I'd like to hear from some of our regular contributors ( and others!) what you think is so special about Kmeleon that it deserves to continue. Doesn't Firefox now do everything Kmeleon does? I am asking this because I am a C++ and javascript developer, and I am currently unemployed and have been thinking over whether I want to volunteer to develop Kmeleon.

For me, why keep using it? My reasons are better compatibility with W98 ( history and bookmarks still don't work with FF on 98), fast startup ( like I said, FF getting a lot better lately), and perhaps most importantly a philosophy of controlling the browser from the surfer's perspective rather than the website's. Also, I like my rss extension and I don't know if FF has a similar one. But most extensions I use are ported from FF anyway...

I would like to see "the browser you control" continue to differentiate itself from the crowd by giving both more control and more convenient control. As I have maintained on this forum since I began to use Kmeleon maybe 7 years ago, I think the privacy bar almost gets it, but not quite. I would like to see it resident in the wasted space of the status bar. I would like to be able to set a default group of permissions for new web pages I haven't seen before. Once I load a page, I would like to be able to quickly and easily enable/ disable images, js, cookies, caching, etc by just clicking in the status bar until the page looks like i want it to look. I would like the browser to remember that next time I load the page, to maintain those permissions. I would like this to be efficiently built into the browser with a fast hashed database that makes a single access per page fetch and uses it to control the page's loading.

I don't think any commercial operation will dare to make such controls so easy to use, kmeleon would truly be the browser you control. I know a lot of this can be added to kmeleon by extensions and some has been integrated already ( like flashblock). But the black/whitelisting is still too inconvenient, and these things are actually ported from FF in almost every case, so they can be added there too. The only way to differentiate Kmeleon is to make them easier and more complete. I think I would stop short of integral adblocking other than the current css "display blocking " system, but who knows, maybe that's what we need, an integrated adblock plus like engine.

What makes Kmeleon Kmeleon anyway? Gecko html engine ( calls to replace it with webkit)? MFC interface ( is that in XUL runner)? the macro language( is it really so different from javascript anyway)? it's the european browser( won't be if i lead the development, i'm american)? W98 compatibility( so few of us now)? Just cuz we like being different?

So I ask all of you: Why should we continue to develop kmeleon?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/18/2012 07:39AM by snuz2.

K-mel is unique in a way, the browser have a personality of it's own that differentiates itself from the others I had tried to use..............guessed it's the browser for me.

Quote
kingsparrow
K-mel is unique in a way, the browser have a personality of it's own that differentiates itself from the others I had tried to use..............guessed it's the browser for me.

I agree with kingsparrow +++ 1

... but snuz you do make some good points that I agree with.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/18/2012 12:58PM by mhf.

OK, where to start on my list of reasons. I will just jump right in.

The Macro Language is number one. I could not function nearly as well without it. It is understandable - Javascript less so. I have the tools that I need right at hand. I pick the buttons and menu items that I want to see. My Klassic skin is very modified even to the background.

I can use Favorites and not have to learn bookmarks. Every version of KM loaded has the same favorites with no work on my part.

I can have multiple versions on my computer very easy. I just extract from the zip and put a shortcut on the desktop. I currently have 1.5.4, 1.6.0 b2.4, 1.6.0 b2.5, and 1.7.0 a2 loaded.

I don't understand zones in IE. I don't trust Google for anything - mail, search or browser. I certainly don't need a search bar and a URL bar both taking up valuable space.

It is not that I could not function using another browser. It is just that I could not function well doing so.

Hanlon’s razor is an eponymous adage named after Robert J. Hanlon that states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

JamesD

Ok..

But one developer not enough for keep-up K-m, cos mozilla to jumpy, if there is no mistake.

Quote
km2
But one developer not enough for keep-up K-m...

It would be difficult. There is no way we could keep up with FF's schedule of releases. Most likely the best we could do would be pick one release per year and fix the MFC code in that one.

@ snuz2

Do you have some idea of what is involved in fixing just one component from FF to use the MFC method? There are quite a number of components. If it were pretty standard to fix, could others - not C++ developers - be trained to do some/most/any of the fix for a component?

By the way, since you do Javascript, do you think you could teach me how to obtain the system datetime string using $value = injectJS( JS [, location ]); ? I just don't know enough Javascript to get the string to be the return. I know Siria has used this for some information about sorting, but I have tried everything I know and all I could see in her code without any results. We might should move this discussion to another thread.

Hanlon’s razor is an eponymous adage named after Robert J. Hanlon that states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

JamesD

Quote
JamesD
It would be difficult.

