After a long time in development, version 0.9 of the Gecko-based K-Meleon web browser for Windows has been released.
Gecko-based K-Meleon 0.9 browser Released
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K-Meleon makes me chuckle, because it duplicates too many of the IE behaviors that irritate me while missing the one Firefox feature I can’t live without: powerful ad blocking.
That said, congrats on the release. K-Meleon should exert some serious pressure on Firefox to slim down.
(PS. For the longest while I didn’t even think to try it, because I assumed that, with the K prefix, it was a KDE app… sigh…)
But when I needed it (under-powered computer), it usually felt not-finished/lacking.
Things might have changed every since, but I prefer one browser to rule them all. 🙂
Firefox devs won’t feel any pressure. K-Meleon ain’t got the buzz. XUL framework and feature creep for Firefox solidify K-M’s speedier nature. But Opera’s UI is generally faster then the Fox, and IE handles flash much better. But speed is only one factor in many.
This new release is pretty nifty, though.
That is not faster than Firefox which makes me wonder why people say Firefox is slower than it. I know, I know that’s not how its supposed to be. But on my machines it doesn’t launch any faster, in fact previous builds seems dog slow although this one seems better. If it was like twice as fast as Firefox, Internet Explorer startup speed, then I’d definitely consider it. But its not and beyond that I can’t find a reason to use it.
I won’t use K-Melon because ***to my knowledge*** it won’t run on Linux, but if K-Melon is faster than FireFox, and has a smaller memory foot-print (only from what I’ve heard – I’ve never used K-Melon) then why doesn’t FireFox borrow some of the code back from their project?
I use both firefox & k-meleon. I think K-meleon is (subjectively) faster loading & running. Its default skin is also more attractive than mozilla’s although of course one can change the skin.
Its all about having a choice.
I abandoned IE since firefox 0.8. Its good that firefox is increasing “market” share, but sometimes firefox fans can be a tad evangelical, in my opinion (NB opinion).
PS. the K-meleon forums are accessible & informative…
I was wondering, especially with the K-name stuff, whether K-Meleon was the new browser by the KDE people who ported the Gecko engine on the last KDE gathering.
I thought they were going to make a KDE replacement for KHtml (or Konqueror as webbrowser).
If this is the first release, I’m wondering why they do it on Windows first and not on KDE ? Technically there must be not that much difference, since both work with QT toolkits.
Re: Is K-Meleon the Gecko Based based replacement for Konqueror
No, K-Meleon is just a shell for the GECKO rendering engine. Mozilla is also a shell, firefox too for the GECKO rendering engine. IE is the shell of the IE rendering engine. Maxthon is again a shell of the IE rendering engine. In simple matters, K-Meleon is to Mozilla what Maxthon and Avant are to Internet Explorer. Maxthon in fact can be used as K-Meleon replacement since you have the option of using the Gecko rendering engine instead of IE’s one. So, yeah, K-Meleon is just a shell.
I’ve just tried it for the first time and while I still prefer Firefox, K-Meleon is definately faster. On my old k6-2/500 128Mb ram running win98, K-Meleon loads in 0.5 seconds and Firefox takes 3 seconds the second time I load it (that’s after opening and closing it once, so some of the program should still be cached in memory), the first time I load Firefox on this machine it takes even longer, so K-Meleon loads 6 times faster than Firefox. In general usage it seems to be faster, but that is a lot harder to time so is more subjective. I’ve still got to try it out some more, but I’ll probably keep it on my old box and stick to Firefox on my newer ones.
Impressive speed, especially the loading time. Memory footprint is also slim. Ugly themes though, and lack of extension and linux support makes it of limited usefulness.
For a very old system running windows though, I imagine it would be second to none!
K-Meleon is definately faster than FF on my P3 933Mhz, 384 RAM machine.
It would be great if they port it to KDE using QT. That would give Gecko based browser for KDE. Not that I don’t like Konqueror :-), but it would really be great to have a Gecko based browser installed directly with KDE.
I’m impressed, really. I had tried it back in version 0.6 I believe… and I quickly dumped it, back then.
I have to agree with socratic : given an ad blocker, this would seriously weaken my bond with Firefox.
somebody said on the Slashdot discussion that it runs on Wine on Linux.
I tried it a few days ago (PIII 800) and it is fast and light. You can still do several of the standrard tweaks w/about:config.
