K-Meleon 0.7 ReleasedFriday November 1st, 2002Version 0.7 of K-Meleon, the light Gecko-based browser for Windows, was released yesterday. This latest version is based on Mozilla 1.2 Beta and includes a rewritten bookmarks plug-in, an improved macros plug-in and a new Layers plug-in that offers tabbed browsing functionality. Visit the download page for more information or select a mirror to start downloading now. Used the final for a while. K-M is pretty fast and since it does not use XUL, it's speedy too... I just installed it and browsed with it a bit. It appears to be stable, fast and smooth as silk. On the downside, the UI is pretty limited if you are used to a fully tweaked mozilla with loads of mozdev stuff installed. Of course the whole point of K-Meleon is to provide a simple UI but still, there's a lot of stuff I miss already so it won't replace mozilla on my machine. However, for those looking for a well performing internet explorer alternative, this is pretty much it. Stupid Slashdot rejected my post... Didn't they post about K-Meleon 0.6...yes! I hadn't use it before, but I'm really impressed by this version. I'd definitely recommend it to all my windows using friends. I booted into windows to give this a try and it was nice and snappy. One thing seemed odd for a default after a completely clean install. There were what appeared to be 3 different bookmarks menus. I'm sure there's some option (I didn't look, my linux partition was getting mad at me for being booted into windows for more than a few minutes) to change that but it just seemed like a confusing default. Also, the layers buttons are kind of small and thus hard to hit in high-res screens. Other than those two things, it seeme pretty good in for the few pages I loaded and the few minutes I poked around the features. Much improved over 0.6 in every way but size (it grew more than 25% in download size!) --Asa Asa, Thanks for taking the test drive. There are actually three bookmark plugins for support of NS Bookmarks, IE Favorites and Opera's Hotlists. Most people won't use all 3 and you can disable what you don't need on installation or in the Preferences. The installation size did increase over the past release. Most of this was due less to increases in the core code and more to do with adding new Mozilla features like Type Ahead Find and continued dependencies in Mozilla code that require us to include files that we would otherwise not include. Finally! Gecko now gets the glory it has deserved for so long by utilizing it in a native user interface. A fast rendering engine with a fast UI, loads like IE, and it's significantly smaller than either Mozilla or Phoenix. In short, K-Meleon Rocks! My hat is off to the K-Meleon team. Keep up the good work! "Finally! Gecko now gets the glory it has deserved for so long by utilizing it in a native user interface." Finally? What does that mean? Gecko has had native UIs from K-Meleon and Galeon (and Chimera) for a long time. K-Meleon is a couple of years old and I think Galeon is too. Chimera's been around for the better part of a year. --Asa I am currently using IE 5.5 in some old machines (Pentium I, 32MB RAM) because the overhead Mozilla adds to browsing is way overkill for them. I had seen the K-Meleon project before but since it was frozen at 0.6 with a Gecko 0.9 engine I though it wouldn't be worth the effort. Now that the project seems resucitated, can anybody tell me how much RAM does this program use? Is it worth a try? |