For one man, it's a killa.. But only coder can say for sure.

Why continue (cause you and other devs are giving up (I should point, what I understand)), or where?

I "didn't get" your full point of your explanation.

The idea of permissions for new pages is not bad. Now it can be done by toggling JS or others on/off, but every new window/page, keeps getting the prefs setting at that moment. But the proposal lend a confusing environment. It would be easy to do for new windows, reseting permissions for new windows, but for a new page in the same window... without C++ knowledge (me), I guess is difficult, but anyway, it could be a good improvement.

Shouldn't be fixed the bugs first

Quote
JamesD
By the way, since you do Javascript, do you think you could teach me how to obtain the system datetime string using $value = injectJS( JS [, location ]); ? I just don't know enough Javascript to get the string to be the return. I know Siria has used this for some information about sorting, but I have tried everything I know and all I could see in her code without any results. We might should move this discussion to another thread.

set a variable to get new date and then extract data from it or create various variables and concatenate them.

var date = new Date(); /* full date */
var hours = date.getHours(); /* hours */
etc

or you can
var mydate = new Date(Hours, minutes); /* never done this way and looks doesn't work ... */

More info: http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_obj_date.asp



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 01/18/2012 06:18PM by JohnHell.

Because K-Meleon is teh only browser which do not freeze my computer..

I have moved the discussion of datetime stamp to this thread: http://kmeleonbrowser.org/forum/read.php?1,121326

Hanlon’s razor is an eponymous adage named after Robert J. Hanlon that states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

JamesD

Quote
snuz2

I'd like to hear from some of our regular contributors ( and others!) what you think is so special about Kmeleon that it deserves to continue. Doesn't Firefox now do everything Kmeleon does? I am asking this because I am a C++ and javascript developer, and I am currently unemployed and have been thinking over whether I want to volunteer to develop Kmeleon.

Why should we continue to develop kmeleon?

snuz2,

I've been a K-Meleon user since 0.6... I never had a browser so open to end users before. By that I mean the original macro language and later KKO's rewrite that allowed more extensive macros. The lack of XUL also was an attraction back when I had slower CPUs and even with KM's use of an out of date Gecko, it runs almost as fast as Firefox 9.0.1 on my aging T-40 Thinkpad. The community here has been a plus for me also, as in when I needed a macro for a specialized task, all I had to do was ask and someone almost always would either write one for me or tell me why it wasn't possible. (I wrote macros with the original, but not with KKO's rewrite.) Firefox extensions are not so flexible IMO.

As for keeping Gecko as the engine, I'm not a coder, so the point I would make is this. Mozilla Corp. is on the fast track in trying to keep up with Chrome. Perhaps WebKit is not a bad idea, because unless one or more of the old developers come back, you would be the only C++ developer for the moment and keeping up with new geckos all the time is a lot of work, but not for me to say one way or the other, with my lack of programming skills. If you look at the history of development here, it has always been just one C++ developer and a group of other coders who help out but don't do C++. It truly has been a community and a mom and pop developer team that have kept KM alive all this time (going back to Phoenix, before Firefox).

Just my two cents worth.

N

Quote
snuz2
I'd like to hear from some of our regular contributors ( and others!) what you think is so special about Kmeleon that it deserves to continue.

Why K-Meleon?
Above all because it is user friendly. The browser you can trust and control.
All settings at hand on one single bar without the need of any extension.



Opera is the only viable alternative for me but I don't like to put all my eggs in one basket since I consider the browser to be the most important application.

Quote
JamesD

I can have multiple versions on my computer very easy. I just extract from the zip and put a shortcut on the desktop. I currently have 1.5.4, 1.6.0 b2.4, 1.6.0 b2.5, and 1.7.0 a2 loaded.

WTH did you get KM 1.6.0 b2.5, JamesD? I can't seem to find that specific version of K-meleon.

personally, I'll keep using almost any version of KM on some old Win2k/WinXP computers. I won't bother using KM on my new Win7 x64 machines.

@ 4td8s

I created KM 1.6.0 b2.5. There is little change from 2.4. Degas2 requested a move back to macro for spelltest stuff. I am hoping we get a beta 3 soon. I think the holdup is the setdefault work.

There is no additional functions in beta 2.5. The only thing a user will see is a definition for the spelltest.kmm.

Hanlon’s razor is an eponymous adage named after Robert J. Hanlon that states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

JamesD

I'll try to answer not only as loyal user but as marketing man too.

