In "love" with K-Meleon!

Hello people.

I'm currently "restricted" to using a very old notebook. I sold my old Acer one and my new HP one got too hot due to fabrication issues (still waiting for HP to replace it).

This very old notebook has the following specs:
- Intel Celeron 1.73 Ghz
- 512MB DDR2 of RAM (128 MB shared for Graphics)
- 78 GB Seagate SATA

Obviously, this piece of hardware can't properly run any modern OS. And then, Microsoft WinXP Pro SP3 "suddenly" became the only reasonable option.

During these days, where the need to tweak every bit of what is tweakable raised - manually and with several third-party softwares - thanks to incredibly poor performance issues, I also tested some of the most famous browsers, with only two plugins installed (Flash Player and Silverlight).

IE 8 , Firefox 3.6, Firefox 4 Beta , Opera 11, Google Chrome Stable, Canary Build, Avant browser. Portable and Installed editions.

My personal test proved (at least to me) that they were all really made to run on modern hardware. The number of performance issues I ran in on all of them was astonishing.... for example, try to load more than 6 resource intensive tabs on them with such an old piece of hardware.

It's a nearly impossible mission.

Then I tested K-Meleon 1.6. It was blazing fast, very customizable, feature rich and, most important, never crashed (even with several resource intensive tabs opened).

I guess I needed to make some justice to it and "recommend" it to others.

K-Meleon is very lightweight and covers all the basics of browsing, with good native handling of bookmarks, RSS feeds, spellchecker, "on-demand" plugin activation, fast rendering engine, native user-agent spoof of common browsers for bonus compatibility and many more. Really worth a try.

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As a side note, foobar2000 also proved to be the best music player option for my new temporary "special needs": it simply handles system resources way better than WMP 11, is spartan but very organized and its foo_wlm plugin works like a charm.

 

I've always liked K-Meleon. I played around a bit with the first beta but eventually uninstalled it. I'm glad they've got the spell checker sorted!

I like the fact that you can customise the pref bar more or less how you like. I may have to download the beta 2 now ...

 

thx for this post - i didn't know Beta.2 was available,
I've been happily playing w/ Beta.1 for awhile
based on several enthusiastic props here

but now we can go bigger !

 

I agree, i think this is one that gets passed over for no good reason, other than quite a few arent aware of it. I would like to see it included in some of the speed tests.

The only problem i am having is not knowing how to go about customizing the toolbars. Is there a good tutorial?

 

You should try QTweb on that laptop as well, see how it fares.

Sul.

 

I was an avid user of KM for quite awhile, but Chromium is the fastest on my machine. KM was, for me, faster than the rest until Chromium came about.

Sul.

 

Looks like QTweb may be even lighter, but I noticed on http://www.qtweb.net/compare.php that it doesn't support RSS feeds or any add-on/extension that could add such a feature (please, correct me if I'm wrong), which means it's not for me.

 

I think it's here somewhere. Do remember that when you change any toolbar configs in the Notepad document you will have to disable the UAC in Vista/Seven & re-enable after you have finished, otherwise it won't save.

 

One of my favorite things about KM is how much control you have over it. A downside though is not everyone finds it easy to do just that.

Sul.

 

I also have K-meleon.
It's the best browser that I have had to date.

Programs like countries seem to go through a process of infancy to maturity.
When something is working good, some idiot has to play with it and ruin it.
It's also called bloat for whatever reason.
I guess the day will come when K-Meleon reaches this stage.
So far it's ok IMHO.

 

Indeed, I've been playing with KM way more than what is usual and I like this. Would like to add that KM has a good community built around it - at least, for every problem I faced, every question I had > I found the right answers nearly instantly.

Ok, enough is enough - I'm starting to sound like a fanboy.

 

Nothing wrong with being a fanboy, as long as you don't close your mind to options. I am a fanboy of Chromium right now, and to a lesser degree KM and Opera. I am not a fan of any kind of firefox or IE, but that is just preference.

