K-meleon is the coolest browser available but why such a booring look?
Why should the ordinary ie user switch to a program that looks and feels
exactly like ie? Of even worse.. how should the ordinary ie user ever know
that it's k-meleon he is using?

Why not make a unique and nice looking ui?

Why not? Because we don't have any graphics artists helping out

If anyone wants to create new toolbar images, throbber animations, or anything else, they would be very welcomed, but until then...this is what we have to work with.

-- Jeff

i don't think there's anything wrong with starting out with a vanilla look... you'll never find anything flashy that doesn't annoy as many people as it pleases. the fact that the bitmap resource files are not packed into a .dll makes it easy enough to modify them (look ma! no ResHacker!)... maybe a page on this site could be dedicated to facelift operations... otherwise, check out www.virtualplastic.org for some pointers.

i don't have anything to make .avi throbbers with, but maybe i'll try and make an alternative button set for folks who really hate IE...
po

ok, i threw some kinda sloppy, not-very-pretty toolbar buttons together as an example of how to replace the existing ones... the two bitmap files in the zip file pointed to below should be direct bolt-in replacements for the ones with the same name (Tool1.bmp and Tool2.bmp) in your profile directory... you should change the names of the originals first, so you can restore them easily if you hate these. DON'T change the ones in the "default" profile folder, unless you're really sure you never want to see the originals again.

bitmaps available here:

http://www.photo.net/users/pobelly/ktoolbar.ZIP

don't do this unless you have some idea what you're doing,
and don't complain to the developers if you don't like the results.

it's not their fault.

----- viva -----

po

I don't think that K-Meleon needs another look. It' s as simple as possible, doesn't need much space on the screen, you quickly find what you need - it is really what I want.
I know many people (Web-designers) that don't like Mozilla / Netscape 6.1 because of it's design - because the design of the browser interferes with the design of the web page. The design of the browser should be as modest as possible to suit every web page. When you surf the net you probably want to enjoy well-designed web pages but not the look of the browser...

I think that the default functionality and look shouldnt deviate too far from IE if this browser is to be the one to reach the masses. Folks like my mom get a panic attack when they have to use a very unfamiliar core app like a different browser or word processor.

There are other funky browsers out their to keep the techo literate happy. Kmeleon is currently the is the one that you can put on a recycled pentium 233MHz and hand out to someone that cannot afford to buy a computer, or put in a community college in a developing world. Or put on your moms machine as a default browser without her getting upset when she has to use IE when away from home.

If kmeleon turns into just another bloated browser for the techno elite minority then we ignore the the billions of people that dont live in the free and privileged world. We also ignore the folks amongst us that we are dont yet or can never have the skills to flit between apps because they just get it when it comes to technology.

I fell in love with this browser because its not bloatware, its not just for the over privileged few, and its the first alternative that I have seen that will work for my mom as she learns about her hot new pc, and for a young genius out in india sitting at a rusting old thirdhand pc that someone gave to a charity.

Thankyou folks.

One of the reasons that K-Meleon looks "boring" is that it doesn't have all the "bells and whistles" that bloat out the other browsers. If you don't have a million and one functions, you don't need huge elaborate toolbars with all kinds of funky add-ons.

Secondly, while the interface is limited, there really isn't a limit to the customization you can do. You don't like the IE look? Create your own buttons and backgrounds and replace the defaults. Maybe we can set up a "themes" area where people can submit custom finishes for K-Meleon. I'm sure someone out there will whip up the "Netscape" theme and who knows what else. Be creative!

Andrew

First of all.. I hope i didn't offend any of the developers by sugesting another look for K-meleon. Second, I actually didn't mean that I want the k-meleon ui to look as flashy as the Netscape 6 / Mozilla does even though it might have sounded like that.