Its missing some of the toys like adblock which can increase your speed of browsing. I would be using it except for the fact that it is missing some of the plug-ins.
Correct me if I am wrong here. But I think the speed can be partially attributed to some of the missing components: XUL, GTK. I believe that its the XUL framework that allows for the plug-ins that Moz/FF.
Even though, its not my “cup of tea”, its still an excellent browser. It is still worth a try, if your looking for something fast/light.
FYI: I remember reading of the K-Meleon that they are working on something like Ad-Block (built-in). So, they are making progress.
Yeah, I installed it via Wine, it ran once, can’t get it to start up now, no error message or anything.
K-Melon is definetly faster loading. Rendering wise not much of a difference compared to Firefox, but startup is pretty evident even w/o the pre-loader.
I won’t use K-Melon because ***to my knowledge*** it won’t run on Linux, but if K-Melon is faster than FireFox, and has a smaller memory foot-print (only from what I’ve heard – I’ve never used K-Melon) then why doesn’t FireFox borrow some of the code back from their project?
There’s Galeon, Epiphany, Kazehakase, etc. if you need a Gecko-based browser on Linux. In fact, I think K-Meleon is a word play on “Galeon”.
it’s not really a play, it was originally explicitly intended to be a version of Galeon for Windows (and back in the early days it looked a lot like it). I used to use this as my main Windows browser before Phoenix (then Firebird, then Firefox…) started getting really good, it was pretty neat. But yeah, not much reason to take it over Firefox now, unless you really need the trivial speed boost.
I think “K-Meleon” was a play on “gecko” and “chameleon“. The original releases of K-Meleon looked just like Internet Explorer, but had Gecko underneath.
Does anyone know about such a lightweight Gecko-based browser for UNIX? Firefox is just too slow for older machines, Galeon/Epiphany are good but require half Gnome…
all it does is bitch:
“unable to delete blah/blah/blah/overlay folder”
Didn’t launch after install though that option was checkboxed.
Launched manually complains:
“unable to find MSVCRT.DLL” or whatever.
I’d go hunt that down on the web but I know how these things go, it’ll just bitch about some other file next, then the next, then the next…
I’ll stick with Opera, but they’re annoying me with their odd priorities. So many things you can’t do without installing winsock2, but if you do that it breaks Opera. Oh well, who cares about not being able to connect to servers or having uploads timeout after 480k as long as you have all these great SKINNING features, right?
I haven’t tried this one in quite some time:
skipstone (www.muhri.net/skipstone)
It was gecko/mozilla based; however, I don’t remember the version they were using for their builds. Its been about a year or two since I tried it last.
Hope this helps.
There’s Galeon, Epiphany, Kazehakase, etc. if you need a Gecko-based browser on Linux. In fact, I think K-Meleon is a word play on “Galeon”.
I use FireFox on my Linux Box (previously used Mozilla), but at work I’m forced to use a Windows box, and I hate using two different browsers. Therefore, I also use FireFox while at work. It seems that after approx. 1/2 hr. of using FireFox on Windows it becomes a bit slugish — then you notice that the memory foot print becomes huge (60+MB). Similar issue can be seen in Linux, but I don’t notice the slow down
I love FireFox, but I hate the memory usage. I would dump it in a sec. for any alternative that runs well on Windows & Linux.
Actually, I think the name had something to do with the fact that it was originally able to use either IE or Gecko to render with.
Seeths: It’s not going to render pages any differently, because they both use the same exact rendering engine (Gecko).
Same engine, but not necessarily the same version, so the rendering may not be the same. Don’t know which is using a later version of Gecko at the moment, but the best from that perspective would be a Firefox nightly. Those are currently broken in lots of *other* ways, though.
Uhh.. it does suport XUL… (looking at my test xul fine in another “layer” right now).
And it does suport extentions as well as its own plugin system.
It uses 8mb of memory on this box (it only has a total of 128) while firefox uses 16.
Its system tray preloader makes it load much faster, its macro suport is very awsome, geoups are cool.
And it has pop up blocking and a privacy plugin… seems to be able to block most ads and pop ups…
and best of all NO GDI LEAKS!!! anyone how uses the old kmelon or current IE and Firefox browsers on a system with little ram will notice that most browsers slowly eat ram like pac man… Not so with this release.
Its flexable, light, and somehow suports all the extentions and xul rubish firefox does… makes me wonder what the firefox team is doing wrong.