First, the user point of view goes:
- I see, every community man loves KM in his own way :-) So, we can conclude that KM is really PERSONAL browser.
- It can give you what you want if you CAN WANT, can think, ask, answer etc. Thereby its COMMUNICATIVE browser.
- I cannot exactly tell why, but I'm really dependent of K-Meleon. It's a kind of magic (c) but may be it follows from its FRIENDLINESS in terms of smooth browsing even on older and weaker hardware.
- The really important point is that I can't find browser lying more closely to 'ideal' around. All the competitors - IE, FF, Opera and Chrome - have their own big and annoying limitations. So, KM is the most BALANCED browser when it comes to pro and contras.

Now the marketing side.
Speaking technically, the uniqueness of KM lies in the conjunction of all features that are differentiating it: Gecko + native Win interface + KMM + finetuning with simple general operations (text file editing, file adding/deleting in folders...).
I think, main ones are Gecko and KMM. Why? It's simple: Gecko is practically the last FREE, OPEN SOURCE engine. Trident&Presto are proprietary and WebKit now is highly connected (de-facto) with such monsters as Google and Apple.

And KMM is really unique part of KM browser.
Fine controlling is optional for average user (dummy) and makes sense only for advanced users, so we have to keep it but not need to put it the first point when promoting KM and offering it to new users.

And what about GUI - yes, now it's the key point, but what I think (not being a coder, so I could be wrong - correct me if so): it seems to me that it can be made like core and GUI parts where core consists all functional and is wrapped (with some needed tuning) in different GUIs (for example: MFC, Qt, GTK, wxWidgets etc.) and this can lead KM to Linux OSes, for example.
It's not the crucial point of development but just one more opportunity to popularize KM among those people who can fully assess all the power of our lizard :-)
Paradox is that being only Windows software, KM behaves more in linux way of controlling and managing the application. So, to cover linuxoids is one of logical steps. But not critical one.

And now - the most important - marketing look from the consumer's side:
I believe, and more - I know, that we must think about KM not only as developers but as average potential user do.
This is the simple logical chain: more friendly, more familiar, more closer would KM be to end user - more popular would it become - more people would be involved in the KM orbit - more chances that it would be interesting for coders too - more possibilities to develop - better future for browser.

And thinking this way I can guess that we can position KM primarily as LIGHT browser.
"Light" is very rich-of-senses word, and people generally like 'light' things.
Things that make their life 'lighter', easier, clearer, simpler.

KM is - first - light on resources. It's very technical thing but that one what every user can estimate and feel every day working with browser (we know, for many people nowadays browser is the main working tool or just window to the whole world!). And we (taking us as users) feel this lightness really every day, hour and every time.
KM is really light (not-difficult) in basic use being the same time more powerful than many competitors. Real pain for non-advanced users begins only when it comes to some 'extra-functional' and - more crucial - to personalizing the browser.
This are areas of high-priority work - because now they contradict to the LIGHT definition.

Why I concentrate on this one word? You know - it's just marketing (being more precise - branding) where you must take the position in consumer's mind. And more simpler, lighter, clearer is the verbal formula for this position - more chances are to win this race.

P.S. Sorry for so many letters, folks!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/20/2012 09:39AM by rodocop.

ya hell yaaaaaaaaaa iorme and the now dflunt"flock" tried all of opera , ff, chome
but when i t come to speed ....none of them cant even go there not even, and unlike chrome it dont do 44 open exe on my processes.
oh ya chrome crashe all thE DAM TIME, PIECE OF SHIT

I JUST wish that k-meleon would in corprate lastpass better , if it cn do im lining ff,chrome,opera and yes crappy ie9 up against the walland shoot.. ha,aha, in the nuts, not the head or heart lol

 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/29/2016 07:19PM by adodupan.

I agree with adodupan, you should sign up as to answering your question:

I use K-meleon because of how light it is on my resources I have a p4 with 2GB of ram I EXTENSIVELY use google docs at work and thus was forced to change to chrome. Note - "change" it's by no means an upgrade - just having one google docs spreadsheet open takes up ~150MB of memory (the spreadsheet is a simple timesheet).

That's totally (i.e combining all the series of chrome.exe's running, not sure what the underlying theory is for doing that - maybe if everything runs as a separate process process it will be more stable/less crashy, who knows)

While it's not the fastest in rendering pages and JS, K-meleon is DEFINITELY the lightest and most responsive when it comes to accessing the browser itself. I just hope it gets updated for all the common things that people use other browsers for.

Snuz2 I wish you and the browser well for the forthcoming future - I just hope that it's together!

