especially privacy-focused ones.

[–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Any idea what the issue might be?

Does "The Qt Company does almost as bad of a job with QtWebEngine as they did with QtWebKit before" count?

[–] Yora@diyrpg.org 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Maybe. But if it's just a really crappy browser, then why do I see it being praised as a super-fast browser in several places?

[–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

When it was still based on QtWebKit (and named QupZilla), it had relatively little overhead, so it was a better choice for low end PCs than fully featured browsers. My guess is that those descriptions are a leftover.

[–] hunger@linuxrocks.online 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Yora @woelkchen most people do not look beyond the UI. Unfortunately writing a pretty UI is the easy part of writing a browser. Maintaining some browser engine is much harder.

So make sure to use a browser with an engine backed by as big an open source project as possible and one where the browser engine has as few downstream patches as possible.

Wrapping the entire engine in a new set of APIs not available upstream involves way too many downstream patches for my taste.

[–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Maintaining some browser engine is much harder.

And yet, when Qt Company still made QtWebKit, instead of using the stable branches Apple used for Safari, they made releases from svn trunk and then tried to stabilize it with a small team. No idea when Qt Company keep trying to make a browser module for so long and keep failing all the time...

[–] Yora@diyrpg.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So opinion here is that it's just a crappy browser?

[–] Grangle1@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I wouldn't say it's a bad browser for regular web browsing if you just want a vanilla browsing experience. It integrates well with KDE Plasma theming and does come with an ad blocker built in and the ability to customize the browser through scripting. Past that it just doesn't have a lot of the bells and whistles (such as variety in extensions) that other browsers have. I prefer having at least a few privacy extensions and a better ad blocker installed so it's a deal breaker for me for daily driving. If you don't mind something more minimal like that it works just fine.

[–] Yora@diyrpg.org 1 points 1 year ago

Well, the issue is that it doesn't work on my Fedora 40 KDE computer.

[–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I prefer having at least a few privacy extensions and a better ad blocker installed so it’s a deal breaker for me for daily driving.

Too bad KDE rather develop three(!) completely independent browsers than to just combine resources and all three are based on QtWebEngine. So there is Falkon which only has a desktop GUI. Then there is Angelfish that has a smartphone GUI, a tablet GUI, and also a desktop GUI. Recently they released a browser for TVs -- why they did not just add a fourth GUI to Angelfish: Nobody knows. Why Angelfish wasn't just developed as Falkon 3.0: Nobody knows.