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I remember being so impressed using KDE Konqueror for the first time where the filer and browser were seamlessly integrated in one style of window -- this was a big deal and not imitated enough.

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That was technically impressive no doubt, but I think it was itself probably inspired by Windows' explorer.exe, which used to work the same way: you could enter an HTTP address in the file explorer address bar and suddenly it became a web browser.

Konqueror took it a bit further though by supporting other schemes like FTP, SFTP, and anything else that had a KIO[1] implementation.

[1] https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kio/html/

dunno if it was inspired or obvious, but I remember the Konqueror window didn't flicker or the icons change jarringly when going from filesystem to web.... That's what made all the difference.

But it was a long time ago, and I might be mistaken.

Using the SFTP KIO backend was awesome. Was super impressed being able to copy/paste files between tabs in Konqueror, with both tabs being SFTP servers! FUSE is still catching up.

I think Konqueror also supported man:// URLs, and those man pages were always nicely formatted.

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