Monday, March 12, 2007

Cool navigation feature in Konqueror

Why does one use mouse while browsing? Primarily to click on hyperlinks, of course. Recently, I came across this cool feature in Konqueror which allows you to browse around using keyboard only.

Try this. Go to some web page using Konqueror, and press the Control key on your keyboard.
Konqueror would provide you with tooltips on the webpage, that associate a key with each link on the webpage. Pressing the correct key would take you to the associated link, in the same manner as would have happened if you had clicked on the link with the mouse. This feature is probably called Access Keys Control.

The screenshot shown here is what it looks like. Notice that the "A" key is assigned to two links in the screenshot. This is because both the hyperlinks point to the same location. Hmm, smart, real smart... :)

FYI, the version of Konqueror on my system shows "Konqueror 3.5.5 (using KDE 3.5.5)". I ain't sure if the older versions have this feature.

However I think there is a problem here. As far as I know, Konqueror uses the alphanumeric keys (A-Z,0-9) for labelling links on a web page. Now what happens once the number of links on the web page exceeds the total number of alphanumeric characters (which is 26+10=36)? I found out that only the first 36 links are alloted keys for navigation, while the rest of the links are not. This looks like a shortcoming to me, unless there is some other way to label all the links on a webpage, however many there are. A better solution would be, IMHO, to label only the links on the webpage that are visible at a time in the browser window. In this manner, once the user scrolls down the webpage and finds more links, the keys can be reassigned. In other words, the assignment should be dynamic. Although one could argue that this method would fail if the number of links visible at a time exceeds the total number of alphanumeric characters, the proposed method is still better than statically assigning keys only to the first 36 links.

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