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.
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.
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' )
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' )
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!
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!
