Running Linux, 5th Edition - Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [90]
You can also use the sidebar for navigating your home directory, your hardware, your session history, and many other things. Just try it, and you will discover many useful features.
Besides the sidebar, another feature that can increase your browsing experience considerably is the so-called tabbed browsing . First made popular by the open source browser Mozilla (see later in this chapter), Konqueror has really taken tabbed browsing to its heart and provides a number of useful features. For example, when you are reading a web page that contains an interesting link that you might want to follow later, while continuing on the current page now, you can right-click that link and select Open in New Tab from the context menu. This will create a new tab with the caption of that page as its header, but leave the current page open. You can finish reading the current page and then go on to one of those that you had opened while reading. Since all pages are on tabs in the single browser window, this does not clutter your desktop, and it is very easy to find the page you want. In order to close a tab, just click on the little icon with the tabs and the red cross.
As mentioned previously, you can access new URLs by running konqueror with the URL as the argument. However, you can also simply type the URL in the location bar near the top of the Konqueror window. The location bar has autocompletion: if you start typing an address that you have visited before, Konqueror will automatically display it for your selection. Once you are done entering the URL (with or without help from autocompletion), you simply press the Enter key, and the corresponding document is retrieved.
Konqueror is a powerful application with many options. You can customize Konqueror's behavior in many ways by selecting Settings → Configure Konqueror. The sections Web Behavior and Web Shortcuts provide particularly interesting settings. In the section Cookies, you can configure whether you want to accept cookies domain by domain and even check the cookies already stored on your computer. Compare this to browsers that hide the cookies deep in some hidden directory and make it hard for you to view them (or even impossible without the use of extra programs!).
Finally, one particular feature deserves mention. Web browsers register themselves with the server using the so-called User Agent string, which is a piece of text that can contain anything, but usually contains the name and version of the web browser, and the name and version of the host operating system. Some notably stupid webmasters serve different web pages (or none at all!) when the web browser is not Internet Explorer because they think that Internet Explorer is the only web browser capable of displaying their web site.[*] But by going to the Browser Identification section, you can fool the web server into believing that you are using a different browser, one that the web server is not too snobbish to serve documents to. Simply click New, select the domain name that you want to access, and either type an Identification string of your own, or select one of the predefined ones.
Other Web Browsers
Konqueror is not the only browser that reads web documents. Another browser available for Linux is Firefox , a descendant of Mozilla, which in turn started its life as the open source version of Netscape Navigator , the browser that made the Web popular to many in the first place. If your distribution does not contain Firefox already, you can get it from http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. Firefox's features are in many aspects similar to Konqueror's, and most things that you do with one you should