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Tweaks for Speed in Konqueror (IPv6 and digg.com tweaks)

Konqueror tries to establish a connection using IPv6 when that fails it uses the reqular IPv4 protocol. So to speed up the loading of web pages just:

On Debian/Ubuntu:

add the following line to /etc/environment

KDE_NO_IPV6=TRUE

On Suse:

You could do this via the YaST2 /etc/sysconfig editor module (change Desktop -> KDE_USE_IPV6 from ‘yes’ to ‘no’) or edit the file /etc/sysconfig/windowmanager directly with your favorite text editor:

Change the line

KDE_USE_IPV6=”yes”

to

KDE_USE_IPV6=”no”

Speeding up Digg in Konqueror

With the recent Digg update, I noticed that reading Digg in Konqueror had become nearly impossible. With each scroll, the page takes seconds to refresh, making it very painful to use the site. I decided to make a local copy of the Digg page to troubleshoot. Through some experimentation, I found that one GIF image was to blame – /img/main-back.gif, loaded in global.css. Apparently the 4000×600 image size doesn’t play well with Konqueror. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect Konqueror not to grind to a halt when viewing an image background that size, but I’ll leave the task of debugging that to someone else. Perhaps it’s the way the image is loaded by the stylesheet. I don’t really care, I just want to be able to browse Digg again!

In order to work around this problem, I simply added the following line to the Konqueror adblock configuration:

digg.com/img/main-back.gif

Now the page scrolls about 400% faster. It’s still not super-speedy, but it is usable again. Hopefully this might help someone out there who prefers to use Konqueror as their primary browser, as I do.

http://www.joestewart.org/digg-konqueror.html