Gecko-based K-Meleon 0.9 browser Released

Fylfot writes "After a long time in development, version 0.9 of the Gecko-based K-Meleon web browser for Windows has been released. K-Meleon is the geekier, more configurable, lighter-weight (XULless), speedier twin of Firefox. When 1.0 comes out, Microsoft may have another reason to worry about Internet Explorer marketshare. Also reported on Chip Online and MozillaZine."

Comments

Geekier?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hardly consider something that tries to look like IE and that is Windows only to be geekier.

Re:Geekier?

[superswede]

Mirror (should be) at http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/ce21e880642f9d797 bad7f2e541cdc38/index.html

Re:Geekier?

[Anonymous Coward]

what kind of troll of this? :) That was the original release from more than two years ago with the IE skin.
There are screenshots of 0.9 here.
Anyway, you can customize the appearance... part of the geekier.

Re:Geekier?

[b1scuit]

Turns out, 640k isn't enough.

Re:Geekier?

[JPriest]

Try kmeleon.sourceforge.net and here is the download link.

Re:Geekier?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can customize Firefox, too. Now, you'll say "But that requires hacking XUL!" Well, K-Meleon is claiming to be geekier, not easier.

Also, those screenshots are horrible. The UI is totally non-standard. Why would anyone use that?

Re:Geekier?

[ArsonSmith]

"Linux would be massive on the desktop."

Have you taken a look at top lately? hi M while it is running and you'll see Linux is massive on the desktop.

Re:Geekier?

[jersey_emt]

"Also, those screenshots are horrible. The UI is totally non-standard. Why would anyone use that?" BECAUSE it's totally non-standard.

Re:Geekier?

[jaavaaguru]

Office XP's UI is non-standard. Office 2004's UI is non-standard. Visual Studio .Net's UI is non-standard. Is there even a standard look on Windows XP? Appearance of buttons, toolbars, scrollbars, mouse-over effects all seem to be different each time MS brings a new application out. Compare that to something like KDE. Windows people must be used to non-standard by now. As should Linux users who use apps from more than one desktop environment. Then there's Aqua vs the shiny metal-looking apps on OSX...

Re:Geekier?

[fm6]

...but if I were representative of 99% of the population, Linux would be massive on the desktop.

You've put your finger on the number one blind spot in the desktop wars. Most geeks just can't seem to grasp that they are not typical computer users. This has always been a source of conflict between the two main computer user communities: people who live and breathe computing, and the great mass of people who see computers as nothing but tools. It's always been a bad thing, but it's paticularly bad when geeks actually reinforce the Microsoft monopoly by refusing to understand the needs of the people who are forced to used Microsoft technology.

And that's what's happening right now in the browser war. You'd think that IE users would be jumping ship in droves, what with the spyware thing being so thoroughly out of control. But it's not happening, and I think the geek/nongeek cultural gap is a big reason.

Re:Geekier?

[TerminalInsanity]

Yes, because as we all know, geekness comes from using the L1nuX Operating system and if it looks remotly like sometihng Microsoft has done, it is obviously flawed, useless, and üngeek...

Anyways, apart from that, It does look promising. And considering its visual similaritys to IE, it does pose a threat, because its alot easier to get used to, then say, Opera or Mozilla... Plus tabbed browsing!! (Why hasent MS added a feature like this yet... they have it in practicly every MS Office app...)

Anyways, Its downloading now, and i'll give it a shot... just because its not skinned to look l33t doesnt make it a bad app...

Re:Geekier?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have missed the "Sourceforge" logo.

Preeety geeky.

Re:Geekier?

[eugene ts wong]

This has always been a source of conflict between the two main computer user communities: people who live and breathe computing, and the great mass of people who see computers as nothing but tools.

I totally agree. That's why I think that Gnome and KDE should focus on 2 diametrically opposed groups. Gnome should focus on expert computer users and KDE should focus on those who see computers as a tool. I don't understand why both keep going for the same market share.

On an unrelated note, I love KDE and recommend it for anybody who has work to get done.

Re:Geekier?

[yasth]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/dnwue/html/welcome.asp Never ask a hypothetical question that can be answered ;)

Re:Geekier?

[Commander Trollco]

I predict that, because everyone here has grown so attached to Firefox, everyone will attack the submitters' "geekier" claim and mindlessly defend Firefox without even bothering to try K-Meleon, which really is faster and more configurable. Instead of actually discussing K-Meleon, the discussion will be about defending Firefox, because, for some reason, geeks really hate change or when the things they're used to get criticized or bested. Note that not all of you are like this--but a large majority.

It's totally pointless for Firefox to re-implement its own widgets when I have a GUI that already provides those to apps for a reason! I switched to Opera long ago because it takes up half the memory and works at twice the speed. Cross-platform compatibility, you say? Opera happily exists on multiple platforms while still using native widgets. For crying out loud, Firefox even has its own generic string class! Unless the Mozilla/Firefox developers are intent on constructing their own OS, they should stick to just being a native browser on whichever platform of choice. Otherewise, Mozilla/Firefox will continue to be slower than they should be and will continue to take up ungodly huge amounts of RAM when they shouldn't. And most people will continue to defend it just because they don't like Microsoft and have adopted Firefox as their little badge of rebellion. Sheesh.

Re:Geekier?

[shaitand]

Last I checked people ARE switching to firefox in droves. EVERYTHING starts out by being used by a more tech oriented crowd and then filters out to the ignorant masses.

In the case of firefox, it's already infiltrated the ignorant masses who believe they are part of the tech crowd (Microsoft "Tech"s, MCSE's, some college students, etc). Once something has that level of penetration it's general acceptance is a given.

I'll give you a clue, with some exceptions, the ignorant masses stay ignorant and choose not to learn for one reason. The reason is that people like to do things they are good at, and when you lack mental firepower learning something new becomes a chore.

We geeks don't want to accept this, we try studying usability and such. Ultimately however, it turns out that no matter how easy the software is to use, most people can't handle it. This means they use what the nearest computer literate individual sets up for them and is willing to help them use.

Re:Geekier?

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean if it WERE geekier, it's the subjunctive

Re:Geekier?

[fm6]

Last I checked people ARE switching to firefox in droves.

Where did you check? Firefox usage is still something like 3%. Reports vary, but I've never seen anybody claim much more than that.

I'd be encouraged if there were even a tiny trend, like a percentage point every couple of months. But I don't see it.

I'm not sure how to respond to the rest of your post, which kind of contradicts itself. All I can say is that your patronizing attitude ("ignorant masses"?) is not helpful.

Re:Geekier?

[jaavaaguru]

I know the guidlines exist, but it's only a standard if people follow it. Would help if the vendor followed their own guidelines.

Re:Geekier?

[Anonymous Coward]

no, they run Linux. Nice troll though.

Re:Geekier?

[shaitand]

You need to look at how much Firefox usage has grown since the first of the recent recommendations by US Cert to switch browsers compared to the last several years. And last I checked 3% of the browser market IS droves by any standard, it's also the lowest number I've seen. When your talking about a crowd the size of the browser market 1% is a HUGE variation.

"which kind of contradicts itself."

In what manner? Exactly what in my post actually contradicts myself.

"your patronizing attitude ("ignorant masses"?)"

I fail to see anything patronizing about refering to the ignorant masses. When it comes to neuro-surgery most are ignorant, I don't find that there is anything offensive about being included as part of the "ignorant masses" when a neuro-surgeon refers to them in relation to their knowledge of brain surgery. I am quite frankly ignorant of that subject, I've studied very little on the topic.

Ignorance and stupidity are two entirely different things, but we should never forget the primary reason for prolonged ignorance of known subject matter that is a part of your daily life is stupidity.

Re:Geekier?

[yasth]

And I knew you knew that the guidelines exist (lets just stop there in recursion). The sad thing is that the guidelines are actually pretty good. I mean they are fairly basic, and a bit wiggle roomy at times, but still decent stuff. And most people follow most of them most of the time, it is just that most of the time simply allows a bigger suprise when someone doesn't, and if you change scrolling behavior, well the fact that you can resize the window properly using all methods isn't much consolation.

Re:Geekier?

[westlake]

it's paticularly bad when geeks actually reinforce the Microsoft monopoly by refusing to understand the needs of the people who are forced to used Microsoft technology.

You are caught in your own trap when you use words like forced instead of choose.

Re:Geekier?

[fm6]

And what trap is that?

Re:Geekier?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that's a more mature attitude...

You might not like it or it might not suit your needs, but at least you'll have first hand knowledge to base your opinions on.

Don't forget to check the forum, if you get any trouble along the way.

Wait a second...

[BlueCodeWarrior]

...K-Meleon is more geeky than Firefox?


Oh shit, my Internet penis is shortening by the second....must......download....

Re:Wait a second...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not geekier. It's a bit more lightweight, but it's not availible for Linux or *nix, which must be the measure for geekiness here.

"K-Meleon is an extremely fast, customizable, lightweight web browser for the win32 (Windows) platform"

Re:Wait a second...

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox isn't geeky, this is geeky:

• http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~clock/twibright /links/

and a hell of nice light browser too.

Re:Wait a second...

[Flamingcheeze]

Speaking of internet penises... what's up with the naked lady in the upper left corner of the K-Meleon logo? LOL

Re:Wait a second...

[contagious_d]

Well, I tried to go look, and it seems the uptime on K-Melon's internet penis is kinda short.

Re:Wait a second...

[Anonymous Coward]

It might not grow your virtual penis, but if you download it and give it a real try it might change your (computer) life forever.

But please remeber it is windows only.

marketshare worry?

[Anonymous Coward]

since they make a fortune on it now?

Re:marketshare worry?

[JPriest]

Only as far as vendor lock in. Having more non IE users forces webmasters to write more compatible web sites (and by extention easing the transition to another platform).

Re:marketshare worry?

[Anonymous Coward]

except all the mom&pops and teenage girls won't ever move from frontpage anyways (unless there becomes a good open source alternative) and I promise they really don't care if firefox renders it right or not, if it doesn't they'll just tell their friends to use IE.

Re:marketshare worry?

[JPriest]

Re AC: except all the mom&pops and teenage girls won't ever move from frontpage anyways (unless there becomes a good open source alternative) and I promise they really don't care if firefox renders it right or not, if it doesn't they'll just tell their friends to use IE.

When will people ever understand that Linux is not intended for mom & pops and teenage girls?? I'd be happy enough with techs, engineers, developers, and power users myself. If you think Linux is going to reach mom & pop by skipping everyone in the middle you need to go back and retake business management 101.

I never got why so few Linux advocates understood this point. Maybe because you need the Slashdot hivemind to think this idea for you?

clean

[Janitha]

Its like the naked version of firefox. Just better and clean.

Re:clean

[dos_dude]

It's naked? I guess that explains why the site is down right now.

Re:clean

[TerminalInsanity]

Yep, its only version 0.9, you've gotto wait untill 1.8 before its legal...

Fuckin betaphiles...

Too bad

[datadriven]

I'll never get to try it because I use slackware.

Re:Too bad

[koi88]

From your sig: The line between "Funny" and "Flamebait" is too thin for some to see.

So is it "funny" that someone modded you "flamebait"?

Re:Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting. I wonder what your fellow LUG members would think if it came to light that you were an immature troll on Slashdot in your spare time?

Perhaps a few e-mails are in order.

Re:Too bad

[datadriven]

I dunno, isn't that what ALL linux users do?

Re:Too bad

[13Echo]

That's what Epiphany is for.

Damnit!

[Anonymous Coward]

And I've just installed Linux.

Geekier?

[raider_red]

If this was geekier, don't you think the guys behind it would have a tougher web server?

I don't think so

[Takyn-U-RUN]

K-Meleon is the geekier, more configurable... Microsoft may have another reason to worry about Internet Explorer marketshare.

If K-Meleon is more geeky than Firefox, than I don't think IE will be worrying any time soon.

Re:I don't think so

[bogie]

Have you even tried K-Meleon? If you had you'd notice it is in fact geekier than Firefox. Firefox is just easier to setup and configure than K-Meleon. With Firefox more things a user would want to change are fairly easy to access through a GUI. In fact Firefox is about on par with IE when it comes to setting options. With K-meleon many times your manually editing a text file to achieve basic functions. That's not a flaw, that's the way they want it and more power to them.

Firefox isn't a geeky app. Automatic plug-in detection was the last hurdle it being useable by "Joe consumer" and now that that's done there is no reason why anyone shouldn't be using it. If you think Firefox is geeky than I can't possibly fathom how your able to use MS Office or even change your homepage to something other than msn.com.

Re:I don't think so

[oneself]

It it's so Geeky, why is there no Linux version?

Re:I don't think so

[Dizzle]

Firefox can be very geeky with the right extensions.

Re:I don't think so

[bwy]

If K-Meleon is more geeky than Firefox, than I don't think IE will be worrying any time soon.

Not to mention, the intial user base will probably be Firefox users, not existing IE users. SO- Mozilla may have a reason to worry about Firefox market share once this thing is released.