The thing is, if we go to XuLRunner as Fred suaggested, I don't think it will be "lite" anymore. Just FF with a more Kmeleon-like interface and KMM. I can't even get XULrunner to run on my old machine, though I haven't tried very hard.

Maybe the best thing to do is to just to get KM working for real with FF3.6 Gecko, which is a big improvement over 3.5. Alot of complaints about FF 4+ on Slashdot, especially regarding memory usage. And my own tests of FF9 on W98 is that it is slower than Kmeleon with FF3.5 Gecko.

But FF3.6 is only a temporary stopgap measure, soon the web will leave FF3.6 in the dust. So is there any point?

Anyways thanks for all the comments. I think the main point is the community and KMM that makes Kmeleon, followed closely by it's tolerance of old machine and OS plus quick boot and small memory usage. I don't think those last two will survive a change of html engine or migrating to XULRunner.

I think some have posted ways to make KM a lot lighter in the past. I don't think it needs all the files included in the current build. Extensions used to really bog down FF, but I think they made great improvements there, and a lot of other areas.

I don't know if age of machine matters so much. I can't check that. The thing is the way you start the Xulrunner system. I got the files that were noted in the forum and extracted them - one requires a double extraction. Once to tar then another one. I had provided space for the extractions by creating folders. They were not needed as you can see from the string in my shortcut. You start xulrunner and pass it the application.ini file from conkeror.

E:\XulRunner91\xulrunner\xulrunner.exe E:\conkeror\conkeror\application.ini

Xulrunner is approximately 33 megs in size. That is 5 megs more than KM.

Is there a way to make the KM exe file do the things that the js files do in conkeror? I mean using menu, buttons, prefs, etc and not the silly ctrl keys.

Hanlon’s razor is an eponymous adage named after Robert J. Hanlon that states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

JamesD

Seems to be abandonware anyway, how long does a browser need to be in beta? I kow its volunteer built, but we're talking what, over a year now?....





Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2012 09:02AM by Paul.

Quote
snuz2
The thing is, if we go to XuLRunner as Fred suaggested, I don't think it will be "lite" anymore. Just FF with a more Kmeleon-like interface and KMM. I can't even get XULrunner to run on my old machine, though I haven't tried very hard.

Maybe the best thing to do is to just to get KM working for real with FF3.6 Gecko, which is a big improvement over 3.5. Alot of complaints about FF 4+ on Slashdot, especially regarding memory usage. And my own tests of FF9 on W98 is that it is slower than Kmeleon with FF3.5 Gecko.

But FF3.6 is only a temporary stopgap measure, soon the web will leave FF3.6 in the dust. So is there any point?

Anyways thanks for all the comments. I think the main point is the community and KMM that makes Kmeleon, followed closely by it's tolerance of old machine and OS plus quick boot and small memory usage. I don't think those last two will survive a change of html engine or migrating to XULRunner.

I think some have posted ways to make KM a lot lighter in the past. I don't think it needs all the files included in the current build. Extensions used to really bog down FF, but I think they made great improvements there, and a lot of other areas.

Snuz2,

I do appreciate your candor and your interest. It would be nice to have KM 1.7 working as that would give KM some time to try and find a solution. Only you can decide if that work would be of any value to you down the road.

The other ways, of course, would be XULRunner or WebKit.

N

Quote

XULRunner

Isn't XULRunner a cpu hog? Cos high level language.

Agree about 1.7
..

I don't see Xulrunner using more than KM. This page in both has KM at 29,316 and Xulrunner at 27,234. I am not sure that I did an exact equal conditions test. I viewed the page in KM first and ran the macro to send the page to Xulrunner.

