Falkon (Web Browser)

★★★★☆

I’ve found Falkon to be a good balance of features and light weight for low-end hardware like the PineTab2 and virtual machines. It’s more capable (and compatible!) than NetSurf or Dillo, and faster than Firefox, Chrome, Vivaldi or Angelfish. It also runs well under LXQT, which I like to use on that low-spec (and virtual) hardware for the same reason.

It does all the basics you expect of a modern browser, and because it’s built on Chromium (via QtWebEngine), it’s less likely to run into actual incompatibilities than sites that think they’re incompatible.

You can send a page from your phone to your desktop using KDE Connect (which despite its name can also run on Gnome and other desktops), and if Falkon is your default browser, it’ll pick it up. I haven’t found a good way to send tabs from Falkon to a phone, though.

Problems and Workarounds

• It doesn’t run Chromium extensions (or Firefox add-ons for that matter), and there are only a few dozen Falkon extensions at this time.
• There’s no way to connect directly to an external password manager like KeePassXC (or Bitwarden, as OSNews’ article points out). I’ve worked around this by using KeePassXC’s auto-type feature. It’s more cumbersome than auto-detecting in the browser, but still faster than copying and pasting – and much faster than typing manually.
• Bookmarklets (JavaScript bookmarks) aren’t allowed to open new windows by default, which is actually a sensible decision. There’s a preference to allow JavaScript to open pop-up windows, which makes things like my Postmarks bookmarklet actually, y’know, work:

  Preferences → Privacy-General → JavaScript Options → Open popup windows

• There’s no bookmark sync capability, even using extensions. For now I’ve just put the main links for my Nextcloud Bookmarks and Postmarks instances in the toolbar and using them directly, but it would be nice to be able to use the built-in UI. I’ve been contemplating hacking together a script to download from Nextcloud and update the bookmarks file as a one-way sync, but haven’t gotten around to it.
• It can’t install PWAs (portable web applications). Then again, neither can desktop versions of Firefox.

But I can log into Dropbox or Nextcloud (they complain, but let me use it anyway) or any webmail client and it does what I need it to in a reasonable amount of time!

Flatpak Issues

When installed through Flatpak, launchers get confused if Falkon is already running: It opens a new instance of the program, complete with all the windows and tabs you had open the last time you closed it, in addition to the one still running.

On XFCE specifically, I also have trouble setting Falkon as the default browser if it’s been installed through Flatpak: It doesn’t show up in the list of applications for setting a default web browser, so you have to manually add the full flatpak run org.kde.falkon "%s" command as a custom browser. Adding that makes it work as the default browser for opening links, but the “Web Browser” launcher won’t run it.

Haiku

Falkon also runs on Haiku, an alternative operating system inspired by the late, lamented BeOS. The version in Haiku Depot is a bit out of date, and I’ve only experimented a little with the OS as a whole, so take this with a grain of salt. It seems to handle more websites than WebPositive (Haiku’s native web browser), but it’s not quite as stable. Or as stable as Falkon itself on Linux. A few sites just don’t show text. But it mostly works, and I can imagine alternating between the two as needed if I spent more time in Haiku!

Availability on Linux

Fedora and Arch packages seem to be kept reasonably up to date (no surprise), and you don’t have to install too much of KDE if you’re running it on another desktop. Debian stable lags behind (also no surprise), but the current Flatpak runs just fine (there’s also a Snap) unless I try to open way too many tabs.