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?

[JPriest]

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

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 ;)

Wait a second...

[BlueCodeWarrior]

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


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

marketshare worry?

[Anonymous Coward]

since they make a fortune on it now?

Too bad

[datadriven]

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

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.

It's MS only :(

[photon317]

How can that possibly be geekier than multiplatform Firefox?

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.

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.

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: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. ;-)

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

[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!

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?

[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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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: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/

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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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:Dillo

[joshv]

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

-josh

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...

[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...

[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.

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.

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.