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

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: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.