Re:I don't think so

[Anonymous Coward]

When the fuck did geeky become making things hard????

Geeky should be about getting the most out of your computer. If that's through a well laided out shiny gui, then good (assuming it's a front end for text files I can script).

If it's through a cryptic config file, I'll do it (but I'll grumble about the lazy ass developers.

It's MS only :(

[photon317]

How can that possibly be geekier than multiplatform Firefox?

Re:It's MS only :(

[zootm]

I think it's based on the idea that something which is optimised for speed is "geekier". Since K-Meleon has a native Windows (non-XUL) frontend, it runs faster.

Re:It's MS only :(

[DarthWiggle]

Geek irony, clearly. Like "The Vagina Monologues" with software.

Re:It's MS only :(

[AstroDrabb]

Since K-Meleon has a native Windows (non-XUL) frontend, it runs faster.

Well, I just tried K-Meleon and it took about 2 seconds to start-up on a 3.06 Ghz P4 w/HT and 1GB ram. It takes about 2 seconds as well for Firefox to start up on this box. I didn't notice K-Meleon to be any faster. The only thing I noticed was a little less memory use.

Oh, and you can get speed optimized Firefox builds. These builds have better 3D-Now, MMX, SSE, SSE2 and SSE3 optimizations, so you need to download the one that is right for your processor.

These optimized builds of Firefox run just as fast as K-Meleon IMO and I don't lose all the great Firefox plug-ins. I personally can't work on the net without AdBlock.

Re:It's MS only :(

[NYhXc]

I don't know, I just tried it on my Athlon XP 2000+ and it starts 1, 2 seconds faster than Firefox, but it eats the same amount of RAM. Just try a bloated website with flash and stuff... I tried www.gsp.ro (I'm from Romania) and K-Meleon uses 17.3 MB of Ram where Firefox uses 17.33 MB. So, what's the big difference? I still hang on to Firefox yet... It works on my linux box too.

Re:It's MS only :(

[zootm]

I agree - however, you won't really notice the speed/memory usage issues until you're on a much older PC (I use Firefox on all my boxes). Even speed-optimised FF builds will probably not be able to fully compare to K-Meleon on a really old system - as such, it's a good way for someone with really old hardware to get themselves a modern, standards-compliant browser.

Windows only, nothing to do with KDE

[Omicron32]

The K has nothing to do with KDE since it's Windows only.

Geekier?

[Savant]

What percentage of the Internet Explorer audience run it because Firefox isn't geeky enough, and will be tempted by a "geekier, more configurable" browser?

I don't buy the threat to IE market share. I'm sure it's a great browser, and I'm geeky enough to take an interest in it, but if I were representative of 99% of the population, Linux would be massive on the desktop.

You forgot

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously forgot to turn on the Star Trek browser-theme.

Re:You forgot

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate the cliché that all geeks are into Star Trek. I take pride in being a geek but I could never force myself to watch Star Trek. It didn't even carry much scientific value, the acting was bad, and it was really more of a soap opera for the socially inept.

Re:You forgot

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just for the socially inept. It's, in part, a joke on the inept by the adept. You're just too inept to realise it.

Re:You forgot

[sepluv]

I've never seen it as I never watch TV (like a *real* geek ;-) ) but from what I've heard you may be right.

Re:Speedier twin of Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Its much faster because the UI is native to the OS. Rendering isn't really faster unless you have a really slow machine where rendering FireFox's UI is slowing everything down.

Its Windows only so you probably wouldn't need to worry about starting KDE.

If its *that* good...

[E IS mC(Square)]

then, i guess it would be Firefox which may lose market-share. after all, both of them (K-melon and FF) appleal more to the techie ppl than those rest 90% (i.e. IE users).

So, chances are more that a FF user may convert to K-melon than an IE user!

or not?

Re:If its *that* good...

[uimedic]

I really agree. I use Firefox preferentially, and this Slashdot story made me aware of K-Meleon. Given how much I like Firefox, I was excited to try it.

I downloaded the newest version and installed it. It installs cleanly, a feature I appreciate greatly (no registry entries or system files to be orphaned). It loads very fast. I manually brought in my bookmarks from Firefox and started browsing.

So far, it loads fast and then goes about as fast as Firefox. K-Meleon uses a scheme that creates "layers" instead of tabs which I personally find much less intuitive. One features I use most in Firefox is the "Open in Tabs" selection from the bookmarks menu.

Instead of an "Open in Tabs" option within bookmarks, K-Meleon has you create "groups" of "layers" which you then label. To create a group, you have to open individual layers for each page and then point each layer at a page I wanted in the group. You can then save them with a name like "news." You can then just type "news" in the address bar and hit Shift+Enter to bring up the group in different layers. It is slick and fast once the group is created. Of course, don't accidentally type in "News" b/c the group names are case-sensitive.

All in all it's interesting and fun to play with new software. Yet with my N=1 sample of me, I'd say that I found tabs and their implementation in Firefox much more intuitive than layers and groups. There was no simple method to import Firefox bookmarks from within K-Meleon, but it did import IE Favorites quite easily and has methods that supposedly work with Netscape and Opera bookmarks. Also, while the browser itself feels light and nimble, its menu structure is cluttered and not particularly intuitive.

All of this is written with about an hour and a half of use on a 0.9 release, so my impressions must be taken with a grain of salt and improvements are sure to come. However, this brief experience certainly makes me think that an IE user would adjust more readily to Firefox than K-Meleon. Consequently, I think K-Meleon is more likely to convert Firefox users than IE users.

But that's just my opinion.

Re:If its *that* good...

[cmad_x]

The problem about that is it's Windows-only. So many *NIX users that use Firefox will stay in Firefox - not that I consider that bad.

Re:If its *that* good...

[tod_miller]

Yeah, K-Meleon is vi, and FireFox is xemacs.

let the flaming begin (I tried K-Meleon, I like the light shell around gecko, but give me something usable! :-) 0.9, hopefully with some nudging it will improve)

Re:If its *that* good...

[Anonymous Coward]

I beg to differ. As a long time MS dweller, I did not stray far from home for the better part of ten years, and I am still a dedicated user - you see, I tend to like my work done with the least hassles...

I have tried FF every now and then, but I must confess that it could never beat the competition right away, so back to the herd I went. When I discovered KM it all changed, and it is now my default browser.

This ain't demographics, but sure counts as life experience...

Cheers.

Tisk tisk

[paranode]

And are you counting the overhead of starting KDE and all those unpleasant threads that KDE starts (which make ssh -X so unpleasantly hard to log out of). Course they're not.

Nice KDE troll and all but this product is for Windows. Can't even read the headline blurb before posting? You almost had it too but then you had to flame away.

Faster but...

[radixvir]

Well it seems much faster than firefox, but there's a point at which an application becomes 'too customizable'. You have to edit a text file just to change the toolbar buttons? And there doesnt seem to be any extensions right now, you might want to wait. Personally I would like to see a native-rendered firefox.

Re:Faster but...

[radixvir]

Alright I take that back. There are extensions but not Adblock or Web Developer yet.

Re:Faster but...

[j0217995]

At work we use it for "kiosk"-like web browser. The use of the txt file to force settings down is a lot easier then trying to setup IE to run in the same locked mode.

It was a pain to get setup but once setup it runs like a dream w/ no problems

Re:Speedier twin of Firefox

[andrew_j_w]

a) Please stop spreading fud about KDE. b) If you'd RTFA you'd see that it is Windows only and nothing to do with KDE.

Re:Speedier twin of Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Speedier it is because it has pipelining enabled up to 32 simultaneous requests to a server by default.

It's been well known that this often speeds up firefox, but kmeleon comes with it enabled as standard, and doesn't need this fiddling to work better.

speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

no speed found @ site.

by the time the site is back up, I will be forgotten I wanted to try this...

Re:speed?

[RonnyJ]

You can download it from here.

Re:Speedier twin of Firefox

[Ford Prefect]

And are you counting the overhead of starting KDE and all those unpleasant threads that KDE starts (which make ssh -X so unpleasantly hard to log out of). Course they're not.

KDE? What?

Surprisingly, given the name, it has nothing whatsoever to do with KDE. It's a Windows program for a start. ;-)

IE Market share

[Anonymous Coward]

MS has nothing to worry about until web developers start writing Firefox compliant sites. I have several sites I go to that flat out refuse to work with firefox -- mostly banking sites..

Re:IE Market share

[Masami Eiri]

Which, of course, means that they are fully W3C compliant... if I'm not mistaken.

Mind warp

[Hoplite3]

It starts with a "K", but it's not for KDE. It's windows only. This violates an essential rule of software. If it's called "kfoo", it's for kde, "gfoo" -- gnome, "xfoo" -- graphical cousin to pre-existing "foo" cli application, "yfoo" -- I don't know. Why foo?

Re:Mind warp

[b1scuit]

But it's got a hyphen! The hyphen, man, the hyphen!

Re:Mind warp

[Anonymous Coward]

i think you'll find its a play on the phrase "k-rad".

Re:Mind warp

[druske]

It starts with a "K", but it's not for KDE. It's windows only. This violates an essential rule of software. If it's called "kfoo", it's for kde, "gfoo" -- gnome, "xfoo" -- graphical cousin to pre-existing "foo" cli application, "yfoo" -- I don't know. Why foo?

Don't forget iFoo for the Mac!

Re:Mind warp

[BJH]

I think the developers will find that "k-rad" is a sucky basis for the name of a browser.

Re:Mind warp

[aonifer]

Don't forget "yafoo" -- yet another foo.

Re:Mind warp

[JabberWokky]

finf... foo is not foo.

--
Evan

Re:Mind warp

[hyu]

Why foo?

Why not foo?

Re:Mind warp

[Mercano]

And, of course, WinFoo 2005 for Windows.

Re:Mind warp

[Vampyre_Dark]

And 'IPityDaFool' for C64 users.

Re:Mind warp

[x40sw0n]

yfoo= Yellowdog (which seems redundant, since there is no devoted window manager for ydl)??

Re:Mind warp

[Saint Stephen]

finf...finf is not foo you forgot: "foo" .... horribly generic OpenStep app package contaminating Debian package namespace, i.e. "terminal"

Re:Mind warp

[Anonymous Coward]

"Don't copy that floppy!"

Re:Mind warp

[wed128]

(OFFTOPIC) Speaking of yfoo...didn't someone propose a new alternative to the X Windowing System called Y about a year back? i guess that didn't go anywhere...

Re:Mind warp

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME software long ago (like 3 years at least) abandoned the lame gxxxx naming. Only KDE plays that silly game now.

Re:Mind warp

[Brandybuck]

Maybe we should rename it to Winfoo?

Re:Mind warp

[Anonymous Coward]

The name probably means 'kameleon' but then with a 'c'. With a 'c', one could also guess it means sameleon which is the wrong one; thus is spoken wrong as well; hence they chosen to use the 'k'. Just a wild guess though.

Re:Mind warp

[the_truk_stop]

It's "yafoo" -- Yet Another foo

Re:Speedier twin of Firefox

[dtietze]

"Insightful", without even having RTFA? Which part of the description "K-Meleon web browser for Windows" triggered the rant about KDE and ssh and what-have-you? Geeez.... Pity there's never a mod point around when you really need one. Dan.

Re:Speedier twin of Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol! KDE? It's windows only. Damn, I won't even say RTFA, it's right up there in the story!!

Lightweight

[hhg]

They should have made a more light weight webserver also!

Is it an oxymoron, or the new wave?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what exactly DO you call grass-roots astroturfing anyhow?

KMeleon may be a good browser...

[Tavor]

But it's not designed to be a server app. "The operation timed out when attempting to contact http://www.kmeleon.org/" Whoops. Another one slashdotted?

One LESS reason to worry for IE?

[ZakMcCracken]

A new Open Source platform... doesn't the community stretch out its efforts a bit?

Imagine these developers working instead on bringing to life open-source products that are really lacking. Like a good Exchange substitute.

Re:One LESS reason to worry for IE?

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe cause they dont have that itch to scratch and would rather work on something else.

the question is, why arent YOU doing that exchange substitute, since you have interest in it.

Re:One LESS reason to worry for IE?

[Bedouin X]

You might have a point, but I'm sure that Kmeleon predates Firefox/Bird/Phoenix so I don't think that it really applies here.

XULless),

[essreenim]

Who else thought that said useless? : )

Slash

[Anonymous Coward]

Site killed in under 20 comments, doh!

Re:Speedier twin of Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! Kick ass! Abuse servers and take more than what's fair! I bet you use a download manager to take up 10 downloading spots, too. You're probably also using 802.11 SUPER-G and taking all 3 useable channels. Screw the neighbors.

MOD DOWN -1 Idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

This program has nothing to do with KDE, this guy's just a lame troll looking for some easy karma.

waste of time

[Turn-X Alphonse]

Why don't they just help support firefox? Firefox has taken the market by storm, if it can get 20% it's a huge dent. Giving other options doesn't help this at all. 2%, 5% and 1% means nothing, but if you combine it all together it becomes 8% which in browser terms, is huge!

