I did something dumb the other day. I was so excited at the prospect of using WindizUpdate within Firefox as an alternative to Windows Update within Internet Explorer, that I showed my complete ignorance of K-Meleon as a browser. The comments feature of HTMLfixIT is temporarily disabled, but if it were functional I’m guessing that I would be getting a hiding from a heap of loyal K-Meleon users.
To make amends, I have pulled my head in and checked out K-Meleon. For those folks who don’t know, K-Meleon is a web browser based on Gecko, the layout engine written by the Mozilla Foundation and also used in Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Application Suite, and SeaMonkey. According to Wikipedia, the aim of K-Meleon is to provide a light-weight browser running under Microsoft Windows using the operating system’s native interface for the application’s toolbars and menus – similar to Galeon or Epiphany on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, and Camino on Mac OS X.
Wikipedia further reports that because of the lower resource requirement, K-Meleon is more responsive than most other Gecko based web browsers. It is beneficial for systems where the hardware is aged and system resources are limited. It is also stated that it starts up much faster than one of its competitors, Firefox.
I have now tried K-Meleon out for myself, and found it to be an easy browser to use. Like Firefox it uses “layered” (tabbed) browsing, and like Opera is uses mouse gestures for navigation. The default skin is boring, but what default skin isn’t? There are a range of macros available, providing functionality not unlike Firefox Extensions.
The claims of fast load times seem to be valid, and this is something that really appeals to me. Allow me to explain why. The most popular PC in my house is a Dell notebook with a modest 1.5GHz processor and 512MB RAM, and between my 3 children the PC can be logged on / switched between any number of users at a time. With limited resources it often slows to a painful crawl when switching between users, sometimes proving too poor for Firefox, killing it off and stopping it from responding. If K-Meleon can make life easier in this regard, I’ll be converted to a fan!
Go on, give K-Meleon a try for yourself!
June 15th, 2021 at 5:01 am
Continue on inspiring us with your writing! Thank you for this article.
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