Disclainer: KDE developer

Yeah, KIO is an awesome piece of software. Yesterday, a fuse interface was released[1] so that non-KDE software in Plasma also get most of the benefits of KIO.

And speaking of browser tabs, Plasma Browser integration allows to switch to an open tabs from Krunner directly and it works with Firefox, Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

[1]: https://feverfew.home.blog/2020/12/31/kio-fuse-5-0-0-release...

I had no idea kio-fuse was being worked on. This is awesome! gvfs (and its FUSE implementation) was my favorite feature of GNOME and was the reason I primarily used Nautilus on KDE on my work VM.

Yes, finally in 2020 Dolphin can open a file from an SMB shared folder without making a local copy, which basically made KDE unusable in any environment that involved editing files on a Windows share.

Took a while but it does work, bar a few minor issues. I have problems with certain applications not understanding Dolphin has already authenticated to a share. For example VLC will only open a file if the URI to the share contains the user name required to authenticate (smb://user@fileserver/Video).

Could you expand on this by filing a bug report[0]? In particular, noting exactly the location VLC is opening (via Ctrl+I).

[0]: https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=kiofuse&component...