Remember hitting a brick wall with a sledgehammer will knock it down, so smaller hammers can fix the holes. Hitting it with lots of little hammers chips it, but it still stands.

Re:waste of time

[General Wesc]

IE isn't bad (okay, it is, but finish reading my sentence), monocultures are bad. If everyone switches to Firefox, it will still be worse than if there are a lot of standards-compliant browsers in use.

Of course, they're both Gecko. . .

Re:waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why don't they just help support firefox?

Why doesn't firefox just help support them? You want a testbed for the gecko activex control or not? kmeleon is that testbed.

Re:waste of time

[khellendros1984]

Ummmm...since when was the objective to get people to use Firefox and only Firefox? The idea is to draw marketshare from IE and basically make the browser market more balanced. I say that we should have a large choice of browsers, hopefully each with its own unique bugs. Face it people: FIrefox has bugs, and the reason we're safe with it is because it's better for attackers to go after the largest marketshare product (IE). When Firefox gets bigger, it will be much more heavily targetted.

Re:waste of time

[Jerph]

They both render with Gecko and therefore both serve to make it harder for developers to write sites that only work on IE. IE's market share means that Microsoft controls what people write for the web. It is only because they use the W3C DOM/CSS that those standards are usable, and they are usable (generally) only to the extent that IE and Microsoft's development tools support them.

We need Gecko and other rendering engines (that follow standards) to gain market share so that no one company can make you pay them to participate on the Web. The actual browser doesn't matter in this issue.

Re:waste of time

[ampathee]

Maybe it's not about knocking down IE: maybe it's about making a good browser? I'm a windows user who has long used firefox and I don't remember ever using IE as a primary browser.

However, I use firefox because it is *better* than IE, not because I want to see IE go down. If K-Meleon turns out to even better than firefox, then I will switch. Why should I stay with an inferior [from my pov] browser? I choose the programs that I use based on their features, ease-of-use, speed, etc. Certainly not for political reasons.

Besides, whether someone uses k-meleon or ff, they still arent using IE, so that's one user off of ie's market share.

I would hate for the browser market to be composed of *only* IE and FF, no matter what the ratio is.

Link

[crache]

Here is a link to the sf page: http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/ I used to use Kmeleon back when I still used windows. Startup times are very good and the interface does feel faster to me.

Re:Link

[rk87]

Warning: mysql_connect(): User kmeleon@ has already more than 'max_user_connections' active connections in /home/groups/k/km/kmeleon/htdocs/wiki/config.php on line 15

:)

Re:Speedier twin of Firefox

[tehshen]

Yes, startup. Given the number of complaints about how Firefox takes an age and a half to start up sometimes, it can only be good. The last version could open within two seconds on my machine, compared with seven or eight for Firefox.

It is faster because it uses the standard Windows widgets for menus and toolbars, instead of using XUL for the interface. No XUL = faster, see.

Dissecting the features

[Staplerh]

Found this on the release page, a list of features:

Support for Bookmarks, Favorites and Hotlists
Hmm, nothing too special? It'll be interesting to see what form they take - whether the Safari-esque model of bookmark management (a page) or the standard pop-up organizer.

Layers(Tabbed Browsing)
Wooo... Kind of a necessity in today's brower 'market'.

Integrated search tools to search Google or configurable to use your favorite web resources
Neat. Still nothing revolutionary.. think Firefox.

Enhanced privacy and security features to protect against spyware and viruses - block pop-ups and web sites that try to change your home page or download spyware!
Anything like this is great.. Maybe this will start to hint Microsoft along those lines, and we can get real security that can keep my family's computer running (despite the naive endusers).

Unique right-click toolbar buttons allow quick access to additional features and settings
Now, right mouse button features are good but I feel they are a bit of a crutch for poor design and don't make it as accessible to the user. I suppose I fall into teh 'Apple' camp of one button computing.. the right button/scroll is handy, but not the end all/be all... certainly not something to trump as a unique feature.

Complete customization of all menus and toolbars
Now this is a great thing.. I love the way I can configure MS Office to my exact specifications, and this could be the real reason to switch over to K-Meleon 0.9 IMHO.

Configurable to use your mail and news programs
Hmm, wonder if this will take the form of just popping up my mail client when I click on something, or a news client when I click on something, or if it is something revolutionary?

Bit of a screed, I know, but just my two cents.

Re:Dissecting the features

[m50d]

Integrated search tools to search Google or configurable to use your favorite web resources

Neat. Still nothing revolutionary.. think Firefox.

If it's configureable by non-admin users, then this is a big plus. I hate that about firefox and opera.

Re:Dissecting the features

[tehshen]

I am typing this from 0.9, and the only thing that makes it different from the other browsers is the number of options and customisations available. The 'Tools' menu gives me thirteen different submenus, for one.

I think it is trying to have all the browser features of Opera, for free - very customisable toolbars, loads of options, things Firefox has extensions for (tab groups, user agents, etc) are all built-in. This seems a little odd - isn't it supposed to be ultra-stripped down and lightweight? It'll take some getting used to, but it has everything I need in it, even though most things I doubt I'll ever use.

(It uses a pop-up organiser for bookmarks, btw. And it launches your mail client to read your mail)

Re:Dissecting the features

[Herr_Nightingale]

Here are some vast improvements over Firefox:

1 autoscroll is WAAAAAYY better, it doesn't gimp if you move the mouse up while over a javascript image. Also it's fast without 'jittering' that FF does.
2 faster. Windows are faster to create than FF, opening/closing.. can't speak for rendering speed, it's probably the same.

And the problems:
1 options are scattered through several disparate menus. There's the Edit->prefs, and the Tools menu with 13 sub-menus.
2 can't use extensions? That's a biggie.

Re:Dissecting the features

[zsau]

It was a damned good browser when your only choice was IE, Opera or Mozilla's bloatware. Now that we have the much milder take on bloat that is Firefox and because K-Meleon spent a few eons not being developed, there is a choice... But I hate Firefox, so if I'm forced to use Windows I might give K-Meleon another shot...

I agree, but it's not IE 6 that should worry

[Weaselmancer]

When 1.0 comes out, Microsoft may have another reason to worry about Internet Explorer marketshare.

True enough, but MS should worry more about the Embedded IE that comes with Platform Builder. A small FireFox, clean and stripped down could do for palm devices what FireFox is doing for desktop PCs.

Re:I agree, but it's not IE 6 that should worry

[Anonymous Coward]

A small FireFox, clean and stripped down could do for palm devices what FireFox is doing for desktop PCs.

Look no further...

Staying Focused

[Anonymous Coward]

While having more options is good, I hope this does not add any confusion for people looking to switch to Firefox. Having too many options may scare off some users and in turn they will continue to use security-hole ridden IE.

Why should MS care?

[manno]

Why would MS care if it looses browser share? How much easier would it be for them just to drop it all together, and let the hassles of securing, and patching a web browser end up in someone else's hands?

Re:Why should MS care?

[Stevyn]

The browser helps them retain their monopoly on the OS which helps them retain their monopoly on Office -their cash cow.

Re:Why should MS care?

[ravind]

For the same reason that they tried to buy Netscape and, when they couldn't, gave IE away for free.

More and more, the browser and not the OS is becoming the platform for application development. Where I work, I see so many desktop based applications moving to a web-based interface. That's the idea that scares Bill G the most and, whether or not you like him, he was smart enough to realize that this was going to happen way back then.

Re:Why should MS care?

[uimedic]

They claimed to have embedded IE so tightly with Windows that it cannot be removed. So dropping it all together isn't really an option for them.

Re:Why should MS care?

[manno]

Do you honestly believe that? That's a lot like asking for directions and being told you can't get there from here. I understand where the reponses are coming from, but I still don't see why MS would even care if it lost ground to Firefox. hech they'd save face if it became more popular. It's not IE that's the problem any more it's Firefox ect. In the 90's when no one had a clue about the web I'de agree with you guys. MS, Netscape ect. had no clue where this thing was going, but now-a-days. A web browser is just that a tool to browse the web.

Re:Why should MS care?

[Anonymous Coward]

MS ought to care because a good many of their products either use or require IE in some way- Outlook/OE uses the IE renderer, Office supposedly requires it (dunno why, actually), SharePoint requires it, Exchange requires Outlook, which requires IE.

If IE looses it's market share, then that would mean that content providers (ie: websites) would have to write content that did not require IE. If you don't code the the MS standard, the only obvious choice is to code to a REAL standard (ie: W3C)- which IE may or may not support correctly. Furthermore, you run the risk of HTML emails not rendering correctly anymore. MS would have to deal with various (possibly large) corporations bitching at them that 'our xxx Server only works with IE, but we don't use IE anymore because xxx!'.

Furthermore, if an open source browser becomes popular enough that big companies are willing and able to switch to it, that gives them leverage over MS. MS has already shown they are willing to bend with you mention Linux. 'Look, we like your SharePoint Server and all, but we hate having to have IE installed and accessible. Make it worth our while or we're finding something else and using Firefox.'

Re:Why should MS care?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, why would it care about *loosing* market share, since that isn't the same as *losing* market share. *ahem*

Re:Why should MS care?

[Anonymous Coward]

A web browser is no longer a tool to browse the web. It is a means at accomplishing tasks. Banking, stock trading, buying, selling, etc are all online.

Re:Why should MS care?

[uimedic]

Read my post again. They "claimed" to have embedded it too tightly to extract. Removing IE may be technically possible, even desirable, but doing so would ipso facto expose the falsehood of Microsoft's previously held positions. For this, and several other reasons, removing IE from Windows is not really an option for Microsoft.

Re:Why should MS care?

[Sark666]

The question is, why does microsoft seem to be dropping the ball and NOT seeming to care either way.

You'd think with every other week some new exploit being found and microsoft paying for it in the media articles, that they'd be making it a big priority to firefight this situation.

They just seem to be sitting on the side lines and being indifferent to someone taking back the market share.

It's actually fortunate that IE is the insecure pig that it is. Do you think a lot of people would have switched to moz/ff if they were told - look!! it's open source and standards compliant!!

They switched because of security and features (think tabbed browsing and stopping pop ups).

And people need to root for a new champion, unfortuately, that's the mentality of a lot of people, mostly because they don't have the time or the inclination to get informed.

Because of this some of them would resist going to K-Meleon. They are still in the IE sucks, FF rocks mentality. The informed will realize that K-Meleon will be faster due to native widgets (esp on older machines). So only extensions would maybe hold them back.

For me, I've already made the switch to epiphany and definately notice it being faster than firefox.

But that's the beauty of firefox, even though people want to have their next champion, firefox really levels the playfield again. So in the end it shouldn't matter if your using Opera, FF, epiphany, Konq, Safari. If compliance is adhered to then may the best gui win. And in that situation really we all win.

Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[knitterb]

My FireFox, when refreshing things like Horde (webmail) and My.Yahoo! will consistently take upwards of 400M of memory. FireFox 1.0 crashes a lot on me because of memory issues. If I restart it at nite, open 4 tabs (My.Yahoo!, Horde/webmail, /., and Engadget), but morning I'll have taken between 200-400M of memory and 1/5 of the time it will have crashed.

This is on WindowsXPsp2 so your mileage may vary. I can't seem to get any help from the Mozilla FireFox team. Are there others out there like me?

Off to try K-Melon! IE sucks!!!!!!!

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[Zemplar]

I wouldn't suspect these to be related specifically to FF. Sounds like something specific to your hardware or OS configuration (misconfiguration).

Absolutely no problems with FF on Linux at home or XPSP2 at work with the listed pages.

Crashing apps happens all the time in XP, so it kind of hard to diagnose that as being specific to any one application.

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[birder]

Sounds like you have serious issues that I have never see exhibited before. You might try using the MOOX build of firefox. For one, it fixes the annoying ./ render bug.

http://www.moox.ws/tech/mozilla/

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[Andrewkov]

Off to try K-Melon! IE sucks!!!!!!!

What's this K-Melon? Some kind of special prono browser? ;-)

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[SenorChuck]

I haven't had the same issues that you've talked about, but I've noticed that certain plugins tend to make Firefox very unstable at times. It's usually Sun Java or Quicktime responsible, as far as I can tell. I'm no Firefox developer, and I don't have years to pore over the code, so I'm not sure what exactly happened. Just my observation.

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[knitterb]

FireFox is the only application that does it. Mozilla does it as well. This was a known problem in Mozilla 1.6, and it was fixed back then. It appears that it's similar.

Perhaps you aren't reloading the same pages I am and you are not hitting the same bugs I am. I'm suspectinng it's a problem with JS reloads again.

I wouldn't doubt if Linux runs differently, it's a different OS and likely a different mind-set/developers.

As for apps crashing all the time on XP, it rarely happens to me. The only time something crashes on XP for me is if I wrote the program :) or if it's a poorly written program.

Blanket statements regarding an OS are unhelpful to everyone.

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[knitterb]

Hmmm, good point. You know, I was thinking the same thing. Any clue how to get a list of the plugins like Java and Quicktime so I can remove them?