If being a fanboy means I am a fan of something, then call a spade a spade as they say

Sul.

 

I find it extremely assuring & encouraging that Jeff Doozan,
creator of the "can't-live-without-it-once-you-know-it" StrokeIt mouse gestures program,
has been involved in the development of K-Meleon for quite awhile

... quality flows where quality goes ...

 

Any good adblocker for k-meleon ?

 

It has an in-built adblocker which is pretty good. You have to activate it in tools if I remember correctly. Plus, when I customised the pref-bar I dragged it (the privacy/pref bar) up to the menu bar & occasionally you can re-invigorate the adblocker by clicking 'flashblock' if any ads start to sneak back in.

 

I also used K-meleon for many years and the way they implemented this prefbar was one of its most lovely features. Even Opera did not achieve same functionality (don't know about firefox that I just cannot stand and did not try it lastly).

Now this tread give me the taste to install and test KM on windows7 x64, is it supposed to work ok anough?

 

I tried the beta 1 on my Vista 32 bit laptop. I decided not to try it on my Win 7 64 bit as it is my main computer. It should be OK though, especially the beta 2 I suppose. It's using the same engine as the SeaMonkey 2.1 beta I believe & I'm running that with no problems.

 

Ok, thanks for info!
I will give it a try and see how it goes.

 

yes i found it in the settings..must have overlooked previously

 

OK, good. There is however AdblockPlus but I never found it was necessary to add it to KM as the internal one seemed to do the trick.

 

That ADB+ for KM is very outdated, considering that the 1.6 KM release is already using the most recent stable mozilla codebase in the beta, I guess we may need to take some spare time to post on Wladimir Palant's blog to remind him of updating, just in case. http://adblockplus.org/blog/

After all, ADB+ is pretty much the state-of-the-art in adblocking.

 

Yes, I'm sure you are right. I think quite a few KM extensions are a bit outdated. To be honest, I was quite happy with KM's internal blocker. It would be nice to have an up-to-date alternative though. I am looking forward to the eventual release of 1.6 final.

 

On my older machine, I've tried K-Meleon, found it to be pretty lightweight but couldn't get it to replace my default browser (firefox) due to personal usage patterns. For that, I've had to use Minimem to tame the memory usage of Firefox and other 'heavy' browsers which the OP describes as "made to run on modern hardware". I found it to be much of a help. Without it, I might have to go change to K-Meleon instead

I'm just wondering if anyone intends on going back to the older version of the commonly known browsers (Firefox, etc) out of performance reasons...

 

Hmm... I was given an old laptop, 1ghz. I tried some linux distros like dsl and puppy. They installed fine but were not as "snappy" as I imagined. The browsers felt as heavy on them as windows. I decided maybe XP could perform better, considering that I know how to tweak it. And it is true, XP on that machine "feels" better than linux. Kmeleon and QtWeb are the browsers. The others want more resources and create a "feeling" of such when using them.

I had a reason to put my XP image on my main system recently. I forgot how fast XP was compared to w7, especially on hdd and network transfer. On XP, there is no "busy" icon for anything, it all happens instantly.

Am I going back to XP? Probably, because the time I spend waiting for w7 to let me browse my files adds up. w7 is fine in many respects and even better in some. But for pure speed, XP still rules IMO.

Am I going back to Kmeleon for speed? It is faster loading and much lighter that Chromium which I am currently using mainly. But no, while I like KM, I still have an infatuation with the slim and sleek Chromium UI.

Sometimes moving backward is the right choise, sometimes not -- depending what you are trying to achieve

Sul.

 

It's interesting that KM uses the same version of Gecko as SeaMonkey. I have always found that SeaMonkey was 'snappier' & performed better than Firefox as a whole. Unfortunately SM has other problems, some page rendering etc. Not enough to deter me from using it so much though!