Xulrunner.kmm

# K-Meleon Macros (http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?id=MacroLanguage2)

# ----------  Xulrunner.kmm ------------------------------------------------------------------
#
# Dependencies	: main.kmm (Go), sendto.kmm (menus)
# Resources 	: - Xulrunner & conkeror
# Preferences	: -
# Author and date  JamesD  2012-01-28
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Note - The value of first string in $_XulR_Path must be your path to start Xulrunner
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MAX_OpenPage{
macroinfo=_("Open page in Xulrunner");
$_XulR_Open=$URL;      &_XulR_Open;
}
MAX_OpenLink{
macroinfo=_("Open link in Xulrunner");
$_XulR_Open=$LinkURL;  &_XulR_Open;
}
MAX_OpenURL{
macroinfo=_("Open URL Bar contents in Xulrunner");
$__text=$URLBAR; $__text==""?$__text=$URL:0;
$_XulR_Open=$__text;   &_XulR_Open;
}
_XulR_Open{
#  command line:
$_XulR_Path= "E:\\XulRunner91\\xulrunner\\xulrunner.exe E:\\conkeror\\conkeror\\application.ini"." %1";
 exec(sub("%1",urldecode($_XulR_Open),$_XulR_Path));
}
_XulR_BuildMenu{
index($macroModules,";SendTo;")>-1?&_XulR_BuildMenu_SendTo:&_XulR_BuildMenu_Default;
}
_XulR_BuildMenu_Default{
$__m="Open In &Xulrunner";
setmenu(DocumentOpenExternal,macro,$__m,MAX_OpenPage);
setmenu(LinkOpenExternal,macro,$__m,MAX_OpenLink);
setmenu(_Go_Open,macro,$__m,MAX_OpenURL);
}
_XulR_BuildMenu_SendTo{
$__m="&Xulrunner";
setmenu($_SendTo_Page,macro,$__m,MAX_OpenPage);
setmenu($_SendTo_Link,macro,$__m,MAX_OpenLink);
setmenu($_SendTo_URL,macro,$__m,MAX_OpenURL);
}

$OnInit=$OnInit."_XulR_BuildMenu;";
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
$macroModules=$macroModules."Xulrunner;";

Hanlon’s razor is an eponymous adage named after Robert J. Hanlon that states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

JamesD

I love K-Meleon and use it since long, but I cannot agree with «super-speed» posts here. It starts not really fast and almost unresponsible for a while after starting (though I have only around 20 bookmarks, no cookies stored and my history size is not huge). It has no megaJavaScript engine and it hangs while opening big pages (with hundreds of comments for example) and scrolls them with the visible lags. Maybe it's fast comparing to others on Pentium II machines with 256 mb ram, but on modern configurations it's not.
Also it crashes randomly when I left-click on a link to some file, so I try to use right click -> Save Link Target As... wherever possible.
I'm using 1.6.0b2 btw.

Quote
AirSpirit
I love K-Meleon and use it since long, but I cannot agree with «super-speed» posts here. It starts not really fast and almost unresponsible for a while after starting (though I have only around 20 bookmarks, no cookies stored and my history size is not huge). It has no megaJavaScript engine and it hangs while opening big pages (with hundreds of comments for example) and scrolls them with the visible lags. Maybe it's fast comparing to others on Pentium II machines with 256 mb ram, but on modern configurations it's not.
Also it crashes randomly when I left-click on a link to some file, so I try to use right click -> Save Link Target As... wherever possible.
I'm using 1.6.0b2 btw.

AirSpirit,

You might want to start a new thread in bugs with some links that can be investigated.

N

ndebord,
actually AirSpirit's note is an appropriate.

Yes, KM's GUI freezes (or half-freezes) on regular basis dependent on page content and yes, it is unresponsible after start (this has just the same genesis, as I can see).
Yes, on the newest PCs you can find Chrome-based (for example) browsers smoother-running.
Yes, there are some long pages, that are opening with lags (but I cannot point to them without some remembering).

And some builds really are crashing sometimes on some PCs...

But, you're right too - all this are just bugs, what are targets to fix.
And all in all - that's already my opinion - KM remains most adequate browser speaking in terms of speed and resources.
Not only on the oldest hardware...

ndebord,
I'm sorry I can't give any specific link because it crashes truly randomly, and if it fails when you click on some link it can open it correctly (I mean showing save/open dialog and downloading) next time after restarting. Sometimes it opens a link after two crashes. The only thought I have — there is a bug in filetype/mime associations analyzer, but I can't be sure.

rodocop,
Not all of these problems are bugs, but a consequence of outdated engine (and it will never be any newer because Mozilla ceased embedding Gecko a long time ago).
And even the bug problems are unknown when to be fixed, there was no any new betas (not speaking of stable releases) for more than a year because of lack of time and developers.

Anyway it's still usable by now, so life's going on.

Quote
AirSpirit
ndebord,
I'm sorry I can't give any specific link because it crashes truly randomly, and if it fails when you click on some link it can open it correctly (I mean showing save/open dialog and downloading) next time after restarting. Sometimes it opens a link after two crashes. The only thought I have — there is a bug in filetype/mime associations analyzer, but I can't be sure.


Anyway it's still usable by now, so life's going on.

AirSpirit,

I know, it is an aging Gecko... my kludge solution has been to user browser.kmm and right click to bring up Firefox 9.0.1 whenever I run into problems. Also I use Guenter's latest user agent string. Even though it is a spoof designed for the latest Gecko engine, it works most of the time.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:10.0a1) Gecko/20111008 Firefox/10.0a1

N