It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others - De Montaigne
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KDE desktop integrates Webkit
THE DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT KDE has been updated with over 1,700 new features and 16,000 bug fixes.
The cross platform application project best known for its desktop environment that is shipped by many Linux distributions has issued this major update a month after the rival project Gnome put one out. The latest KDE update features integration with Webkit in applications such as Konqueror, the default KDE web browser.
The browser itself has gotten numerous tweaks that, according to the project, should help speed up browsing by parallel downloading of content. General application performance is aided by the introduction of Kshareddatacache, which previously had been used for icons and exhibited "noticeable speed-ups".
Changes to Plasma Workspaces mean that administrators can issue setup configurations bundled through Javascript templates. This sort of feature is likely to endear KDE to systems administrators who need to deploy setup configurations over hundreds of machines.
A healthy rivalry between the two most popular desktop environments, Gnome and KDE, has gone on for years. Though Canonical prefers to ship Ubuntu with Gnome, Kubuntu offers a KDE alternative. Other Linux distributions such as Fedora, Opensuse, Mandriva, Gentoo and Mepis all support KDE as one of the default environments, often alongside Gnome. It is likely that when those distributions issue their next major releases they will incorporate KDE 4.5.
If however you want KDE 4.5 before then, there's nothing stopping you from downloading and compiling the code and seeing what's new and interesting about it.
UPDATE
One of our eagle eyed readers and a contributor to the Fedora project informed us that there is an 'unofficial' KDE packaging project that aims to simplify KDE installation on RPM or Debian based Linux distributions.
Those on Fedora, CentOS or other distros not wanting to compile from source should head on over to the project's website and follow the simple instructions allowing installation through yum or apt. µ
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beats firefox hands down in performance and rendering.
Only opera does better on my system ( don't use chrome etc).
I am now using Konqueror more since the webkit integration. It is much more responsive and integrated into the desktop than any other browser on any OS ( except maybe safari on OSX - I cannot speak for that).
Konqueror is a KHTML browser. Webkit is a fork of KHTML. It is only just being integrated now.
Ive already known for a while that konqueror was a webkit browser for a while. It was just a matter of time before they integrated webkit to the rest of KDE. Either way its not really news. But its nice to see Linux getting some limelight.
http://www.kde.org/info/4.5.0.php
other distros too
Has already released 4.50. Installed it on my laptop this morning.
I always loved KDE for it's eye catching features, but if it was more responsive I liked it more.
KDE always seemed too much like Windows for my taste.