[jle17]

> It used to be KDE's file manager and web browser all in one app.

It goes further than that. It's pretty much everything in one app. KIOs accesses stuff and KParts shows it. Since many applications expose their functionality using those, it can show whatever content they support and browse it as a filesystem when it's possible.

Web browsing is just KIO doing http and a KPart showing the page. File management is just the file (or smb or sftp or whatever) KIO and the Dolphin KPart. The Kate KPart is used in both cases to either view local text files or web pages source.

But there are others and you can do any combination, including some cool ones.

You can go to man:// or info:// to view man/info pages.

The Akonadi KIO from the PIM suite can be used to browse remote mail or calendar accounts and extract data.

It even used to be possible to use magnet links in HTML (like in <video src="magnet:...">) with kio-magnet or to browse mysql databases and use applications to edit content in cells with libferris, although I don't think those are currently maintained.