Well, I'll begin from afar. K-meleon isn't a new kid on the block anyway. Moreover, it's oldest active browser on the scene - except Internet Explorer.
"What?!"
No mistake. No deception. No one word of lie. Chrome is real newcomer. Old Opera (with Presto engine) has died in desktop PC world.
But K-Meleon is even older than Firefox (despite of all talks that it uses Firefox base). It was created in 2000 while Firefox starts 1 year later. K-Meleon was a child of Mozilla's embedding feature. And that's a point of identity: K-Meleon is Gecko engine inside native Windows MFC-wrapper.
This leads to the main advantage of K-Meleon - standard Windows GUI makes it consume significantly less memory and CPU power for render than original interface of Firefox and other XUL-apps.
Well - it's deadly simple to check this fact:
we've taken a little test where number of modern browsers were given a task to open 5 average modern webpages to see what is the RAM consumption. No surprise for us - K-Meleon literally knocked out all his contemporary rivals.
You'll see that K-Meleon is about 2-3 times more 'RAM-savvy' than Big Four browsers. No one Chromium-based browser can get close to our Lizard! Even RAM-optimised newest builds of Firefox are visibly heavier. Old Opera cannot compare along with new Opera-mimics like Vivaldi or Otter. And also Midori here.
The only real contenders are old-fashioned (but still good for some purposes) QtWeb and SlimBoat - they have partly outdated Webkit-engines with less compatibility.
You can see also an old K-Meleon 1.7 which has notably outdated Gecko 1.9.2 incompatible with a number of modern web-services but still capable for 90% of WWW. And it had almost multiplied all other stuff by zero in terms of RAM-saving.
To get unbiased result we'd compared browsers for compatibility with modern web technologies.
Full results are here in table (sorry for russian headings 'Движок' means 'Engine' and 'Совместимость' means 'Compatibility rating' )
And if you are limited in RAM on your Windows PC - K-Meleon is your browser!
If you want as smooth work with web as possible - than give K-Meleon a try!
And even if you have a lot of RAM on your fresh and powerful COMPUTER - no any browser could run there faster than K-Meleon!
Next time we'll speak about other unique advantages of K-Meleon! They could (and should!) also be the reason of choice in favor of Our Little Reptile!