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Falkon

Although LibreWolf is a good general-purpose browser, there are some websites that won’t work properly with the Gecko engine, especially with strict privacy settings enabled. For these sites, we will install Falkon, which uses the QtWebEngine implementation of the Blink engine from Chromium/Chrome. Falkon gives us a Blink browser that has better out-of-the-box privacy when compared to Chromium.

Page Contents

Installation

To install Falkon on Alpine Linux, run:

doas apk add falkon

Spelling Dictionaries

QtWebEngine uses Chromium’s built-in spell checker, which requires dictionaries in a specific binary format. Fortunately, there is a tool to convert a regular hunspell dictionary into this format. We simply need to run this tool on the command line:

doas mkdir /usr/share/qt6/qtwebengine_dictionaries
doas /usr/lib/qt6/libexec/qwebengine_convert_dict \
     /usr/share/hunspell/en_US.dic \
     /usr/share/qt6/qtwebengine_dictionaries/en_US.bdic

Note that the backslashes in the second command are only needed if you split the command onto multiple lines. You can simply type all three paths on a single line and omit the backslashes. I have presented it this way so that the command properly fits into your browser window.

Be sure that this command produces a “Success” message at the end! It is really easy to mistype either the folder name (which needs to be qtwebengine_dictionaries with a “t” in it) or the conversion command (which is qwebengine_convert_dict with no “t” after the leading “q”).

Configuration

Start Falkon by going to the start menu, then looking under the Internet category for the launcher.

Once Falkon starts for the first time, you will likely see a prompt to configure the KDE Wallet Service. I don’t recommend KDE Wallet as a password manager, so for the sake of convenience, select “Classic, blowfish encrypted file” and hit Finish. You will be prompted to set a wallet password. Leave it blank and just hit OK. When asked to confirm using a low strength password, click Yes. Note that if you instead choose to set a password here, you will be prompted to enter that password every time you start KDE Plasma. Setting a blank password eliminates this prompt.

To configure Falkon, go the hamburger menu on the upper right side and click Preferences. Preference categories are located on the left side of the Preferences window. Selecting a category will allow you to change the settings for that category on the right side of the window.

General

In the General category, I recommend leaving the homepage set to falkon:start. Set the “After launch” and “On new tab” settings to “Open homepage.”

Appearance

Change any of these settings according to your own preferences.

Tabs

On the Tabs page, you can tweak Tabs behaviour (British spelling) to your liking. Click the “Address Bar behaviour” tab at the top, and UNcheck the “Enable inline suggestions” and “Show search suggestions” options. These options could cause anything you type into the address bar to be sent to a search engine, which has privacy implications.

Browsing

On the Web Configuration tab, optionally enable the built-in PDF viewer. I recommend that you also enable “Disable automatic playing of videos” and “Prevent WebRTC from leaking local IP address.” You might consider disabling “Enable DNS prefecthing” to improve privacy at a small performance cost.

Switch to the Local Storage tab at the top of the section. UNcheck the “Allow storing network cache on disk” option. Disabling the disk cache both improves privacy and reduces unnecessary writes to flash storage. For additional privacy, check the boxes next to “Delete history on close” and “Delete locally stored HTML5 web content on close.” It is probably better to leave history and HTML5 storage otherwise enabled, since disabling these settings could make fingerprinting your browser easier and actually reduce your privacy.

Password Manager

I recommend that you disable the two “AutoFill options” settings at the top, effectively disabling password storage. It is better to use a separate password manager for storing passwords.

Privacy

In the Privacy category, click the Cookies Manager button on the General tab. Click the Settings tab on the window that appears. Check the boxes next to “Allow storing of cookies,” “Filter tracking cookies,” and “Delete cookies on close.” Although disabling 3rd party cookies is preferable, some websites will not work without them. Since Falkon should be your secondary browser (after LibreWolf), we can relax the settings slightly to improve website compatibility. Click the Close button at the bottom when the cookie settings have been configured.

Also on the General tab of the Privacy category, click the JavaScript options button. Enable the two clipboard support options so that you can use this browser easily with services like Office365. Do not allow popup windows or window activation, as these are common annoyances found on crappy websites. Click OK when finished with the JavaScript settings.

Under the HTML 5 permissions tab, set all the permissions to Ask. We disabled the corresponding permissions entirely in LibreWolf, and Falkon is our more relaxed browser for working with sites that need these permissions. You’ll still be prompted to enable the corresponding feature on a per-site basis, so be careful while browsing with Falkon. For example, deny location access to sites that do not have a legitimate need to know your location.

Notifications

Leave the Notifications settings set to the default for Native System Notifications. On any site where you allow notifications (which should be few or none), notifications will display along with the rest of your Plasma notifications.

Extensions

Two extensions should be enabled by default (if not, enable them): AdBlock and KDE Frameworks Integration.

Click on the AdBlock extension item, then scroll down to see a Settings button appear at the bottom of the window. Click the Settings button. A dialog will appear showing the enabled ad filter lists, with one filter list per tab. Be sure that tabs are present for EasyList and NoCoin List.

Click the Options dropdown to pick the Add Subscription item. Add the following subscriptions one at a time. You will see new tabs added and populated after a brief delay.

Click OK to close the AdBlock configuration window when finished.

Spell Check

Enable spell check and the English, United States dictionary. If you see a message about dictionaries not being found, go back up to the top of this document. Your dictionary conversion step may have failed.

Other

It can be useful to change the browser’s User Agent to Chrome to work around sites that try to detect the browser. An option for the Linux version of Chrome is available for both the global User Agent and for site-specific user agents. To change this setting, look for the User Agent Manager button in the Other category.

Default Browser in KDE Plasma

Since you probably installed Falkon second (after LibreWolf), KDE Plasma likely changed the default browser to Falkon. I recommend using LibreWolf as your default browser, reserving Falkon for sites that require the Blink engine. To change the default browser, go to the System Settings application in KDE Plasma. Pick the Default Applications category on the left side of the window. You can change your default Web browser from that settings page. Remember to click Apply when finished.