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Why K-meleon?

8/2/2015

4 Comments

 
Probably, K-Meleon is something new for you. Yet another brother. Why choose it? Where is the sense of migration here?
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.
Picture
Here your should note look at 'K-Meleon 75b2' (last version at moment of testing) and compare it with performance of other popular browsers like Chrome, IE and Firefox (different buids) along with different less known alternatives which include some newcomers which try to compete in the field of GUI-power (number of settings, options, customizations etc.) as well as different 'RAM-savers'.

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contenders are old-fashioned (but still good for some purposes) QtWeb and SlimBoat - they have partly outdated Webkit-engines with less compatibility.
You can see also an old K-Meleon 1.7 which has notably outdated Gecko 1.9.2 incompatible with a number of modern web-services but still capable for 90% of WWW.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' )
Picture
So, the easy answer for 'why?' is - lightness! No any other modern browser eats as little RAM as K-Meleon!
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!
4 Comments
P Smith
23/7/2015 02:06:35 am

How unsurprising that the only sites which mention less popular browsers and test are sites run by the less popular browsers. Sites run by the fanboys of "big" browsers ignore HTML5 browsers unless they're popular.

Many of the smaller browsers are very capable and well made, and much more stable than the bloatware and spyware made by others. I have used and still use K-meleon, QtWeb and Qupzilla, and they're all very good, though each has its strengths and weaknesses.

One very notable thing about the newest release of K-meleon (June 2015) is that youtube no longer gives rude messages. You're no longer forcibly redirected to non-functioning pages. K-meleon 74 and even the old 1.5.4 COULD view youtube, but the site's programmers chose to be a$$holes and write rude code to prevent any browser from viewing it other than firefox, chrome, opera or ie.

That's also true of QtWeb. If you tell QtWeb to identify itself, youtube and other sites target you with $#!++y code, but if you tell QtWeb to identify as firefox, then youtube and other sites will work normally. It's not the "small" browsers that are the problem, it's a$$hat programmers who target "small" browsers with bad code.

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rodocop
23/7/2015 03:53:32 am

Well said!

Reply
Random
2/3/2016 06:26:43 am

Would be interesting to compare Seamonkey web suite and Pale Moon browser (Firefox derivate), too. Both should be in the region of modern Firefox builds, I think.

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SaM HiLL link
29/12/2017 12:48:30 am

Finally somebody gets it. I'm new to K-Meleon and I'm hoping it is what I've been looking for. I just can't take browsers sucking away all of my RAM any longer. I have a lot to learn, but with people like you around who actually seem to give a damn, I don't think I'll have too much trouble. Thanks for your efforts!

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