Comment 31 for bug 185986

I observed something interesting. I am running KDE, and both the konqueror (still running KDE 4) and dolphin (KDE plasma 5) file managers have their own webdav implementation, which is much faster. Just by putting "webdav://" into the address bar followed by the address, I can directly access the pages. And it is blazingly fast! I would say at least one order of magnitude faster than mounting the same server via davfs2 and accessing it this way.

The advantage of this test is that I can access the very same webdav server from the same machine in both ways. Therefore, I can rule out speed limitations on the server side, performance limitations on my machine, or network speed as reasons for the davfs2 slowness. However, while the "webdav://" implementation is good to browse files, it is not a full replacement for a mount. For instance, when I click on a document to open it, a temporary file will be downloaded to a temporary folder. So when I save an edited document, it will only change the temporary file, but not change the file on the WebDAV server.

What would be ideal is if the developers of the "webdav://" implementation at KDE turned it into a fuse implementation of a file system! But I have not yet found out who the developers are.