Screenshot of K-Meleon with default skin

Sometimes I don’t like to talk about others products as we all know how each one of us can get carried away and say things we really shouldn’t have. Of course when one reads in a blog and takes note that the writer of the blog has slipped in a couple of words that does everything to suggest that there is going to be a fare share of juicy material that blatantly attacks the product then you know you’ve definitely got a reader that’s going to get past the first paragraph. I would like to mention at this point that I do not intend to take a shot at this product but just give my experiences about it.

Good! Okay; let’s take a look at this Software called K-Meleon. It supposed to be according to its website an extremely fast, customizable, lightweight web browser based on the Gecko layout engine developed by Mozilla which is also used by Firefox.

I wouldn’t want to entirely agree with that for one,  Speed seems to be the buzz word of the season used by every browser out there about who is Kick-ass faster than who and every browser then goes out to poor in huge sums of money to sponsor speed tests, you know how it goes. Personally I don’t want to dwell on speed issues ’cause frankly speaking; I find it great as far as rendering speed is concerned. In fact I will go and say that this browser is pretty fast.

Lightweight, ah yes. Now I could live with that one. Well, I stopped listening a couple of Firefox versions ago. Browsers just seem to keep relentlessly hogging all my memory and this doesn’t seem like it is going to ease up any year soon.

One thing I must say is that it is awesomely responsive to my clicks here and there. The UI is definitely super fast, Its performance is pretty awesome and renders stuff on many websites pretty well. I chose to say many websites because I am currently trying to figure out why I wont work with some Ajax code I wrote a couple of days ago. This code seems happy enough on almost every browser out there but K-Meleon just seem to have issues. I am actually referring to K-Meleon 1.5.3. I would feel very guilty tearing into the great work the boys down at the K-Meleon project so I am going to assume at this point that there is a nasty bug lurking in my code and so I am gonna keep trying to lure it out and I will not rest until this is done.

It will be great to know this browser is released under the GNU General Public License and is available for download here. Based on the same Gecko layout engine as Mozilla Firefox, K-Meleon uses native Windows API to create the user interface (instead of using Mozilla’s cross-platform XUL layer),this browser is definitely tunes to run on Microsoft’s Windows Platform.

K-Meleon’s was originally written by Christopher Thibault and released to the public on August 21, 2000. That tells me it has come a long way to get to where it is. This browser gives a whole opportunity for one to customize it and enhance it and there is plenty information on that on this location http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/docs.php.

Other interesting things you could do with this browser are,

• change the browser’s skin http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/wiki/TutorialSkinning.
• Install all the major pluggins such as Abobe Flash, Sun’s Java, Adobe acrobat reader, Windows Media Player, Real Player, Quick Time and a host of others http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/wiki/ThirdPartyPlugins.
• Plenty of common features that all browsers should have and more http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/wiki/FAQ#standards.
• Some of Mozilla’s Extensions have been modified to work with K-Meleon http://kmext.sourceforge.net.

All in all this is a great product and wouldn’t hesitate to use it over and over again. As I continue to use it over and over again I will definitely be writing more stuff about this browser.