I prefer a simple and clean ui as well. But I don't see the reason why it should look exactly like IE.
I tryed the suggestion from po and even tryed to make my own toolbar based on the netscape classic look (wich I know is kind of ironic since I critizise the IE mimic look). I ran into some problems wich I hope somebody and help me out with. First, is it possible to make the buttons bigger. 16*16 is a it to small for my likeing. Second. The colours in the buttons i created looked very weird. Any idea why?
A theme area on the page would be really interresting..

And since a lot of the developers seem to read this.. Thank's for an excellent work. I'm not ready to leave Mozilla yet since I use their mail-client. But I use it for most of my surfing.. Keep up the good work...

Oh my good...

Why don't I read through what I write before I post it..?
Please excuse the bad english...

not good... god.. I hate myself.. I better get some sleep...

I'm currently planning a way to make the toolbar much more customizable. Right now it's limited to 16 color 16x16 images, and you can't change the order. I'd like to make the order and size user-definable. I'd also like to be able to support 256 colors (or even better, 16 million), but i'm not sure if that's possible with the current toolbar control we're using.

Thanks for all the kind words, they really do make the time we spend on this browser worth it.

Like I told you before I have tried to convert the netscape icons and use them with k-meleon. When I read Brian's post a few minutes ago and found out that the reason why my icons looked so wierd was the fact that the icons are limited to 16 colours. I converted my earlier tries to 16 colours wich is a bit few to look good. The icons are originally bigger then 16*16 pixels so it lookes a bit wierd now as well.. But any way.. If you are interested I did put it up so you can download it..

http://www.dwarfhammer.com/netscape.zip

Unpack to your k-meleon profile-directory.....

Any sugestions how to make it look better would be interresting..

christian,

i'm not that familiar with netscape, but i would guess that maybe there are versions of the buttons that are already 16x16 included somewhere in the resource files... maybe even 16-color versions. if you could find those, it would be easier than trying to adapt the larger ones, probably.
as for why they look funny, i haven't seen the original buttons, but i'm guesing that they included light gray - RGB(192, 192, 192) - as one of their colors, but on the kmeleon toolbar that color is made transparent. you might try substituting RGB(178, 178, 178) instead... it will look almost the same, but it will show up. =)

po

po,

actually... I tryed to look through netscape with reshack and I couldn't find any toolbar images with the right dimension / colour depth.. It seems like the icons used in the netscape 4.x and 6.x classic -toolbars are all adapted to 256 colours. If you want to use true netscape 16*16 icons with 16 colours you have to use the ones in Netscape 3.x. And they are in my opinion truly ugly.

Thanks for the tip about 178,178,178 thought.. It actually makes the icons look a little better... I will update them and put them online later if anyone is interrested...
Christian

Why can't we have K-Meleon determine what kind of icons to use based on the Windows display settings? For example, if the user is running 24 bit color, use the full color TOOL_24.bmp as the background, if they're running 8 bit color, use the 256 color optimized TOOL_8.bmp as the background. I remember one window manager for BSD (either KDE or XFCE) did this, and it would probably be a nice feature for K-Meleon as well. Just a thought.

The next version of K-Meleon will be sport a toolbar plugin that will replace the current toolbar. You'll be able to define as many toolbars as you like, link the buttons to other plugins (like macros or full screen or whatever else you want). This will also support toolbar images of any colour, and any size. Detecting the colour depth is a good idea, I may add that. Unfortunately, this plugin requires features not available in the .5 release, so I can't just post a link to the plugin here, and let you replace the current toolbar with it. Join the developers' list if you want more announcments things like this (and links to the beta builds, when they become available)

So, if you're feeling artistic, don't let size or colour stop you, go ahead and create those new toolbar images, and wait for the nightly builds to test them out.

-- Jeff

well, then... so much for minimalism... =)

actually, that sounds really neat... i was wondering about having the plugins linked to toolbar buttons in the future... guess that answers that question.

time for everybody to get creative, i guess...

Sounds really really neat. Where do I get on the "developers' list"?

If anyone is interrested the "netscapeish icon theme" is updated.. I even added netscape icons for the "new window", save and open in the menu..

http://www.dwarfhammer.com/netscape.zip