K-Meleon 1.5 Available

Thanx ronjor
Install over previous version was painless.

 

1.1.6 working better. There is random slowdowns with this version.

 

What are the advantages of using K melon? Is it additional features, or more stable/secure/faster? How does it compare to Firefox or opera?

 

K-Meleon is a "slim" and lightweight browser with not too much fluff and its main feature is speed: Its faster than Firefox and has much lower minimum requirements. Whether it is faster than Opera is subjective.

It is, however, subject to the same security problems as Firefox's Gecko engine. Given that K-Meleon's team is not so fast at releasing updates when compared to Firefox; this might not be a good thing.

 

I have used Opera as my primary browser since version 5. I have also used kmeleon for a long time as well. Typically for me, Opera has been more robust with a layout and features I really like. But Opera has not always opened every page. Most, but not all. That has been where I used Kmeleon in the past. It is very much lighter than other browsers, and you can tell it. Most importantly for me, it has with only 1 exception, opened every web page I have ever asked it to.

Now lately I personally feel Opera is getting too well known, thus leading to the demise of all products that become 'known' - bloat. For me now they do too much, and the lightweight 'worlds fastest browser' is now, maybe fast, but only on a page render, certainly not on load.

So with newer versions of Kmeleon, more stuff has been added that IMO puts in on par with where Opera should have gone, aka 'bloatfree' lol.

On top of that you can use it's macro language or other methods to tweak it the way you want. I have found that most things you wuold need have already been made by someone.

The only thing it does not do that I want that Opera does is have a download manager. It does pause/resume, but not like Opera. I have been using winget with it. It works well, and you can tell winget to shutdown once the download is complete, so it is not sitting in the tray doing nothing when not needed.

I use it for all of my hardware needs, like interfacing switches and routers. I have not seen it shutdown from an error. Ever.

One intersting thing that I have noted with both Opera and Firefox is that if you open many many tabs, and download a lot of data (drivers, demos etc) in one sitting, you can get a bsod. And it has happened on vmWare as well as real boxes. On intel & amd, raid and singles. Firewalls / AV or not. IE never does this, and so far Kmeleon has never done this either. Kmeleon has been cleverly using a layers method instead of an MDI style true 'tabs' (or so I read), but now in v1.5 I believe there is true MDI tabs. So I shall see if it does the bsod thing or not. Intersting that bsod, every time scandisk finds broken files in the cache of either ff or opera.

Anyway HTH.

Sul.

 

Opera is not in any way bloated at all. It might have a lot of features, but it's been like that for a while. Even then, it is still efficient--fast and stable. Also, I've never experienced BSODs with Firefox and Opera, even when downloading a lot of items.

I tried K-Meleon, and it is indeed fast. However, the fact that they're using the old Gecko engine prevents me from using it. It is a good and stable browser, though.

 

DL mgr.s such as OrbitDownloader, Fresh Download, WinGet, Free DL Mgr, Download Express and others are available for K-Mel via extensions or External app.s:
http://pagesperso-orange.fr/jujuland46/JujuLand/KMES/KMES-Download.html#down_extensions

http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/wiki/ExternalApplications#downloads

 

Really enjoy k-meleon so will have to try the latest version. I have pocket k-meleon 1.13 tiny running off my USB stick. Works well.

 

I have found Opera to be bloated. I have a love affair with Opera. I have tried to pry anyone and everyone off of IE or FF for years. Back when Opera had it's little ad banner I was pushing it.

Opera uses way too much resources now. Why does a page renderer need to use that much? Eye candy? Extra features? Honestly, do you navigate by voice commands? Do you use Opera for torrents? Do you use the new featrues in the last year or so?

As for BSOD, I can only state that I have had this happen on my machines both at home and work, my families machines and friends machines. Quite frankly I have often wondered wether the OS may be making something unstable on purpose for 3rd party browsers. It has happened that often. Starting on pII/k62's, to pIII, athlon, athlon xp, p4, athlon 64, x2, and now core 2 duo. All my machines have always done this when using Opera, periodically.

I love Opera, but just because I have a very new computer with multi cores and more ram than I have ever had, does NOT mean that I want programs that today do the same job as yesterday, but pack on more useless features at the expense of resource usage.

All that being said, I would not uninstall Opera. I just like to start a faster browser when I just need to get on and get off. Major research I still prefer to use with Opera.

Sul.

 

Re: K-Meleon 1.5.1 Update Available

K-Meleon 1.5.1, an update to Gecko engine 1.8.1.17 was released.
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/
Note SBIE users:
There have been a couple conflicts reported with 1.5.1 update and SBIE.

