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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."
The K has nothing to do with KDE since it's Windows only.
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.
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.
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.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Try kmeleon.sourceforge.net and here is the download link.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
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.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
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/
Site is /.ed...n 09.exe?download
Download at: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/kmeleon/kmeleo
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.
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."
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.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.
Diagnosis: you are paranoid. As luck would have it, you're also being followed.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/dnwue/html/welcome.asp Never ask a hypothetical question that can be answered ;)
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
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.
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.
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
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.
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.