I'm trying to remember when it started. I can't pin it to the 1.0 release of FF, or just length since last reinstall.

I tend to reinstall WindowsXP about once every 6-8 months. I use Linux and other *nix's for everything I do, I just prefer Windows as a client OS (Trillian for instance), and my wireless FUCKING BROADCOM (search engine snare) card isn't supported under anything but Windows (Dell 1400).

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[scforth]

I have had no such issues with firefox. running sp2 with all the updates and i sometimes have 10+ tabs open for various school projects and leave it open for days at a time.

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[Anonymous Coward]

pore

pour

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[Anonymous Coward]

The only time something crashes on XP for me is if I wrote the program :) or if it's a poorly written program.

No offence intended, but could the two be the same thing? :P

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[mr_jrt]

The url "about:plugins" will list all the current plugin details, and uninstalling them is usually a case of just removing the DLLs from the firefox/plugins folder, YMMV.

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[Bedouin X]

Blanket statements regarding an OS are unhelpful to everyone.

How about blanket statements about blanket statements regarding an OS?

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, not sure what the deal is with the memory usage. Something is definately not right.

Currently it's taking about 86MB on my system. Five FireFox windows open, 37 tabs, and I don't recall when I last restarted it. 'Course, I'm running 0.9.3, on Win2KSP4, so this may have no relevence to your scenario.

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[knitterb]

Yeah, I'm horrible at Windows DEV! :)

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[knitterb]

Okay, I hunted around this damn system and changed the name of most plugins from *.dll to *.dll.no and it apparently doesn't load them anymore.

Where is the plugin repository kept? I mean, why are the dll's in every directory all over the place and FF is still able to find them all?

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[Anonymous Coward]

That's fine, it's like being intolerant of intolerance. It's the ONLY time such a thing is acceptable.

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[apdt]

Why yes, it's the KDE porno browser of course...

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[NYhXc]

What computer are you running FF on? I've installed FF on my WinXP SP2 box 3 months back and never had problems. Read it: N-E-V-E-R... and I convinced almost everybody in my company to use Firefox and Thunderbird as default browser/mail client and they're happy now, believe me!

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[dustinbarbour]

Fixes the /. rendering bug? I just downloaded the latest M3 build only to have the same rendering problem. :/

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[garbletext]

my wireless FUCKING BROADCOM (search engine snare) card isn't supported under anything but Windows (Dell 1400)

Use the ndisWrapper linux kernel module to get wireless support for your card in linux. It works extremely well, and generally will function perfectly as long as there are windows drivers.

Alternately, a company called LinuxANT makes a commercial version of the same tool, but ndiswrapper is so easy to use that it doesn't matter.

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[Anonymous Coward]

maxo-texas
Firefox has a repeatable download memory leak.
You do not have to exit the browser but you do have to close the download window.
It's been bug reported for about 2 months now. Looking forward to a fix. FF is the only browser I use. Adblock and Nuke Anything have locked me in hard to FF.

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[Krankheit]

I have a similar scenario but I think it is because Firefox has been running for a few weeks. I have four mozilla-firefox-bin processes that are taking 50% of my RAM total (which is about 256 MB of RAM)

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[Reziac]

I don't use Firefox itself, but Mozilla 1.0 leaked resources like nothing else I've ever seen, and had the dubious honour of being the ONLY application to *ever* BSOD my good old Win95 box.

I've noticed that Moz-anyversion leaks resources (at least on Win9*) when it's viewing my local disk. This reminds me forcefully of the core Mosaic bug that's evidently in all NS and IE versions to some degree, most often manifested as a resource leak when viewing a page with many elements (links, checkboxes, etc) inside table cells. Anyway, I wonder if this might manifest in Moz on XP as excessive memory use (as you're seeing).

I've reported it, but was told I was full of shit and that no such issues exist. [shrug]

I just tried K-Meleon v.Today; it lacks some config stuff and various features, and the layers thing would take getting used to... but it renders at least 10x faster than Firefox or Mozilla (notably wrt table structures), and KM also multitasks smoothly, whereas Moz does not. (Which is probably not visible on a fast machine, but is painfully evident on this poor old P3-550. Moz does one task at a time, grinds to completion, and only then does it get to the next task. This makes me want to hurt someone...)

Re:Hopefully no memory leaks like FireFox

[birder]

That's strange. I know myself and a few others I've talked to have found the moox build fixes it. Before switching if I opened a reply in a new tab it would take 5-20+ refreshes to get it to render properly. With the moox build it's corrected.

Re:Speedier twin of Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Speedier it is because it has pipelining enabled up to 32 simultaneous requests to a server by default.

Ooh, slashdotted.

Maybe all the visitors were using K-Meleon.

Promotion, promotion, promotion...

[Stick_Fig]

...three things this software doesn't have.

The reason Firefox has a reasonable shot is because it has an actual, honest-to-God fanbase and strong marketing for an open source product.

This just has a crappy logo and some random submitter talking it up. (Hint: You need more than that to have a successful product.)

Re:Promotion, promotion, promotion...

[Anonymous Coward]

"(Hint: You need more than that to have a successful product.)"

Having an OS monopoly certainly helps, for instance.

Re:Promotion, promotion, promotion...

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason Firefox has a reasonable shot is because it has an actual, honest-to-God fanbase and strong marketing for an open source product.

Little things like technical merit of course don't count. I'm still looking for the ability to map any key to any action. Without writing XUL, which makes J2EE look streamlined. With KM I can do that by editing a single text file (a feature shared with Opera)

You don't even bother to look at the things you criticize. You're ignorant. You call yourself a nerd?

Re:Promotion, promotion, promotion...

[Stick_Fig]

You don't even bother to look at the things you criticize. You're ignorant. You call yourself a nerd?

I may not be a nerd in the sense you are, but I am a professional graphic designer and realize that it's as important to put a good face on something as it is to have the backend solid.

Mozilla, I might remind you, had a lot of problems starting out, because it didn't have a very marketable campaign. They worked on that, got a really memorable logo, and got some word-of-mouth going about its benefits. Opera is questionably better, but it doesn't have the momentum Firefox does.

You can call me ignorant all you want, but it's just as important to advertise as it is to have a solid backend with a good reputation.

KM, just like Linux, will not succeed with Grandma if she can't remember what the hell it's called. Grandma does not care if she can add key mapping to a program -- she simply wants to be able to look at recipies. What reason does she have to switch if she doesn't know why key-mapping is worthwhile?

This is a reversible thing, remember. It's easy to create a logo that doesn't suck and a webpage that shows the benefits of the program. Linux has done better lately too, though they still have a lot of work to do.

Happy trolling, Anonymous Coward! You should keep in mind that I know what I'm talking about just as much as you.

Re:Speedier twin of Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh can it. Servers are designed to hand out data, and all pipelining does is make better use of the resources available. Should I take up several seconds of a web server's time loading image after image from a site, or should I take them all at once and be on my way in half a second?

The latter is much better use of their resources, and allows others to come in next even faster than before.

Re:Speedier twin of Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Missed the "for Windows" part of the blurb, eh?

Multi user ?

[Sidoine]

Last time I tried it, it was only single user, requiring administrator access to use it. Is it improved now?

Why not support HURD?

[Anonymous Coward]

because on my subGHz AMD Athlon based computer with 512mb of RAM, I have regularly found Firefox to take a full second before a right click yields the context menu. XUL can slow things down something awful. I've come across those who refuse to use Firefox because XUL slows it down so much, making it downright unpleasent to use.

Besides, try using Firefox on a Pentium 1, then try K-Meleon. Basically, Firefox is a dog on older computers, and K-Meleon isn't.

Re:Why not support HURD?

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG!! A full second delay? Oh, the horror; the horror...

What Niche?

[TheFlyingGoat]

The reason Firefox is gaining popularity is because it fits a niche in the market that needed to be filled: an fast, clean alternative to IE. K-Meleon doesn't seem to fill any other niche, which means it would be a direct competitor with Firefox.

I'm sorry, but that's a battle it's probably going to lose. As for taking market share from IE, I don't see it being anything significant. Any IE users that switch are likely to change to Firefox, since there's so many existing users and comes across as a commercial product (read: clean website, clean interface, etc). Any IE users that were unlikely to switch to Firefox are unlikely to switch to K-Meleon. The only people I see using this are the Slashdot crowd.

I personally won't switch because Firefox has been stable enough for me, and waiting 2 seconds for it to load isn't too painful. K-Meleon can probably load it in what, 1.5 seconds? Yay.

Re:What Niche?

[belg4mit]

AFAIRecall K-Meleon was around before Firefox (it has nothing to do with Firefox other than it also happens to use Gecko). K-Meleon, out of the box looks and acts a lot like IE. Unlike Mozilla (and presumably Firefox), which out of the box, looks and acts like no standard browser and breaks all sorts of muscle-memory.

Re:What Niche?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla looks like Netscape. Netscape used to be THE standard browser.

Most of today's Mozilla users were long-time Netscape users and still like the way it works.

Re:What Niche?

[TheFlyingGoat]

If you don't use the tabbed browsing feature in Firefox, and if you use an IE theme, the only way most users know it's different is the way Bookmarks are handled. I got my grandma up and running with Firefox in 5 minutes, and she didn't need any training to switch from IE (except showing her which icon accesses the Internet now). This is a lady that took an hour to show how to compose and send an email.

Re:What Niche?

[belg4mit]

Your point being? I said *acts* not looks, and *muscle-memory* i.e. shortcuts and menus were arbitrarily changed.

Re:What Niche?

[bonch]

It's shocking how aggressive Slashdotters are being toward the simple idea of there being another choice. It's not like Firefox is some perfect, holy browser that everyone and their mothers are switching to. I hate to tell you this, but Maxthon probably gets more users switching to them then to Firefox.

Re:What Niche?

[nitehorse]

You know, aside from your posts, I've never even *heard* of Maxthon.

Meanwhile, people ask me about Firefox all time. People who don't know anything about programming or system administration. They do know that their computers have gotten much slower over time thanks to the myriad types of malware that spreads to their computers thanks to IE. And they've heard about Firefox.

I think you're living in some sort of a weird alternate reality where IE is still better. Maybe you could come out of 2002 for a bit and join us here in 2005? It's not that different in most ways; we still don't have flying cars, but we do have a better web browser.

Re:What Niche?

[Pulzar]

I can't find the "IE Theme" on the update site -- can you point me to it? I'd like to set that up for my dad who's complaining about things not looking the same.

Re:What Niche?

[TheFlyingGoat]

Can't seem to find it now, either. I was using it for version 0.5 or 0.6, so perhaps it didn't get modified to work for 1.0.

Re:What Niche?

[ThousandStars]

The guy just above you asked more or less the same question, and a response answered to say that Firefix is still too slow for older Windows machines.

Re:What Niche?

[Alrua]

This turned up on Google :)

Re:What Niche?

[dumdeedum]

Niche? Market? This is one of my pet peeves about Firefox - or at least many of it's users - they've forgotten what free software is about. Success no longer appears to be about how good the software is, it's about how many tiny percentage points of userbase can be clawed away from IE or how many new users were converted by the NYT advertisement.

The only way K-Meleon would lose any battle would be if it stopped being good software to use, and having used it since 0.3 I can say that's yet to happen.

Re:What Niche?

[Anonymous Coward]

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Love,
bonch (aka rd_syringe aka Overly Critical Guy)

Re:What Niche?

[artson]

"Any IE users that switch are likely to change to Firefox, since there's so many existing users and comes across as a commercial product (read: clean website, clean interface, etc). Any IE users that were unlikely to switch to Firefox are unlikely to switch to K-Meleon. The only people I see using this are the Slashdot crowd."

I'm looking at K-Meleon version 0.8.2+ and here's the top line menu:

[File] [Edit] [View] [Go] [Bookmarks] [Favorites] [Hotlist] [Groups] and [Help]

Clicking on Favorites offers Internet Explorer bookmarks in their native format, and clicking on Edit under Favorites presents an Explorer window on C:\Windows\Favorites. Pretty good. Clicking on Hotlist offers the Opera bookmarks in their native format, and they too can be edited.

So why's that such a big deal? Because one of the main impediments for anyone in changing browsers from Opera or IE is their Favorites/Hotlists.

To many choises

[Anonymous Coward]

I think maby my mom and dad, and my grandmother is starting to have a hard time orienting themself on the browser choises. I will do my best to guide them to firefox tho..

Geekiest

[barryman_5000]

If you want a really geeky browser thats faster than you should check out moox's compiled firefox. It loads pages 3-5x faster (with benchmarks to prove it.) http://www.moox.ws/tech/mozilla/

Re:Geekiest

[wikinerd]

It is a good idea to use official builds or compile the software myself to be safe from various security threats. Unofficial builds may be faster, indeed, but I would prefer to read instructions on how I can compile Mozilla to load pages faster**, instead of installing a prebuilt program that I don't know what is changed in it and how secure it is.

** Note: I use Konqueror and it is orders of magnitude faster than Mozilla/Firefox/IE in loading Web pages. I definitely believe that Konqie is the perfect browser. The only other browser that I have found to be faster than Mozilla/Firefox (but not faster than Konqie) is Opera. Too bad that Opera isn't open source, if it was then IE would be history by years now.

