K-Meleon 1.1.4 Available

@ronjor- thanks for the heads-up

 

Working fine but still I'm using 1.5 version.

 

That went in easy, although I had to reinstall Adblock Plus. But it kept the settings, so no big deal.

 

K-mel is the fastest browser that I know of, & I have tried lots of them.

With each change to K-mel I always worry whether they have done anything to slow it down. The 1.1.4 version has not gotten one whit slower.

By the way, I compare the speed of various browsers by using THIS site's service.

 

That URL you posted doesn't work.

I'd like to see what you are basing these speeds on.

I've used K-Meleon in the past, and I've never noticed anything special about it in regards to speeds and being faster then other browsers...

 

I base the speeds upon actual measurements by the website I linked. The site is down right now. In the meantime, have a look HERE

For a *live* video of a speed test of Safari, IE & Firefox on windows go HERE

Here's another test. It's several months old but interesting because it pits Opera IE FF & Safari at each other. You might be surprised at the winner (I was).

Another interesting test can be found HERE. The test is primarily designed to test the speed of 6 different JavaScript frameworks. However, since the test runs in whichever browser you are testing, you can also compare the numbers between browsers, and see which browsers work fastest within each framework. The "start tests" button is in the upper right hand corner of the page. On that particular page, I only tested K-mel & Firefox. Firefox smoked K-mel on that particular test. Generally, with pipelining, K-mel excels at page rendering of HTML & CSS etc, whereas other browsers might run faster on scripts and java etc.

There are also user perceptions of relative speed. For instance, some browsers are default-set to render large pages all at once (so you have to wait to see the results) whereas other browsers are default set to display part of large pages as fast as they are loaded (so you can begin reading the page while it is still being loaded.) Browsers of the latter type convey a feeling of being speedier, even though browsers of the former type might load the total page faster.

Be aware that there are LOTS of tweaks that can be done to K-mel in order to make it faster. Here are a few examples of tweaks to K-mel's user.js, from a few years ago.

A number of those tweaks have since been incorporated into K-mel's defaults. For an intimate look into K-mel's knickers, type "about:config" (without the quotes) in K-mel's address bar then hit return.

By searching around at the K-mel forum you can find plenty of good tweaks (if you enjoy doing that sort of thing.)

+++However, I assure you that K-mel is fully "good to go" & plenty fast right out of the box. If speedy minimalist is to your liking, go for K-mel. If you want all the bells & whistles, go for Firefox or IE or Sea Monkey. With browsers there are tons of choices, many of them quite good. Myself, I wouldn't use IE on a bet -- but each to his own tastes (as the lady said when she kissed the cow.) ^__^

 

This site:

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#winspeed

Those times are not accurate at all, did you also notice the test box it was used on?

XP with a 800 MHz Intel Pentium 3, 256 MB RAM

XP doesn't run that great on 256MB of ram and this would not be a good test bed platform to use.

Also was this on a clean install, what services or software was running, etc...

I've used all the major names in browsers and then some, and they all have only taken a half of second to 1 or 2 seconds to open.

 

The times are not designed to be viewed as absolutes but as *relative* values. The relative speeds among the browsers tested are significant.

To open WHAT? Scripts? Java? CSS? HTM? Of what size web page? 30K 80K? 2MB? With how many images of what resolution? From how big a pipe? With or without pipelining?

I appreciate your comments and I'm sure they are representative of your own surfing habits and set-up. However, relative browser speed can & has been measured objectively (not just anecdotally).

There ARE speed-of-rendering differences between the various browser engines (gecko, ie-std, safari, etc). There also are differences in the CONCEPTS & TYPEs of coding used by the various browsers. For instance, K-Meleon gains a teeny increase of speed by using uses the native Windows UI rather than (for instance) Firefox's use of XUL.

Browser speed is similar to horse races. If you take the potentially fastest filly & handicap her with 20-30lbs of saddle weights, then slower horses might beat her.

The same is true for browsers. The speediest browser ever made will seem snail-slow if you use it in an environment where (for instance): (a) your AV does heavy real-time website monitoring while you are surfing, &/or (b) your cable neighborhood has lots of folks who are doing heavy file-sharing uploads & downloads, &/or (c) your ISP is making lots of circuitous (cheap) hops through cogent lines & other inefficient cheapies, and so forth.

Because of these & many other variables, perceived speed during every day surfing is generally not as meaningful as objective testing.

 

I get two TCP prompts each time I open this new version K-M 1.1.4 - from Outpost FW 2008 - how to avoid them ? Similar popups re-occur when click any weblink after having already opened K-M 1.1.4 .
Earlier I used OP v4_1025 and never got such prompts with K-M 1.1.3.

Grateful for any tips /ideas
SKA

 

Sure browser speed can be measured objectively, I'm just saying if you are going to do tests then do them properly, using a P3 with only 256MB of RAM to do software testing on is not adequate.

This has nothing to do with my own relative surfing habits. It's a fact that a web browser needs a certain amount of CPU to process, and Ram to download websites, pages, pics, flash, video, etc., if you don't believe me, and you are running a desktop, try this experiment, take out some sticks and only leave 256MB of ram in your box and notice the slow down on web loading, but then again depending on your video card you might not notice to much of a slow down, but make sure you test this on graphically intense websites, and you will see the difference.

Of course engines have faster speeds rendering, etc., but only in slight seconds. On any decent box of a decent CPU and Ram the differences are only a few seconds, not leaps and bounds.

Your analogy of the the speediest browser, and horses is because you are taking away the ram the browser needs, this gets back to what I was saying above.

And for the last, I'm not talking about any testing just on surfing, but objective as you put it.

I've yet to see anything more then around a 3-5 second difference in browsers and 5 seconds was a stretch, then when someone knows how to tweak their box for better performance the browser they are able to gain some performance and shorten the gap.

 

how is the ram usage compared to firefox now.. i know is was slightly better before but is it even better with this new release i see the newest version of firefox using a lot more ram than previous builds did...

 

This is not a strict test, but I am seeing about a 10K difference in memory use between FF2x (higher) and the new K-Meleon here.

Would be more interesting to see a side-by-side of them with the exact same plugins installed...

Mike

edit: spelling

 

it seems many buge for me with this new build..

it refuses to save my home page no matter what i do.. i tried typing it in when clicking make this your home page did not work uninstalled reinstalled no go all it will do it start to the k-meleon page...

i can not get it to save multiple user profiles.. i tried and it will only save the first one. the second or any i add go back to default when i re-open it after exiting the program...

and man does it make kis firewall go crazy.. where with firefox i set it in kis i tried with k-meleon and kis goes nuts ever page to open requires a million allows or deny's... i do really like the layout and options though.. anyone have any ideas??