Another fine KDE feature

That I thought people should be aware of – everyone that has ever browsed the web more then a couple of times knows that links on pages are not always as simple as navigating to another page:

The worst offender is of course the “open in a new window” link which when you click on surprises you by springing open a new window (although the problem is lessened in modern browsers that open new tabs which is far less surprising and actually useful).

Slightly less insidious but still annoying is the “mail to” link which normally looks like any other link but instead of opening a page or a new window, starts up your mail program and opens a new mail window.

The main problem with these type of links is that their behaviour is unexpected – at least with the “new window” type there is absolutely no warning about what the browser is going to do, and even with the “mail to” link, one has to scrutinize the status bar to prepare for what clicking on it will bring – and almost nobody actually checks the status bar for link targets before clicking on them; several browsers even come with the status bar disabled by default (Safari for example, but also Internet Explorer 7 under some configurations).

What can be done about this problem ? Konqueror to the rescue!.

Konqueror, KDE’s web browser (and the father of the HTML rendering engine that now powers Apple’s Safari, Nokia’s new phone web browser and a few others) includes this neat feature where the cursor icon changes when you’re about to click a non standard link such as those described above, for example – when clicking a “mail to” link, this is what you see:

Konqueror mail cursor

And when moving the mouse over a link that is about to spring a new window on you, you get this cursor:

Konqueror new window cursor

One more cool feature that other browsers should take note and implement.

6 Responses to “Another fine KDE feature”

  1. ik:

    חכה בIE7.1 או משהו כזה מיקרוסופט יקחו על זה פטנט אחרי שהם יממשו את מה שקונקי כבר כמה שנים טובות ממש לבד 🙂

  2. Guss:

    The next version of Internet Explorer would be 8: [ thehotfix.net]

  3. Eyal:

    Firefox has an add-on that does that

  4. Eran:

    KDE should patent this or something.
    What’s the add-on called?

  5. Guss:

    The firefox extension that does this is Link Alert and it has cursor modes for a lot of different actions – even specific cursors for popular file formats – but I can’t see if it supports mail links (I haven’t installed it).

  6. Jonatan:

    Hi there!
    Firefox also have a neat feature called BetterGmail that redirect any mailto: link to the Gmail composer, this is pretty cool because when you don’t work with local mail client it can be useful, also it’s load faster!

    GL.

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