Re:Geekiest

[Lil-Bondy]

looks like this moox group/guy needs a good redecoration of his site, im sure his mods are excelent, i just dont need firefox to load 3-5x faster, it loads fairly fine as it is, i dont really notice how slow firefox goes, seeing as i havnt used anything else for a very long time now, but im sure even a totalled 10 seconds to load after a reboot and then a possible 2 seconds till you reboot again is as fast as anyone not on drugs or an extreem amount of coffee needs

Re:Geekiest

[Visceral Monkey]

I agree, Konq is a *great* browser, but it's lacking a lot of features I've grown use to on FF and development on the browser seems disjointed and slow when compared to FF. If they could speed things up and give it more plugin like functionality, it would be awesome.

Re:Geekiest

[sootman]

Not trolling here, I'm seriously asking--what kind of machine are you on, and what kind of pages are you looking at, where you can see "orders of magnitude" difference between browsers? I did testing a couple years ago, and yes, at the time, on huge tabled pages (not regular sites, but database "show all" pages with 1000's of TDs) NS4/Mac was slow, IE/Mac was better but still pretty slow, and Moz/Mac was fast. (In Windows, IE was fastest, and Moz was almost there.)

But nowadays, when the slowest systems I use are 1 GHz+, I do not see an appreciable difference at all among different browsers. (Mostly Safari/Mac & FF/Win.) On a broadband connection, every page I need draws in a second or two as long as the server can keep the pipe filled.

Re:Geekiest

[thinkninja]

Likewise, Siimo makes optimized athlon-xp binaries for Linux. Autofox is much geekier...but there are lots of other builds to choose from.

Re:Geekiest

[XchristX]

Dillo http://www.dillo.org/ INCREDIBLY FAST! Doesn't do much, though.

Re:Geekiest

[wikinerd]

You asked what system I use. You can find this information here.

Konqie is faster not only in loading webpages but also in application startup time.

Re:Geekiest

[Reziac]

Speaking of Konq, did anything ever happen with that Konq for Win32 project?

I *like* Konq, largely because out of all the "other" browsers, it's the most operationally similar to my to-this-day *preferred* browser, Netscape 3.04. As you note, not only for being orders of magnitude faster than Moz/FF, but also because of Konq's behaviour wrt context menus and multitasking, usefulness as a local file browser, config options, appearance options, and internal integration (how the mail client behaves, etc). And I flat couldn't use a linux desktop without it. :)

Wow. Really. Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, jeez, its got something to do with Firefox doesnt it? It must be the friggin greatest then

K-Melons?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm perfectly happy with k = 2.

Sorry...

Or just try Moox

[badmammajamma]

http://www.moox.ws/tech/mozilla/

This guy makes processor optimized builds of Firefox. He even provides some numbers of tests he did on an Athlon system. Anyway, if you use a moox build with some other minor tweaks (like pipelining), you will definitely notice a difference.

Re:Or just try Moox

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy makes processor optimized builds of Firefox.

So that's the little man from within my Gentoo!

More Troll Goodness

[Neuroelectronic]

Http://neuroelectronic.net

Download link

[jcdd]

Site is /.ed...
Download at: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/kmeleon/kmeleon 09.exe?download

Simple. XUL == Slow.

[brunes69]

Try running Firefox or Mozilla on a Pentium 166, or even less. It is slow as molasses. This has nothing to do with Gecko (which is super fast), but the XUL GUI. It is just too slow for these older machines.

Browsers with native toolkits, like K-Meleon or Galeon or Epiphany, fill this void. They use the excellent Mozilla rendering engine with fast, native widgets.

Re:Simple. XUL == Slow.

[jwegy]

Ah yes! but does your P166 have the MMX instructions? You are running a freak'n Pentimum 166 in 2005, and you think XUL based applications have issues? Dude.

Re:Simple. XUL == Slow.

[Tumbleweed]

TOO RIGHT!

This is the reason I'm stuck using Opera at work - it's the only browser that performs well. Time to DL the newest K-Meleon and give it a whirl.

Re:Simple. XUL == Slow.

[Anonymous Coward]

The last time I tried k-melon, it was just as slow and bloated as Mozilla appsuite.

Re:Simple. XUL == Slow.

[Simon Lyngshede]

The slowest browser I've seen is IE on Windows running on a 2GHz Athlon XP with msn.com as a start page. I don't get why people are calling Firefox slow, okay so it's not blazingly fast, but still better than IE.

Re:Simple. XUL == Slow.

[jschottm]

This is insightful?

Let me introduce you to a concept: Not everyone has much money. There are working people in the United States who can't scrape together $400 for the Dell uber-cheap of the month, but who can get an old Pentium from the thrift store for $5. There are millions of people in Africa who make many times less in a day than the lowest paid burger flipper in the United States makes in an hour. Get some perspective.

Re:Simple. XUL == Slow.

[jwegy]

You said that I should get some perspective. I wonder who's perspective I should get. Really.

Should we take advantage of new more powerful technology to create development platforms which make development easier?

Or should we code everything to an uber-efficient standard so the 1% of the market with 10 and 12 year old computers can run the applications?

Using a paltform such XUL would allow me to put out quality code faster, which may or may not put more money in my pocket faster....and thats my perspective. thanks to the mozilla foundation.

Re:Simple. XUL == Slow.

[Tumbleweed]

You need to realize that not all machines run all browsers the same way. On a low resources machine (slow cpu, not much RAM), IE and Opera absolutely blow away Firefox. Since I'm sure as hell NOT going to run IE, that leaves me Opera for my work machine, as Firefox is unbelievably slow on this machine. Even the moox builds don't help that much. There are also still big problems with CPU usage with Firefox on pages with badly-designed Flash (which don't have the same CPU usage problem with IE/Opera). Depends on your situation.

Re:Simple. XUL == Slow.

[lp_bugman]

I run K-meleon where. On my Latitude CS. Specs :
CPU 400Mhz
HD 7200rpm
RAM 386mb
OS Win2K.

Firefox is simply to slow on my system and eats most of my ram.
K-meleon is FAST and memory efficient.

Re:Simple. XUL == Slow.

[mrchaotica]

Browsers with native toolkits, like K-Meleon or Galeon or Epiphany, fill this void. They use the excellent Mozilla rendering engine with fast, native widgets.

Don't forget to add Camino to your list!

Re:Simple. XUL == Slow.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not only old machines - I like my software to be as responsive as possible, and in this day of multi-Ghz CPUs and GB-range memory, it's ridiculous that a web browser can be as slow as Firefox is.

Re:Simple. XUL == Slow.

[LWATCDR]

"Or should we code everything to an uber-efficient standard so the 1% of the market with 10 and 12 year old computers can run the applications?

Using a platform such XUL would allow me to put out quality code faster, which may or may not put more money in my pocket faster....and thats my perspective. thanks to the mozilla foundation."

If a program can do everything that another program can do runs in less memory and on a slower computer great!
Why not have a good Web browser that will run on lower power PC's? Shouldn't it be about choice. I would know more than a few people that would love to surf the web and get email but do not have $500 to throw at a PC. I have set a few of them up on old PCs that I get for free running Linux.

Re:Simple. XUL == Slow.

[mibus]

Don't forget to add Camino to your list!

He said fast native widgets :-P

Re:Simple. XUL == Slow.

[Reziac]

Hear hear!!

I still support one user who has a 486, and being disabled, he can't afford better (and the 486 was free). I have another disabled user in a similar situation, who just lately graudated from a 486 to a P60 (also a freebie). But these machines still do all they really need -- SO LONG AS THERE ARE STILL OPTIONS AVAILABLE that don't overload their hardware. If the entire online world required Mozilla, they'd be left out in the cold. Along with anyone else whose personal situation doesn't allow current hardware.

Re:Simple. XUL == Slow.

[LWATCDR]

A lot of cheap or even free computers K6-2s Celerons, even PIIs are perfectly good computers and can be used for web access, email, word processing, and even for programing. The problem is that windows XP is just to much for those systems. Frankly KDE is a bit much. It is a shame that they are not being used. How many people could bet on line on computers that are ending up in landfills

Re:Simple. XUL == Slow.

[Reziac]

I still salvage anything from a P100 on up, that being about the bottom end for real usefulness at this point (finally got to where I turn up my nose at a 486 :) Yeah, they won't run XP, but they can be firewalls, luggables, file servers, word processing and websurfing boxes, etc. (I did once accidentally discover that Win2K *will* run, usably enough for basic functions, on a lowly 486DX4-100 with a mere 8mb RAM! Ooops, next time we will LABEL the loose HDs. :)

I have XPPro on a P3-500/768mb RAM, and it's quite good -- not crisp, but never laggy either, and I expect it to do Real Work. One of my clients has XPPro on a P3-450/512mb, and it actually outperforms mine. (Tho XP Home on my neighbours Celeron 2.5GHz/256mb, running less systray stuff, is a pig by comparison to either.) Anyway, I'd put the real sysreqs for XPPro and office/web type apps at P2-300/256mb RAM -- and as you say, tons of just such perfectly useful machines sadly go to the dump. :(

Of course, people who can't afford to buy a $300 eMachine aren't going to be able to afford XPPro either (given that Home is just too slow for older hardware), so I'm not sure that factor is even relevant. Win98 would be more to the point.

Finally, someone who agrees with me that recentish KDE is a bit much for an otherwise-nice old P2! I like KDE, but even so... I have Mandrake 7.2 on a P3-450/256mb, and while it's usable enough, it's definitely sluggish compared to XP on the similar hardware sitting right next to it. (But it could be worse... Gnome barely crawled along.)

I still have a 100%-perfect-working XT that I can't bear to dumpster, and the good old 286 that I "grew up on"... it'd be like executing your own child just because he's retarded :)

Re:Simple. XUL == Slow.

[msim]

retarded? no that would be if you had a 186! ;-)

Re:Simple. XUL == Slow.

[Reziac]

Tee hee... yep, tho such a creature did exist, I somehow managed to avoid being afflicted with one :)

All Downloads Have Completed

[Lil-Bondy]

Kmeleon09.exe - Open Bookmark Support - Nah, Leave It Wait. Set K-Meleon As Default Browser - Umm, No, I Still Like Firefox As It Is. Protocols - Bah! Ill Just Skip The Rest And Click Next... Destination Folder... Intall... Extract... Next... Run K-Meleon! Welcome to K-Meleon 0.9 ! Hmm... I Dont Like That Dinosaur Thingy Looking At Me From The Top Corner Of My Screen, Better Uninstall It

Dillo

[nudnikmeow]

Dillo is faster than any web browser I've ever seen!

Re:Dillo

[joshv]

That's because it renders only about 20% of the pages you load properly.

-josh

There just aren't enough browsers in the world.

[essreenim]

What we need is a browser thats so low in functionality that you have to code it yourself. Oh, I have an idea. Lets create another new browser!

Re:There just aren't enough browsers in the world.

[D'Sphitz]

k-meleon has been around WAY longer than firefox.

Why foo?

[wiredog]

foo-ey.

Re:Speedier twin of Firefox

[Lil-Bondy]

OH GOD 7-8 Second of your PRECIOUS life. What ever are you going to do? im sure downloading K-meleon took a fair bit more that 7-8 second, as well as making the post, oh, and wait, starting up your computer too, sorry for seeming trollish, but i dont think 7-8 seconds is too much to wait. i usually sleep most of my life, so i cant exactly say i dont waste mine either.

Eh...

[astebbin]

If it were more geekier than Firefox, then wouldn't it run on LInux, not Windows?

Re:Eh...

[wikinerd]

Firefox is not geeky, it is for people who want an IE-looking stable and secure browser. The perception that Firefox is geeky is due to marketing. If you want a geeky browser, check Mozilla Suite or Konqueror. Opera would be geeky too, but she isn't open source.

Re:Speedier twin of Firefox

[tehshen]

7-8 seconds is the time on my computer, which hardly runs anything else. On the computers at my school, K-Meleon still takes two seconds while Firefox takes over thirty.

Why not tell Linux to give up the desktop as well

[Shivetya]

After all Apple provides a great choice over using Windows. Or you might want to ask Apple to let Linux have the alternative desktop market.

Let the market figure it out. The competition of different ideas is what has gotten us to this point. If people got the idea that they shouldn't even try there would never have been a Firefox or Mozilla.

I think you over estimate the size of your hammer.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Star Trek is REAL!

[Anonymous Coward]

Who're you calling socially inept?!!!!

Those who mock the historical accounts will be sorry when the eugenic wars start!

because MS sues WINfoos

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't remember where I saw this though.

K-Meleon did it first...

[yoblin]

People who wonder why the project doesn't focus on improving Firefox are missing the point that K-Meleon was around waaaaay before Firefox, when Mozilla still took a really long time to even load. Even so, can't they develop a little faster? I remember 0.8 was realeased years ago... thought they would at least be at 1.0 by now.

Re:Fast as hell!