 

Official K-Meleon versions appear less frequently than other XUL-based browsers because not all security issues affect K-Meleon.

It's been my experience that, when necessary, a new K-Meleon version will usually appear within days after a Firefox GRE update.

 

Opera is the least bloated of all the suites out there....with multiple tabs opened, it consumes way less resources than any suites out there. Not to mention, even after hours of surfing there is no slow downs in any way. If there is anything that is bloated, its Opera's competitors.

 

Prove IT. Please provide FACTS to support your statements.

Hey, Arup -- I am not doing this to challenge you. I really want to see objective comparisons between K-mel & Opera. If you have factual information, please share it.

 

If your definition of 'suite' is one that has all the bells and whistles, such as voice navigation and integrated download manager, then I would heartily agree.

If your definition of a 'suite' includes Kmeleon, then I disagree. To me, KM is still a browser with a few extras, but nothing like Opera's.

I can easily open both, KM and Opera, open the same websites in tabs, and compare the resource usage. Perhaps your computer shows differently, but mine shows KM beating Opera in that regard by a pretty good margin.

Sul.

 

Yesterday I opened around 25 tabs, some of them youtube with movies playing, some Flickr with images as well as text based pages and the memory use was around 80mb, hardly what I would consider bloat. Also as far as safety record goes...Opera rules and even in terms of speed, its a toss up, some pages load fast on KMeleon and some on Opera. Also its not right to compare both of them, Kmeleon needs bunch of plugins to really make it a viable browser whereas Opera comes ready to play right out of the box.

 

Please take a look around and use it yourself, what FACTS are you exactly looking for. Loading time, Kmeleon has an edge but load it with plugins and it gets slow, Opera for a suite loads the fastest. By the way, I made a general statement about Opera suite not being bloated, where have I made a direct comparison to KMeleon. Now that you mention it, Kmeleon, however good it may be to you and users would never equal Opera, also its not a suite. The only thing that comes close to Opera today and can be compared is the Seamonkey suite which is quite good but is let down by a slow clunky interface.

 

http://extjs.com/blog/2007/07/10/css-selectors-speed-myths/

 

That is a reasonable statement. Were Opera like it used to be, just a browser without so much fluff, I am sure it would be faster/better at all things than KM. The fact is that with KM you can still get just a browser, and have to do nothing to make it less. Which is why I use it more now. Were Opera to strip it down and just allow a modular approach to just the browser, I would not have to switch

I don't know if KM will never equal Opera. For example, for many years now I have been using Opera as my primary browser, with KM as my backup. My rought estimate is that about 10% of the websites I have gone to, Opera does not properly display. Doing nothing different than starting same page in KM shows the content. So, while Opera may have milliseconds better load time or something, it has always had a little downfall. Interesting that KM on only a very small handfull of pages will not work either. It is IE or nothing on some. Specifically on a Merchant Provider login site.

I long for Opera versions 6 or 7, even with the ad-banner. It was still a browser and was blazing fast.

Sul.

 

Umm, bloat can be more memory usage than it used to be, which in the newer Opera versions, it definately uses more memory.

The bloat I would refer to though is more the useless fluff that is now incoprated into it. The 'suite' part. Which is likely the cause of the rise in resource usage.

As for KM, what do you mean you have to use plugins? I only install flash player. I don't have any other plugins. Unless you mean the built in ones for like mouse gestures, or cookie deleting. And I would say that on Opera/KM/FF when you change your preferences to use/not use a feature, the modular format is a type of plug-in.

Please tell me, I would like to know, are there certain plugins you have to have for normal usage? That is not including that POS adobe reader. Now that is BLOAT. I would be like some more info, maybe I have missed something that could make it 'mo betta'. What do you do that does not make KM viable out of the box other than flash? Curiosity is killing me here.

Sul.

 

Have you heard of Hugin and Munin concept in Opera, http://www.xs4all.nl/~vangeijt/opera/huginmunin.html also if you don't wish to run Opera with mail etc. just set up a shortcut to Opera with a -nomail and it will open without the mail client.

I and many other Opera users find the added apps in the suite heaven sent. I would not use anything but Opera's super fast and slick M2 mail with its excellent mailbox and very good backup features as well as an integrated mailbox back up feature. Imagine, I just open one app instead of a sea of apps and get my mail while I surf, get my RSS feeds as well as read news with its excellent newsreader and if I want, I can also download the occasional torrent or download files. All this at a minimal impact to speed of the browser or memory. As for Opera not opening certain pages, well the issue here is the page itself and not Opera. Opera adheres to strict HTML coding and therefore pages loosely written has issues, also many pages will sniff for browser ID and shut out Opera, don't think thats Opera's fault by any means.

