I have been using Konqueror as my main browser for a while now. It works very well for almost everything but once in a while I need to fire up Firefox to access certain websites. One of these problem websites is GMail.
The problem when using Konqueror is that GMail ends up falling back on the old-school HTML mode. This mode is a little less efficient than the newer AJAX mode as everything needs to be transferred through and from the central GMail servers. After doing a quick search on the web, it seems that a lot of other people experience the same problem and complain about it. Well, I’ve found a quick fix for the problem.
The simplest way is to change the user agent setting for Konqueror. When browsers visit websites, they identify themselves to the webserver in the user agent identifier. This information typically includes browser name, version, and operating system information. GMail uses this information to determine which browser is being used. When it detects Konqueror, it defaults to the old user interface.
So, the only question is what user agent to fake. At first I tried IE and Firefox, but it did not work. So, I thought that I should try faking Safari. Safari is the default browser on the Mac and it is derived from KHTML, which is the engine that is used in Konqueror. At this point, the user interface would load, but I was unable to click anything. So, finally, I faked it as Opera and voila, everything worked.
To fake Konqueror as Opera, just change the settings under “Browser Identification”. Then, customise Konqueror to identify itself as Opera9 to mail.google.com servers. This is illustrated in the screenshot below:
Sybreon Ones Nought 