[Anonymous Coward]

The rendering engine is the same. Perhaps you need to tweak Firefox?

No, I'm just have a case of the Mondays...

[Anonymous Coward]

According to my calculations, the four seconds it took me to read you drivel cost the equivalent of a slashdot-day.

Keep up the good work, and you could be another Stalin!

Redundant comment but I repeat!

[erroneus]

I would really like to see a way to link the OS to another rendering/display engine or whatever.

One of the last unpluggable holes that I have to deal with is that the Explorer shell and other apps use MSIE as the rendering engine for displaying HTML. If only there was a way to use the same hooks but to point it to Firefox's or even Mozilla's rendering code, I'd feel a lot better about using Windows in general.

I had made this comment before and someone replied that it was possible. I'd really like to see what it would take but I'm guessing some sort of API hook code would have to be written and a LOT of registry entries added/changed. I'm not the guy to make it happen, but whoever might consider it (perhaps someone like-minded to the person who made Win98Lite or whatever it was that stripped Win98 of all the extras and made it really slim and fast did?) might consider this as an important endeavor?

Re:Redundant comment but I repeat!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla ActiveX control

"Not just a similar API

An identical one! That's right, the Mozilla control will implement the IWebBrowser and DWebBrowserEvents interfaces that Microsoft have already defined for Internet Explorer."

Re:Redundant comment but I repeat!

[Trinn]

Unless I am mistaken, you need to replace a few ms dlls with the new code, and they are considered 'system' dlls so it would require bypassing the protection on XP at least. I don't remember them off the top of my head, but I think one is shdocvw.dll, and I am sure there are others, but if you can replicate the functionality of all of these you should be able to replace them, but unfortunately it would likely still break things due to ActiveX not being able to run under your engine.

Re:Redundant comment but I repeat!

[Anonymous Coward]

There was an article on crackbaby.com, linked to from boingboing, etc., that had the detailed instructions. Claim was that even microsoft had verified it worked, but refused to talk about it. The site seems down now, but there is a partial mirror at http://http//farm.tucows.com/blog/_archives/2004/7 /29/114593.html/ The boingboing link is http://http//www.boingboing.net/2004/07/29/how_to_ remove_msie_f.html/ enjoy!

Re:Redundant comment but I repeat!

[Reziac]

You mean 98lite, from litepc.com I think. There are trial versions available, including one for XP. -- I've only used it on my WinME box, in the default "uncouple IE from the desktop" mode, but between that and turning off WinME's worthless System Restore function (and learning to never use the New Compiled-HTML Help**), that WinME box has not crashed since -- not once in over four YEARS. However, in default mode it apparently did NOT uncouple IE's renderer from the New Help engine, as that DOES still make it unstable (hence I've learned to simply avoid using it).

So.. pointing Windows at a different HTML rendering engine does seem like an excellent concept, yep!

But can it use FF extensions?

[denis-The-menace]

If it can't use FireFox Extensions then it's almost Dead in the water for me.

Re:But can it use FF extensions?

[Anonymous Coward]

It can use certain extensions, but the installation must be done manually. Meaning, unzip your .jar or .xpi and place the files in the appropriate directories in the K-Meleon dir and edit whatever configs you need. If the extension doesn't rely on XUL for some interface element, it is likely to work. But just like there are extensions that will work in one but not the other of Mozilla and Firefox, some will not work in K-Meleon as well.

However, K-Meleon does come with native versions of FlashBlock and IEView as standard, as of the most recent build, and it has used an internal mouse gestures engine for several versions now (it is implemented as a kplugin). These, along with Popup Alt and Line Marker, are the only extensions I ever really install in monolithic Mozilla or Firefox anyway. And in the case of Popup Alt, it is unnecessary for K-Meleon, because K-Meleon displays alt info in popups by default anyway, just as IE and Netscape Communicator used to do (behavior that I prefer).

I use K-Meleon as my default browser, and really, I don't miss extensions at all.

Re:Speedier twin of Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you run a webserver? Doesn't sound like it.

They should fix the following...

[LuckyStarr]

First thing I noticed was the absence of CTRL-L. Without that I cannot use any broser. Even IE has it (though clunky).

This may or may not be fixed via the obscure config files in preferences.

Furthermore there is no method of asking if setting specific cookies is ok.

Apart from that, it looks really good. They should polish the dialogboxes though. They look rather amateurish.

Re:They should fix the following...

[Anonymous Coward]

Try "Alt-D"... it's the same thing without the annoying popup dialog box.

Re:They should fix the following...

[aquadood]

Open up the tools menu, goto advanced preferences, click accelerators, and paste this in the bottom of the file CTRL L = ID_SELECT_URL Save the file, and restart the browser. Or you can use CTRL ` , or F6 to do the same... however, I understand you're used to CTRL-L :)

Re:They should fix the following...

[LuckyStarr]

Thanks. Works nicely. Now I can do some more testing. The "Groups" are quite nice.

further clarification (you sir, are full of shit!)

[Anonymous Coward]

"slashdot / day" 700,000 x 60 x 60 x 24 = 9.504e+8

"average lifetime" 60 x 60 x 24 x 11000[*1] = 9.504e+8

"people killed by Stalin" 60 x 60 x 24 x 11000 x 13,000,000[*2] = 1.23552e+16

Those numbers are off by several orders of magnitude! Next you'll be accusing spammers of genocide.

[*1] Moody Blues
[*2] http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html

I don't understand

[Negativeions101]

I don't get it. Firefox is supposed to be THE browser.. now the K-meleon is suposed ot be better? What the hell? Why can't there just be one standard kick ass browser that can take out IE. For god's sakes...

Re:I don't understand

[msim]

I think they just mean K-Meleon is another quality browser for anyone that wants to have an alternative (to the i.e. masses) browser.

I've been using K-meleon for a year or two, it runs nicely, and i've been slowly noticing improvements in speed and quality within that time. However i've read some people say it's even faster still in this latest build. It's tempting to install this latest build on my laptop at home now to see just how fast it is compared to the old release (P120, 32mb ram, etc..)

KHTML

[FullMetalAlchemist]

What I really want is a set of KHTML components ported to Windows as COM objects; preferably the WebCore KHTML package, adaptaion by Apple, as COM objects.

"Geekier"? Perhaps, but also out of date.

[papajune]

Kmeleon is geekier than Firefox, in the sense that Kmeleon's interface is more customizable. I've used both, and there are things I can do with Kmeleon's interface that are impossible in Firefox without serious XUL hacking. (I've spent time with XUL configuring Firefox's context menus, so I know whereof I speak.)

After using Kmeleon for more than a year, I switched to Firefox because Kmeleon at the time was based on an out-of-date Mozilla core (a continuing problem for the Kmeleon community). It was worth losing some tweakability to gain bug fixes and better security.

Re:"Geekier"? Perhaps, but also out of date.

[Anonymous Coward]

Beta builds for the general public have never been the K-Meleon project's focus. Betas are not closed, but you really have to sign up to the dev mailing list to learn about them and download them. Beta milestones are few and far in between, as you've noticed.

But if you'd been building from CVS ever since 0.8.2 (the public milestone version for what seemed like more than a year) came out, you would have seen it progress to 0.8.5b (still using Gecko 1.5 for legacy compatibility) and up to 0.9 (which is more or less 0.8.5b, only based on Gecko 1.7.5).

NB: The devs have stated that Gecko 1.7.5 was selected because it was _not_ bleeding edge like the 1.8.x alphas. However, future semi-private beta builds will be based on the Gecko 1.8.x alphas. And I wouldn't expect a public version to be made available until Gecko 1.8.x at least breaks out of alpha. That's just how K-Meleon works, based on what I've seen over the past several years and versions since I made it my default Windows browser.

Smelly Socks

[bushboy]

Well, it sure doesn't make my socks smell like firefox does, so there's a good start !

Yum !

an alternative -- Opera

[Esine]

Hmm, why don't you use Opera?
Opera is WAAAY more configurable than Firefox, K-Melon or any other browser. And it's fast, light, multiplatform, VERY GOOD browser. Tabs are implemented very nicely with Opera, unlike FF tabs ugh they suck :|
And mouse gestures are on Opera by default. Same goes for 100 other features.

Now, you hate ads? Buy Opera, or better yet .. p2p anyone?

Use Opera.

Re:an alternative -- Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera is not free for most people.

(No, ad-ware is not free.)

Re:an alternative -- Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

I consider a program to be free if the version offered for download is fully-functional and does not have pop-up reminders begging you to pay for it.

The only indication that an unregistered version of Opera is not free is the unobtrusive ad bar at the top right of the the display. This display frame is quite similar to the AdWords on Google; you consider that service free, don't you?

Re:an alternative -- Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

I hide the AdWords using Firefox.

Not all good

[JohnnyBigodes]

Somehow I see this as a threat to Firefox's market share, not IE's....

Re:Not all good

[Reziac]

Several folks have said that, and true, it's likely to attract the same folks who would switch to Firefox. But -- isn't anything that gets people to try some browser OTHER than IE a good thing, whether it's Moz, Firefox, K-Meleon, Opera, Off-by-One, or whatever??

I predict...

[bonch]

I predict that, because everyone here has grown so attached to Firefox, everyone will attack the submitters' "geekier" claim and mindlessly defend Firefox without even bothering to try K-Meleon, which really is faster and more configurable. Instead of actually discussing K-Meleon, the discussion will be about defending Firefox, because, for some reason, geeks really hate change or when the things they're used to get criticized or bested. Note that not all of you are like this--but a large majority.

It's totally pointless for Firefox to re-implement its own widgets when I have a GUI that already provides those to apps for a reason! I switched to Opera long ago because it takes up half the memory and works at twice the speed. Cross-platform compatibility, you say? Opera happily exists on multiple platforms while still using native widgets. For crying out loud, Firefox even has its own generic string class! Unless the Mozilla/Firefox developers are intent on constructing their own OS, they should stick to just being a native browser on whichever platform of choice. Otherewise, Mozilla/Firefox will continue to be slower than they should be and will continue to take up ungodly huge amounts of RAM when they shouldn't. And most people will continue to defend it just because they don't like Microsoft and have adopted Firefox as their little badge of rebellion. Sheesh.

Re:I predict...

[Dionysus]

everyone will attack the submitters' "geekier" claim and mindlessly defend Firefox without even bothering to try K-Meleon, which really is faster and more configurable.

How could I try k-meleon when it doesn't run on the platform of my choosing? Point me to the Linux binaries, and I'll try it out.

Re:I predict...

[Anonymous Coward]

He wasn't talking to you, ass. By writing about a Windows-only browser, he was implicitly directing his post to those who use Windows. Those of us who are not looking for a Windows browser can quietly ignore the thread and move on to more interesting ones.

Re:I predict...

[oldwolf13]

K-Meleon is largely a port of Galeon, a mozilla based browser for Gnome. Last time I tried K-Meleon, it was almost the same as galeon, albeit with a Windows look. Try Galeon, it rocks.

Galeon was my favorite browser in the world for the longest time, smart, simple and FAST. Now that I am back on windows, Opera has taken over that position (yes, I did use opera in linux, this waqs ages ago, and at the time I still preferred Galeon) and I doubt anything could take the crown away from it. Still I'm going to give this a try, I do some webdev and use multiple browsers for testing.

Galeon was also kick butt for an older system... used it on my Pentium 200 - 96 MB laptop, where mozilla was just too bloated.

Re:I predict...

[Cruxus]

I personally haven't noticed any performance problems with Mozilla Firefox, but I am using a fairly high-performance laptop. I did notice a slight speed boost switching from the Mozilla suite, though. Firefox loads in the blink of an eye for me, so I don't need any faster, and I think an abstraction layer for the GUI is a good thing. Let's not forget other applications can use XUL and Gecko.

Re:I predict...

[T-Ranger]

I think you are missing the point about using its own widget set. Time for some buzword bingo here, but the network is the computer, and the browser is the way to access that. Why do you think Microsoft cares about IE? Because it subverted Netscape, and Netscape was well on its way to becoming a good platform for delivering apps, thus rendering Windows far less valuable. A web browser is far more then a tool for browsing the web.

Firefox was relativly easy to develop, because of all of what you think is waste. Firefox has a kick ass extension system because of all that waste. Firefox, and its extensions, "just work" on a huge number of platforms because of all this waste.

Re:I predict...

[LetterJ]

But, but, but, but if I quietly ignore the thread, I won't get my "Pedantic Linux Geek" merit badge. Once I get that one, Susie, this girl in my homeroom, promised she'd go to the movies with me.

Re:I predict...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, why don't you adjust how much memory FF uses:

http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips

search the page for memory cache

Re:I predict...

[Finuvir]

More configurable? I can completely alter Firefox's UI and most of its behaviour without recompiling. I just have to edit XUL, CSS, and Javascript files. I haven't used K-Meleon but I doubt it's that configurable. Maybe you mean it has more options in the preferences dialog, but that's probably just bad UI. I'm waiting to be corrected though, since I haven't used it.

Re:I predict...