With all that Opera offers I don't think memory is high by any chance and time and again, in tests done Opera proves itself top notch overall so where is the bloat?

 

Well put. Hugin and Munin I had never heard of. I tried the shortcuts like that, but I have never seen it do anything on new versions.

Mail I tried when it first came out. It is ok I suppose. However, I have had my hotmail account for so long, that I don't use my isp one. Fortunately I can use OE still, which is pretty simple, also Opera to my knowledge cannot interface to hotmail.

I also don't use RSS. And I really don't like the torrent part of Opera. I use an old version of BitComet for that.

Opera may adhere to strict html standards, which is fine, but when you do come across that site you want to visit, that means nothing. If the author of the site uses loose code, I still have to switch to KM or IE to view it.

lol, the bloat I suppose is where one finds it. Myself I like to use different apps that are designed for one thing only. I don't care for the 'suite'. That is a matter of taste of course. When I started using Opera on a modem, I could tweak 98se to get a connection of 52, very near the theoretical 56 limit. Even with this good connection, modems crawl. I started using Opera I think at v4x. Was it ever fast. At that time you could use IE or Netscape or I think the orginial Mozilla browser, which used to be a dragon looking icon. Opera smoked them. I was happy when it went free with no ad-banner, although I was buying it by this time.

Being a nerd, I have always been interested in how much of my precious ram was being consumed. When Opera came out with tabs, it was really impressive. Stacked up to IE with it's mutiple windows, Opera again gave a good whoopin' to IE. Now as my machine is the best I have ever had, with multi cores and very fast hdd's in raid, 4gb of fast ram and a very mature OS that is tweaked to the hilt, I still look at that resource usage, and get pretty 'itchy' to keep it as low as possible. lol.

For you the bloat is usable tools. For me the usable tools are bloat. Either way, I still can't really say anything 'bad' about Opera other than my taste might be changing.

Good post Arup.

Sul.

 

I have five POP accounts and I depend on Opera M2. This is where I appreciate its suite feature as I don't have to keep a track of other apps, their updates, backups etc. One app does it all with minimal cost to my resources and no other issues, therefore I for one truly appreciate the suite. As I said, I opened up close to 25 tabs, some of them with rich multimedia content, also had mail open as well as downloading a torrent, the memory footprint on my 8GB PC was a measly 82mb.......I guess I can live with that.

Btw, Opera has a very useful open with feature where you can open with any other installed browser in your system for pages that give you trouble, I use it for those occasions when I have problems with certain web pages which is indeed rare.


Thanks for the compliment Sul. I hope you will give Opera another try soon. Don't get me wrong, I love Kmeleon and would use it over IE or FF anyday if I needed a stand alone browser.

 

I think perhaps "bloat" is the wrong word here. I think what you're objecting to is the features surplus, as opposed to any real performance lack or excess memory usage etc. It is actually pretty amazing that Opera has managed to incorporate all the extra features at no expense to performance.

K-Meleon for me loads extremely quickly, and performs well. It just depends on whether one wants a Gecko browser or not, and how much of a nuisance it is trying to add the plugins and things necessary to obtain the same functionality as Firefox with extensions or Opera has.

All that said, I have always like K-Meleon myself.... it's a great light and fast browser optimized for Win.

 

Yes, you are correct. Bloat meaning as you say, too much surplus. I take for example firewalls. They are now swiss utility knives. They are not just firewalls. They are much more resource intensive. True, you can get the 'all in one' package and have less overall apps running. Even Antivirus are the same now, all trying to do so much more. Probably from a marketing perspective they gain more market share. That is the only reason I like Avira. It is still what an AV was, just an AV. A little rootkit going on, but still pretty basic.

I guess in the end, it is a choise of preference to whether I want to take the package deal and use it, or mix and match and make what I want. So in the case of Opera, I used it and used it. It grew and grew. When it broke the flash component I think somewhere just before v95 came out, I started using KM more and more. In light of the fact that it is not a 'suite', and all I use is the browser anyway, I think it is faster overall and uses less resources than Opera, and way less than FF or IE. But as Arup so appropriately states, when you utilize many components of the 'suite', it is probably a wash if not faster/more efficient.

But good assesment of the overall picture Kerodo.

Sul.