K-Meleon 1.5 Available

I have been trying Opera 9.62 out. In interest of comparing, I cleared cache on both, set to open with no pages, same settings in each that seem the same. Cache size, content allowed, etc etc.

Opened both up on a 2.4g amd xp pro with 1gb ram. Minimum resource being used, just a firewall and avira. OP opened with 18mb, KM with 16. Opened exact same 7 pages, OP sits at 76mb, KM 52mb. Opened an additional 5 tabs in KM, mem is at 66mb.

No noticable speed difference really, alhtough I would say from just watching with the naked eye, KM is a little bit faster at loading the entire content in one instance, whereas Opera tends to be faster at showing the initial page, but still has more to render. Not enough to really call one faster than the other particuarlly.

It is interesting though how much more memory it uses now compared to the old days. After using KM almost exclusively for a few months, I miss some parts of Opera, most notably the download manager. But having used it again for a couple days now, it does indeed feel slower than KM, in regards to the user environment, not page loading.

Sul.

 

I made the move to K-Meleon and fell for it

Extremely tweakable, extremely minimalistic and extremely fast in my opinion!
I only had problems at first with a x-mplayr2 plugin (couldn't listen to internet radio), but downloaded 2 DLL files ang got it sorted out.

I used K-Meleon yesterday all day, opened dozens of tabs, visited a lot of sites, played some videos on youtube, listened to tha radio and all that stuff.
At the end of the day I had:
0:19:02 CPU time
120.000 K Memory

Today I'm doing the same with Firefox, it's been on for 2 hours and haes reached 163.000 K of memory and 0:19:00 CPU time

 

I have tried many times to go back to Opera in the last month or so. I just cannot do it. It is a better application. It has great features. It is perhaps a touch faster then KM. It definately has a great download manager, my favorite part. But even with all of that, I still feel like it is bloated somehow. Bloated that is in the sense of way more than I need or want.

Alas, even recent testing show that Opera latest version with 20 tabs open, is a slight more memory efficient than KM, with exact same tabs open. KM beats OP easily in 5 or less tabs, and KM is still very good IMO on resource usage. But the newest OP is gaining back a little bit in way of footprint.

I upgraded my Sandboxe to 3.32 and now am using KM 1.51. Will see if it is any different, but I don't think so. Just vanilla plain and smooth.

Sul.

 

http://home.concepts-ict.nl/~rijk/opera/huginmunin.html

You can have Opera as standalone browser as well.

 

I absolutely agree

But:

Is it safer than FF or not?

 

I believe that products less-known will be less specifically targeted. So from that standpoint, KM should be more secure. Common exploits to mozilla, or common browser exploits, who can say if KM is more secrue? I would say Guenter over at KM forums woudl be the one to ask.

Sul.

 

I'm a K-Mel devotee, but i doubt it is more secure than FF in that it shares the same Mozilla / Gecko engine.
K-Mel's gecko updates are usually a few days behind FF's.

That said, I still feel quite secure using it, although my devotion to it is not security driven.

 

Do they come with an "automatic update" function? Or is there a manual update necessary?

 

I've never received any "update available" prompts.
Updates, manually invoked, install atop existing installation.
Current ver. I believe is 1.5.2 w/ Gecko rv:1.8.1.19 Gecko/20081217

 

Don't know about the Ghecko engine itself, but KM has an update macro which tells you when a new verion is available.

Sul.