[Reziac]

Goaded by your comment [g] I finally got around to installing K-Meleon... I did instantly see something that I think ought to be changed: apparently the default is to ALLOW sites to change browser settings. Also, there doesn't seem to be any way to get it to accept my system colours. And various other little annoyances (inability to block ads?), interspersed with some good features.

But K-Meleon certainly renders faster than Firefox or Mozilla (KM is RADICALLY faster at complex tables), and per my first test, KM can actually multitask, which Mozilla does not. (If you think it does, try it on a slower system and watch how it hangs up on each task until it's done, THEN goes on to the next task.) It also handles local-disk browsing MUCH better than Moz.

I think KM may be about to replace Moz for some of the more-annoying sites that I *have* to use.

Re:I predict...

[Trillan]

For crying out loud, Firefox even has its own generic string class!

Hmm. Bad example. So do all of my applications. It has to do with being truly portable.

Re:I predict...

[RedBear]

I used K-Meleon for a while a couple years back, when there wasn't really anything else available for Windows. Mozilla was still way too bloated and buggy back then. But then Mozilla got better, and then Firefox came out. And both Mozilla and Firefox are cross-platform. More and more these days I am finding myself completely disinterested in anything that ties me to any specific platform, be it Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.

Everyone pitches a hissy fit when applications are only available for Windows, but nobody seems to care if an application is only developed for Linux, or Mac OS X. I like the Mac and find it's a very efficient tool for getting things done, and most of the applications are fairly open, so I am a little less disturbed by using a Mac-only application, but mark my words, as soon as there are suitable open source cross-platform equivalents available for anything, I go for that instead. I am keeping a close eye on NeoOffice/J for instance. Once it and OpenOffice get a little better, the world will have that much less need for Microsoft Office, and that much less need for Microsoft Windows as a requirement. And a side benefit: that much less need for a standardized monoculture to endanger your company's computing infrastructure.

Since Firefox/Mozilla got good enough, things like K-Meleon simply don't matter to me anymore. It's a real drag having to use a different application on every platform, and I especially don't like to be tied to Windows. I can configure everything I need in Firefox, and use the fantastic extensions like Tabbbrowsing Preferences and Adblock. Unless K-Meleon can do that on any platform of my choice, I fail to see why I should care about it anymore. A little extra speed is not nearly as important as portability and freedom.

We as a market need to continuously try to force ALL types of applications away from any platform lock-in, so that the operating systems can start competing based on which is the best, not which one has the right applications. We get more than enough of that lock-in crap from camera manufacturers and everyone else.

Cross-platform development is the way of the future, the way to consumer freedom and choice, and I don't see why everyone here on /. isn't trying to promote it at every opportunity. Open source is only one side of the struggle. Platform freedom is the other. Who cares if there are a million great applications, if none of them run on your platform of choice.

Re:I predict...

[capt.mellow]

hmmmmm . . . AFAIK XUL+javascript allows you to make all the extensions, one of the more elaborate being chatzilla. XUL is worthwhile. K-Meleon is good for slow win 95/98 comps, of which there are still many out there.

Because K-Meleon was there first!

[matvei]

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=14285

Version 0.5 is dated 2001-09-30 16:36. IIRC I used K-Meleon 0.3 or 0.4 way back because it integrated with Windows a lot better than Mozilla did.

CD Embedded Browser

[randomErr]

Ok, this look good, but what about a browser that can run off a CD in Windows? That way people like me don't have use the MSHTML plugin in my own app's I put on CDs.

Re:CD Embedded Browser

[HenrikOxUK]

K-meleon can run off a CD. That's why it's used to power both TheOpenCD 2.0 and Ubuntu Live :)

Re:CD Embedded Browser

[randomErr]

No it doesn't. It can INSTALL K-meleon off a CD. The INSTALL program can run off a CD, but the actual K-meleon.exe cannot. It will try to save several configuration files back to the CD.

An EMBEDDED browser would be one that can RUN off a CD without having write configuration files. Ideally I would manually write a configuration or K-meleon would just with a set of predetermined defaults and just work.

You can embed the MSHTML COM object in a VB or C++ program and it will run on almost any Windows as long as they have IE 3.3 or above installed.

To Mozzila's credit, I know of at least one project that will let you use a similar technique for Firefox and Mozilla but the end client has to have a compatible version of the browser already installed on their machine.

So what I'm looking for a self-contained browser that isn't 10 years old. Sorry Cello, you were good when all I had was access to a bash shell, but your just not gonna cut now.

Re:CD Embedded Browser

[HenrikOxUK]

Please re-read my post. We are using K-meleon for this exact purpose. With a few minor tweaks to the ini files we can get it to run directly from the CD (no re-compile or anything). If you don't believe me, just download a copy of TheOpenCD or Ubuntu Live and run it. It works. Today.

Opera annyone ??

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want a faster, cross-platform, more feature rich and with an active user base..
Why not try Opera?
It shoots firechicken in the egg quite easy...
Ff has to thank Opera for a lot of its features..

FTP mirror

[plazman30]

Is there an FTP mirror of this file anywhere? Can't download EXEs over HTTP.

W95 geekishness

[MonkeyBoyo]

Firefox only runs on W98 and above. K-Meleon can run on W95. What could be geekier than updating software on a W95 box?

Re:W95 geekishness

[Anonymous Coward]

I just blew away a Windows 95 box and installed NetBSD.

Re:W95 geekishness

[asa]

I've run Firefox 1.0 on windows 95 with great success.

--Asa

Re:W95 geekishness

[STrinity]

What could be geekier than updating software on a W95 box?

Updating software one Windows 1.1?

Re:W95 geekishness

[sconeu]

Windows 1.1? Ha! You're a piker. I still have my Windows 1.03 disks (all 6 360K floppies -- 5 for the system and one for Windows Write).

Re:W95 geekishness

[Anonymous Coward]

Asa,

Have you run Firefox 1.0 on a 120 MHz non-MMX Pentium with great success, as I am doing right now with K-Meleon 0.9?

Have you run Firefox 1.0 on a 486 of any flavor running any OS with great success, as is possible with K-Meleon running in Windows 95? (I have K-Meleon 0.8.2 with some kplugins disabled running on a 100 MHz 486DX at a low-income public site with multiple users and serious budget constraints.)

K-Meleon has much lower minimum system requirements than Firefox. I discovered it when looking for browser alternatives to run on a 450 MHz K6-2 with plenty of RAM after noticing how slow the Seamonkey milestones of the day ran on it. K-Meleon 0.6 fit the bill perfectly back then, and that same machine is now running K-Meleon 0.9 happily for my nephews, with all kplugins except Opera hotlist support and IE favorites support enabled. From the many times I've tried, no build of what are now monolithic Mozilla and Firefox (including custom builds and Beonex- and Netscape-branded distributions) has ever run well on that system.

KM really does bring Gecko to machines that can't run monolithic Mozilla or Firefox, and I've found that these same speed advantages scale up well on more modern hardware. I don't own or manage any speed demon systems at home or work, but the speed and RAM usage differences are easily observed in everyday use even on a 2.2 GHz P4, where Firefox runs well but is _still_ measurably hampered by XUL.

Thanks for all your work. The Gecko family of browsers really is amazing, as I'm sure the many Camino and K-Meleon users appreciate every day.

Re:W95 geekishness

[BlueCodeWarrior]

Did you pay JUST 99$!!!!!!!!!!!????

Re:W95 geekishness

[tigheig]

What could be geekier than updating software on a W95 box?

Biting the head off of a live chicken? Or is that redundant?

Re:W95 geekishness

[sconeu]

Yes, I know about the Ballmer video.

No, I didn't pay JUST $99 for it. It was bundled with my Tandon PCA-10 (10MHz AT Clone), back in 1988.

Re:W95 geekishness

[Reziac]

Geekier? Updating software on your VAX. :)

Is it Firefox itself that won't run on Win95, or just its *installer* ??

Cuz Moz itself runs on Win95 (well, I had good luck with v0.99, but v1.0 was the ONLY app to *ever* BSOD that box), and I wouldn't think Firefox would be *that* different.

Anyway... see above where I mutter about a few plus and minuses, but per my first look, KM's big plus is speed. (If you think Moz and Firefox are fast, try 'em on a poor old P3-500 with a paltry gig of RAM.)

Re:W95 geekishness

[assassinator42]

I used kmeleon on my windows 95 computer. It was a 75 mhz with 40 MB of ram, so it still took a long time to browse.

could go for this

[techefnet]

Im currently using firefox, its not too bad but i exprience it crashing much. What i really like about firefox is that it got extensions for everything, and they install easily and cross platform. I could still go for a alternative for firefox, i thought i was going to try this browser, but when icame there.. i saw that there was no.. linux version, heh ;)

Not twin

[imnoteddy]

twin of Firefox

Firefox is cross-platform - this baby is not. Perhaps K-Meleon is a cousin.

XUL in K-Meleon

[Anonymous Coward]

The newspost is correct when it says K-Meleon is lightweight for using Windows natively, but it does include XUL.

Examples of XUL in K-Meleon include about:config and Aggreg8, which can be found in Tools > Mail and News > RSS News Feeds.

Also, take a look at Mozdev Games, which works if you use a browser with XUL.

Re:XUL in K-Meleon

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely.

Wherever possible, XUL is incorporated by K-Meleon for everything except interface elements, which is where it gets its huge speed and memory usage advantages over Firefox.

But there are XUL interface elements wherever Gecko enforces them, such as (IIRC) certain dialog boxes. That's why you might see old systems stutter when displaying K-Meleon dialog boxes: K-Meleon brings such machines to life, but is still hampered by interface elements where Gecko forces K-Meleon to be as slow as Firefox. Given the alternatives that will run in any truly useful way on such machines (IE, Netscape =<4.x, sometimes Opera, but not Firefox or Mozilla), K-Meleon is still the only viable choice.

CRACKING IS THE WAY TO USE SOFTWARE

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that's the way to promote Opera, by promoting piracy. Thumbs up to you, sir!

Fucktard.

Layers...

[NoMercy]

Sorry but anything that wants to be remotely geeky should use the right terms for the right things, this is software for lusers :)

love it

[zxnos]

just installed 0.9 k-meleon and have to say that so far i like it better than firefox. mouse gestures, tabs and a couple other things already there and it is fast... ...the big test will come at home, firefox has an annoying habit of randomly scrolling the entire page down when it loads.

Why would M$ care ? Please explain it to me......

[budword]

Does M$ make any money off of a browser they give away ? If they don't make any money off it, why would they care about this or firefox ?

Galeon is becoming a power browser again

[Anonymous Coward]

Galeon has started to become a power browser again. The early versions of the 1.3.XX series were a little featureless, but now the browser is back in business.

Galeon doesn't have many features that you cannot find in Mozilla, but it has a polish that I haven't seen elsewhere.

If their website is a reflection...

[Anonymous Coward]

Great Product - website handles errors very gracefully...

Warning: mysql_connect(): User kmeleon@ has already more than 'max_user_connections' active connections in /home/groups/k/km/kmeleon/htdocs/wiki/config.php on line 15

Warning: mysql_query(): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2) in /home/groups/k/km/kmeleon/htdocs/wiki/ewiki.php on line 2099

Warning: mysql_query(): A link to the server could not be established in /home/groups/k/km/kmeleon/htdocs/wiki/ewiki.php on line 2099

Re:Don't need it to load faster

[ShieldW0lf]

I just dont need firefox to load 3-5x faster, it loads fairly fine as it is, i dont really notice how slow firefox goes, seeing as i havnt used anything else for a very long time now

By itself, running solo on a modern machine, yeah, no prob, runs great.

But when you're running IIS, MSSQL, and Postgres servers, K-Lite, eMule and DC++ clients, crunching video using VirtualDub in the background and playing NWN and you've tasked out to check the web on where to find that last item you need for your quest, you really notice the difference. The machine crawls while its paging out the massive memory footprint that firefox needs.

Now, don't get me wrong, I continue to use it instead of IE, but lets not pretend that its a lightweight browser, because its not.

Liberal logic

[loopyfx]

Oh for crying out loud, the election is over!

Re:Liberal logic

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF?

K-Meleon features

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all true. K-Meleon is much geekier than Firefox.

Features of K-Meleon:

• Horrendous acne.
• Thick black framed glasses, with tape in the middle.
• Pocket protector.
• Perpetually cracking voice.
• Snorts when it laughs.
• Lastly, K-Meleon is still a virgin.

HTH!

Uh....

[Anonymous Coward]

A browser that runs only on Win32 only cannot, by any measure, be geekier than Firefox.

Re:Geekier? (widgets)

[lp_bugman]

Opera DOES NOT use native widgets. It uses QT widgets skined to look "native"

Another browser? You have to be kidding...

[volve]

Am I the only person that wants to know why the open source movement is so intent on diluting the browser market, instead of just improving Firefox and dominating Internet Explorer?

I agree that Firefox was necessary given what Mozilla had/has become, but why-oh-why are we STILL pumping out new browsers? Can't these obviously talented developers find a spot to contribute to a current browser? You know, one that already has the publicity (full-page newspaper ads, etc.) and growing market share.

