K-Meleon - The Browser You Control

K-Meleon is an extremely fast, customizable, lightweight web browser for the win32 (Windows) platform based on the Gecko layout engine (the rendering engine of Mozilla). K-Meleon is free, open source software released under the GNU General Public License.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: K-Meleon is a web browser for the Microsoft Windows platform, based on the Gecko layout engine. Compared to Mozilla Firefox, K-Meleon is not cross-platform because it uses native Windows API to create the user interface instead of using the XUL layer. However, this reduces the resource requirement and makes K-Meleon much more responsive, which is especially important for users of low-end hardware. This approach is similar to that of Galeon and Epiphany (for GNOME), and Camino (for Mac OS X).

The latest preview release, 1.0 Release Candidate 2, was released on June 28, 2006[2], based on Gecko 1.8.0.5.

Another browser? The browser war is getting furious with Opera coming out with their new release 9, Mozilla with Firefox 2 and IE with 7.0. Now within all these another browser? Yes K-Meleon is another browser which helps you in rendering html pages on the internet. Whats the big news, whats the catch here or what is new? The answer to all these is that there is nothing special about K-Meleon. Its way too simple and does not look any better than the rest. It does not support extensions the way Firefox does! It also does not do all the cool stuff Flock does. Let me talk about all the usual stuff it has. It has mouse gestures inbuilt, keyword support, cofigurable menu items, tab(layers) support, skinnable toolbars, themes, plugins and macros. Now the not so usual things we forget. Adding extensions does make our lives easier but it also bloats our browser. Finally eating up huge amounts of the memory with just one tab open. And then one day it takes just about 5 seconds to open the browser window (thats approximately the time it takes in my machine and sometimes more). So I started looking out for one which just helped me browse faster and load even faster. K-Meleon was the answer (for me). I found it to have extremely fast load times and low memory footprints when compared to others. Also pages did turn up faster when compared to others. Surprisingly even the download of files seemed to be faster though I never timed it, it seems so. I had tried K-Meleon long time back but removed it once I started using Firefox. I came back to it now with K-Meleon 1RC. Before K-Meleon was supposed to be for the nerdy and configuring it would actually require manual changes in its configuration files. This time they have done away with that and made many options available as easy preference items. For me K-Meleon is fast becoming a usual with Firefox while surfing. And I am enjoying the speed upgrade I have got along. I am sure this would be one silent achiever which would take its steady time.

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