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?

  • Master YoraOP
    1•1 year ago

    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
      2•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.

    • Tobias Hunger
      1•1 year ago

      @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
        2•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…

        • Tobias Hunger
          1•1 year ago

          @woelkchen it’s not just the Qt company doing that… there are so many wrappers for browser engines out that are similarly poorly maintained. Basically every tiny browser project comes with a poorly maintained browser engine.

          I especially like those projects that patch major features like e.g. the extension system back into bigger browsers after the much bigger upstream project replaced that for something else, stating that they do not have the resources to keep the old system secure and maintained.