Simplified Konqueror menus cripple the app and makes support difficult

[Luke Plant]

The Kubuntu customised menus in Konqueror (Breezy) are a really bad idea. Here's why:

1. Imagine a support situation where the user says they are running KDE and using Konqueror. Someone on the other end of a phone will expect certain menu items to be there, and if they are not, a great deal of difficulty and embarrassment can follow.

This is not hypothetical -- this has already hampered my attempts to help people do tasks with Kubuntu. e.g. A friend needed to search a CD. Easy, right? Just open up System/Storage media, click on the CD, then go to Tools/Find File. Except it's not there.

2. You are effectively crippling the app -- doing this is equivalent to hacking the source and removing all the features you have hidden. Why? Because 95% of users will never find those features now. Re-enabling them requires a fair amount of expert help (in fact I failed to do this over the phone -- I'm not sure why, I'm guessing it was partly to do with how Konqueror loads it's settings, or it could have been a typing error on their side). A user will assume a feature with a non-existant GUI is non-existant.

3. You have removed lots of useful features! My beef here is to do with the specific items removed. 'Find File' is crucial and so is 'Show Navigation Panel'. Without the navigation panel, you have lost tree browsing of the file system, history, searching through bookmarks etc. You've also lost split left/right, which is an awesome feature, and lots of others. The tree view for folders was the first thing my father wanted to view, and it wasn't there. His impression will be that Konqueror doesn't have a tree view.

4. You are crippling other apps too. For example, amarok has a plugin for the navigation bar. But the menu item to show the navigation panel is gone, so that plugin is gone too.

Please, please remove this customisation! Simplified toolbars are fine - you can restore them with the GUI, and everyone knows that there are only buttons for very common features actions, and so will look in the menus if it isn't on the toolbar. But if you remove the menu item, the feature does not exist.

Question: How many of the Kubuntu developers use Konqueror in the state in which a new user would see it? If the answer is > 0, I'm surprised, and can I ask how you search for a file? 'locate:' is great, but not at all obvious (and doesn't look in a specified folder), and clearly the command line 'find', while the first choice for a developer type, is not much good for most users.

Apologies for the rant. I love Kubuntu, and I appreciate all the huge amount of work the developers must put in. But this modification is a really bad idea, and has caused me lots of difficulties already, please revert it.

[Eric Pignet (eric-erixpage)]

Before Kubuntu 5.10, Konqueror's menu and toolbars were far too complex for beginners. And for advanced users.
They were too complex and not usable at all. Simplifying Konqueror was a request wanted by most of Kubuntu users.

Kubuntu developers designed a new Konqueror profile for web browsing, much simplier and much usable. We don't have to search a command among innumerable commands any more, and we gain space with only one line of toolbars, like in Firefox.

All features that are not present in the menu any more have not disappeared. They all are back if you choose the filemanagement profile.
It's really easy to add an icon to launch Konqueror with filemanagement profile, or this profile is automatically chosen when a removable device is automounted.

So I think that the request should not be to revert to the old konqueror usability, but to have the filemanagement profile more accessible: an icon to launch it in kicker or K menu would be a solution.

I propose to close this bug and to open a new one: "make the richer profile 'filemanagement' more accessible".

[Luke Plant (spookylukey)]

I had no objection to the toolbars being simplified - it's the menus that are the problem.

The default behaviour for the 'Home' icon is to use the simplified menus, and this is presumably how most users will launch it, so they will never find the hidden features. The whole concept of 'view profiles' is itself quite a complex feature, so users will not think "I need to switch to the advanced file management profile in order to find that option". If you have two icons on the default desktop, isn't that just going to add confusion - which one should they choose?

I think it is a pretty bad idea to have 2 profiles for file management - one used for 'Home', another for 'devices' or other browsing. It is pretty confusing to the user - why should menus and menu items suddenly disappear, when it is clearly the same application? It also doesn't work if you already have a konqueror window open, for example (at least with my settings - in this case a new tab opens in an existing window, keeping the view profile the same).

The current behaviour seems akin to Microsoft's attempt to reduce the complexity of their Office apps by hiding the menu items you don't use often (making it much harder work to find anything you don't use all the time), except that the method of restoring the items is even harder to find. This approach makes things appear simpler, but does so at the cost of making things more difficult and confusing in the long run.

[Eric Pignet (eric-erixpage)]

I don't like the hiding of menu items in Microsoft Office. But I talked with several beginners who told me that they like rather the new menu... Just to tell that it is difficult to satisfy all needs: we allways have to choose a compromise.

About konqueror, I like the idea of two profiles. Because a web browser is not the same application as a file manager, functions are different (why would I have a menu to search a file when I browse a website?). I'd like to have a simple menu when I work on my hard drive, and another simple menu when I surf.

I think that the filemanagement profile should be automatically selected when you use the file manager and browse your disk, and the webbrowsing profile should be selected when you click on an web URL or on a tab which is used to browse the web.
I thought this was the current behaviour before reading your bug report and testing it (I personaly use two instances, one for file management and another for web browsing). It is not, the profile is not automatically switched and is hard to switch. According to me, this is the bug...

[Luke Plant (spookylukey)]

OK, if you just restored the menu item to switch profiles, that would be much better. As it was, I was trying to help a user, but the features they needed were gone, as well as any ability to restore those features (as far as I could find).

Cheers.

Luke

[Yuriy Kozlov (yuriy-kozlov)]

Could you try Dapper and see if the settings are now satisfactory? I don't think there is any chance of this being changed/fixed in breezy, but I hope dapper gets it right.

I didn't use breezy for very long, but I remember having the issue with not being able to find "Find file...". I think the konqueror profiles are fixed up now, except for the part about being autodetected for different tabs, but considering the other different profiles, I don't think that's realistic.

[Luke Plant (spookylukey)]

I don't think I'll have time to try Dapper any time soon -- go ahead and close the bug, and if I still have problems I can let you know.

[Luke Plant (spookylukey)]

I'm running Dapper now, and I've come across similar problems again.

'Find file' doesn't appear in any view profiles that I have. I don't know why this is. It doesn't bother me, since I use other methods, and the main KDE menu has an item for this on it.

But the other thing is I *still* don't have a way to switch view profiles. I've saved a view profile with a load of tabs that I want opened together, and the Konqueror handbook states I can switch to it using 'Settings -> Load View Profile', but the menu item doesn't exist.

I really do think these kind of modifications are bad for KDE and for users. It also makes the documentation shipped with Kubuntu incorrect, and makes it very difficult for anyone except a Kubuntu user to provide support to Kubuntu users. By removing features like this, you have effectively forked Konqueror, and things like that shouldn't be attempted unless you really have the resources to see it through. As it is bugs have been introduced (incorrect docs, the ability to save view profiles, but not load them), which will frustrate both users and KDE developers.

[Shriramana Sharma (jamadagni)]

For non-power-users, there is now Dolphin as a simple alternative to Konqueror for file management. Firefox is always there for net browsing. So there is no need to simplify Konqueror for non-power-users. De-cluttering is still valid, however.

[Yuriy Kozlov (yuriy-kozlov)]

Both Tools>Find File and Settings>Load View Profile appear on both my Feisty systems. Some documentation referring to removed menus has been fixed as well, see bug 48462.