I just hate to see skilled people expend energy reinventing the wheel... :(

Re:Another browser? You have to be kidding...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you are only now learning about K-Meleon doesn't mean that you should remain ignorant about it before commenting.

For example, here's a little fact that might blow your mind: Usable _release_ copies of K-Meleon predate the _announcement_ of the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox project. K-Meleon 0.1 was released on August 20, 2000, based on winembed.

"Ooooohhhh."

Besides, whereas Firefox is a great project, K-Meleon is my default browser while in Windows. It has been my default since before Phoenix hit their 0.5 milestone and was just starting to improve beyond a proof-of-concept into a working browser (which K-Meleon had been for a _very_ long time by then).

Re:Another browser? You have to be kidding...

[Ronin SpoilSpot]

Am I the only person that wants to know why the open source movement is so intent on diluting the browser market, instead of just improving Firefox and dominating Internet Explorer?

While there is an organization called the "Open Source Initiative", it is a mistake to think that the "open source movement" can be considered as a single entity. It makes no sense to assign an intent to it. There are people out there who write open source software ... and that's the only thing they all have in common.

While there is a large number of these open source producers who do want to "dominate Internet Explorer" and beat Microsoft, there is also quite a lot of them who just wants to write better software. Not just better than IE, but better than Firefox too.

From a technical standpoint, IE was dominated years ago. Beating it in the marketplace (or whatever corresponds for a "free" product) is a different goal, and one that not all Open Source programmers care about. After all, someone using IE is mostly hurting himself.

As long as there are competent programmers and designers enough to go around, more projects is better. Competition is good for the end user.

Like Galeon for the Mac, K-Meleon is a browser focused on one platform. That allows it different tradeoffs from a cross-platform program like Firefox. Different programs with different goals. Diversity. Choice. I really can't see any problem with that. /RS

Re:Another browser? You have to be kidding...

[msim]

The one thing i like about k-meleon more than any other browser is that the full-screen mode allocates far more screenspace to the actual rendered html than any other browser i am aware of.

Which looks pretty nifty i might add. :-)

With a name like that...

[Relyt]

With a name like K-Meleon, I don't think that MS needs to worry anytime soon.

I mean, people I know think Mozilla sounds stupid enough...

needs a few plugins/extensions

[smahesh]

I use a moox optimized version of firefox. Never tried K-Meleon. Based on the reviews/feedback - it seems to be snappier than firefox - can't wait to give it a try. Will I make the switch to K-Meleon completely? Dunno. I have got accustomed to the adblock and bugmenot extensions of firefox and unless there is something equivalent in K-Meleon - I will not be switching over completely.

OTOH, its good to have more alternatives to IE. The more users are converted from IE to alternative browsers - the better it is for the rest of us. Plus competition is always good - keeps the developers on their toes :-)

kde?

[Titeuf_87]

Why when I saw the title of the post, did I tought it was a gecko-based browser for kde ?

Re:Fast as hell!

[brunogirin]

The reason why it is faster is because it uses Windows native widgets, not XUL like FF, hence why it's not portable. This is the typical quandary in software development: fast and not portable or slower and portable. I choose FireFox because it is fast enough on my laptop and I can also use it on the Sun box next to it. If I had an old and slow Windows box, I'd use K-Meleon.

posted with kmeleon running on Linux! woohoo!

[cypherz]

If kmeleon is geekier than firefox, maybe geekier still is to run it on linux. Works pretty well with Crossover Office on SuSE 9.1. Everything seems to work except for the "explore bookmarks" menu item whick presumably can't find some explorer? component or other it needs. kmeleon is _very_ fast, much faster than Firefox running natively on Linux (at least on my system). I'll try it next on Win2K running on vmware hosted on SuSE 9.1. Has anybody tried running it with Wine?

posted using kmeleon on linux!

Because not everyone likes Firefox!

[Anonymous Coward]

And because MONOCULTURE IS BAD! Admittedly we'd be slightly better off with 90% of users using Firefox, just because it's free software.

Just look at what Internet Explorer has done to the web. Most websites out there are designed to "look good" when rendered by Internet Explorer. This means two things: first they look horrible when rendered in, say, lynx, or w3m; and second, most other browsers are now SOLELY FOCUSED on emulating the behavior of Internet Explorer.

Microsoft was not the first company to do this. Remember Netscape, Firefox's grandfather, which took over and completely reshaped the web, gave us flashing banner ads and popups, and turned a text-based medium into an interactive, digital television screen?

We need MORE browsers, not fewer. We need hundreds of browsers out there, each used and developed by its own small community, connected to one another by nothing more than the HTTP standard. We need variety.

mediocre gesture options

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a nice try, but it's not firefox.
Also, the speed difference isn't that obvious to me.
That, and the fact that... my hovercraft is full of eels.

Re:Fast as hell!

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't need cross platform support it is designed to integrate into the native desktop. If you want an integrated browser on another desktop use Galeon/Epiphany for gnome or Camino for OSX.

Please mod parent up. That's not trolling.

[Dr. Zed]

The parent comment doesn't deserve 'Troll'. Their comment is very succinct, describing the browser as a 'striped down' version. Better and clean are not exactly trolling words.

I look forward to trying K-Meleon when it gets to 1.0. Otherwise, for now, I'll stick with Firefox. It may be a bit bloated, but I'm running on WinXP, so I'm used to bloat.

OT: your sig

[mrchaotica]

It's funny how you insult everyone else but look like an idiot yourself due to your poor grammar skills...

Re:OT: your sig

[Anonymous Coward]

No, actually what's funny is that you don't get the joke.

Or is that sad?

Re:OT: your sig

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be the most boring person on the planet.

Re:OT: your sig

[msim]

oohh ahh haha i get it.

It's still spelt incorrectly ;-).

The real question is...

[Kazoo the Clown]

Does the STOP button actually stop an in-process page load?

Re:The real question is...

[Reziac]

[goes off, tests it]

Yes, it does, dead in its tracks. However the test page I used was Slashdot, which isn't endowed with browser-grabbing components, either.

My own trick for jerking control back from an ill-mannered page that refuses to "stop loading" via the Stop button, is to set the browser's Home Page to somewhere on my local disk (or about:blank, but a local file is more of a sure thing), then I use the Home button as an emergency stop/escape hatch.

Re:The real question is...

[Kazoo the Clown]

My own trick for jerking control back from an ill-mannered page that refuses to "stop loading" via the Stop button, is to set the browser's Home Page to somewhere on my local disk (or about:blank, but a local file is more of a sure thing), then I use the Home button as an emergency stop/escape hatch.

The page I most often run into this is news.google.com, which is my home page. And the reason I most often run into this there, is because FF insists on loading "home" when doing a "New Window" which is a bogus assumption-- I never want to do that so I immediately hit STOP and get to watch it have no effect. IE is smarter in the New Window regard, duping the current window, which is far more likely to be what I'm after. I think it was Netscape that used to use blank (it's been a long time, so I don't recall) which was also a better choice than HOME...

Good idea about configuring HOME as a STOP. The HOME page in FF is pretty useless as anything but a blank anyway, for the reasons I just stated above...

Inevitability

[kitzilla]

> K-Meleon is the geekier, more configurable, lighter-weight (XULless), speedier twin of Firefox.

Well, I -- for one -- welcome our new K-Melon ubergeek overlords.

Does it run on WINE?

[billstewart]

I'm assuming you can run WINE on top of Slackware....

Re:Geekier? (widgets)

[Rits]

Actually, Opera's widgets are not from QT. You either get the native widgets for the platform when using a 'native' skin, or the cross-platform widgets defined in the skin file when using a non-native skin. The desktop versions of Opera 7 (for Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD or Solaris) use a cross-platform windowing layer, which makes it possible to develop a single UI. This is a light-weight layer BTW, which contains just enough for what Opera currently needs. As opposed to XUL...

Because of this, the development of the various desktop versions is completely synched. There is only a relatively small portion of platform specific coding.

K-Meleon in WINE works well

[Krankheit]

I have K-Meleon working very well (and fast) in WINE version 20041201. It installs and runs fine without messing without any messing with DllOverides, etc. Also the Netscape-Branded firefox that was on /. works well in WINE too. So this is good news for *nix users too.

Re:Why not tell Linux to give up the desktop as we

[Anonymous Coward]

Your sig is a little odd ... did the town of Armonk say it? I imagine it's an IBM quote ... Gerstner?

My prediction for you:

[Anonymous Coward]

Overrated.

Mods: The truth about bonch/rd_syringe/OverlyCrGuy

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators: Please note that "bonch" is a known fanatical psycophant whose obnoxious offtopic rants are legend here on Slashdot. It doesn't matter what the topic is, he'll find a way to scrape in some pointless Microsoft shilling. While nobody expects us to love Microsoft in any way, his particularly tepid style of calling anyone he replies to "troll" or "liar" because he happens to disagree with whatever they're saying is well documented and should not be rewarded. If anything, bonch is the type of person that should not be part of the open source/free software community. He is an anathema to all that is good about free software.

I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider bonch and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Windows or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.

If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than bonch. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.

For example, in this recent post bonch not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "MS". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +0) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.

More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own.

More? Bad spelling in astounding conspiracy theories, more offtopic FUD and uninformed "I'm right, look at me" rants, promptly proven wrong. Worse even, bonch wants to be Bill Gates, apparently (that first one is a winner). I mean, really. You think?

FUD, FUD, FUD, FUD, offtopic FUD, and more FUD. This guy is like the Monty Python SPAM skit, but with FUD and more FUD instead of canned meat. Amazed yet? Don't forget that KDE and Gnome make you dumb, and it's all a Slashdot conspiracy. How low do you want to go? Maybe as low as this?

The infamous Slashdot Front Page Troll? Nuclear fireballs? It goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on (troll?). Like the energizer bunny. Or take these two, which stretch the definition of weird.

It's up to you. We can get rid of this guy and make Slashdot a better place. I don't know about you, but I'd rather take the trolls and crapflooders over people like "bonch" any day. And I sure as hell don't want to be categorized along with him. This is not how you advocate free software, period.

Mods: The truth about bonch/rd_syringe/OverlyCrGuy

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators: Please note that "bonch" is a known fanatical psycophant whose obnoxious offtopic rants are legend here on Slashdot. It doesn't matter what the topic is, he'll find a way to scrape in some pointless Microsoft shilling. While nobody expects us to love Microsoft in any way, his particularly tepid style of calling anyone he replies to "troll" or "liar" because he happens to disagree with whatever they're saying is well documented and should not be rewarded. If anything, bonch is the type of person that should not be part of the open source/free software community. He is an anathema to all that is good about free software.

I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider bonch and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Windows or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.

If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than bonch. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.

For example, in this recent post bonch not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "MS". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +0) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.

More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own.

More? Bad spelling in astounding conspiracy theories, more offtopic FUD and uninformed "I'm right, look at me" rants, promptly proven wrong. Worse even, bonch wants to be Bill Gates, apparently (that first one is a winner). I mean, really. You think?

FUD, FUD, FUD, FUD, offtopic FUD, and more FUD. This guy is like the Monty Python SPAM skit, but with FUD and more FUD instead of canned meat. Amazed yet? Don't forget that KDE and Gnome make you dumb, and it's all a Slashdot conspiracy. How low do you want to go? Maybe as low as this?

The infamous Slashdot Front Page Troll? Nuclear fireballs? It goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on (troll?). Like the energizer bunny. Or take these two, which stretch the definition of weird.

It's up to you. We can get rid of this guy and make Slashdot a better place. I don't know about you, but I'd rather take the trolls and crapflooders over people like "bonch" any day. And I sure as hell don't want to be categorized along with him. This is not how you advocate free software, period.

Re:Speedier twin of Firefox

[Lil-Bondy]

fair enough, guess your school isnt as good as mine, and seeing as school time is alot more limited that regular life, that 30 secs may count towards something, sorry for misunderstanding

Re:Don't need it to load faster

[Lil-Bondy]

actually i run most of the things you just mentioned, and it still runs fine. not sure if my computer is that good, dont think it is, but its rough stats are: celeron (shudder) 2400+ cpu radeon 9200 128mg gfx 256mg ram crappy 20 gig hard drive... all in all, its pretty bad, but i have no idea what you have, like to see a comparison

Re:Don't need it to load faster

[ShieldW0lf]

Duron 600@933, 512MB PC133 SDRAM, GF2MX400 AGP + S3 Virge DX/GX PCI, GameTheater XP, 20/40/60/80/120G HDs, CDROM, CDRW, DVDROM, 2x10/100 NIC, W2KASwSP4

Re:Mods: The truth about bonch/rd_syringe/OverlyCr

[Anonymous Coward]

FFS it's just a frigging forum, if someone likes to express their opinion, fine. Deluded or accurate whatever it is an opinion.

He didn't sound like the oppressive anti-microsoft nark you make him out to be so at least for this posting, stfu.

(posting anon so i dont nuke any karma i have left, just like you whiny pathetic anon coward :P