The project has been originally started only for educational purposes. But from its start, Falkon has grown into a feature-rich browser with all the standard functions you expect from a web browser. Falkon supports current web standards and comes with a built-in ad blocker, which is activated by default, eliminating the need of installing an extension for this purpose.
The previous Falkon 3.1 version was released all the way back in March 2019. Today, almost 3 years later, Falkon 3.2 is out. So without further ado, let’s quickly take a look at what’s new.
Falkon 3.1 Highlights
The new version comes with added support for Screen Capturing. This is a much-awaited feature that brings convenience in using it. There is also an option for an internal PDFium-based viewer. It is a PDF viewer based on the PDFium project – an open-source project which was developed by Foxit and Google. This option allows you to view the PDF files directly in the browser window, but to be workable you need additional PPAPI support.
Falkon 3.2 adds support for detaching tabs via the context menu and a link to the KDE Store for installing themes/extensions has been added to the Preferences dialog. We can’t fail to mention that the removal of locally installed themes is now possible through Theme Manager.
The Search Tool Bar also received some love with this release. The warning message that no results were found has been removed. On top of that, the Search Bar shows a number of matches found on page search.
Apart from those mentioned above, some additional changes also deserve to be noted here. Falkon 3.2 comes with an added context menu item to the Bookmarks toolbar for creating a new folder. Additionally, the Bookmark Manager now does not allow you to create a bookmark without a parent.
Browser cookies allow websites to preserve session data such as your login credentials so that you don’t lose information when you close the page. Unfortunately, they are often abused to track your online activity across the web. Falkon 3.2 has a build-in cookie manager that can view, edit, delete and search for cookies.
The new browser version adds support for selecting more than one cookie at once, making it even more convenient and secure to use.
Of course, this release comes with a lot of bug fixes and many small UI improvements. For a complete list of all changes introduced in Falkon 3.2, you can refer to the release announcement.
The download page on the Falkon website has binaries for Windows and Flatpak installation instructions for Linux. Unfortunately, the new version 3.2 is not yet available as a binary package for the various Linux distributions and the only way to get it is to compile it manually from source.
