Just thought, I let everyone know, compared to the very heavyweight common browsers getting heavier on every version.

I tried dozens of "light" browsers, then came across K-Meleon and haven't looked back, it amazing fast and light, does everything I normally do on a browser, and it breaths new life in my 10 year old laptop!

Keep it up, and stay Light!

Yes, it just goes to show you what one can do with a browser and still keep it as light and fast as KM.

To satisfy my curiosity I recently installed a portable version of Firefox 43.0.4. You might say I'm what one would call a "glutton for punishment", because wow, that's one bloated browser! :O Its UI is much less user friendly than it used to be, and I could not make FF even half as flexible as KM after I had edited the userChrome.css file and installed countless extensions. Once I had gotten it more or less usable, page loading was slower than in KM, and I hadn't gained any additional browsing functionality, either.

By the way, Mozilla has announced they plan to drop all support for plugins this year:
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plugins-in-firefox/

I guess that would apply to PDF plugins as well.

Update: I just read that they will make an exception for Flash.

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Gerry



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2016 06:43PM by foliator.

All kudos to Dorian
Love KM too, since many years, but always interesting to read how it compares and looks from the 'outside'. A viewpoint that I'm completely missing myself, due to old machine and frankly neither time nor much interest in such struggles myself. So, rather clueless in that regard.
Great news, thanks for reporting!

I have FF running more smoothly now, but here are some more results from my little experiment: I did a comparison of the drive space used by the profiles for each of the two browsers. Disk caching is disabled in both of them:

Firefox 43.04 Profile Folder: 1272 files, 33.10 MB, including extensions

K-Meleon 75 Profile Folder: 39 files, 13.16 MB
(The files in my macros folder take the place of most of FF's extensions. There are 31 files, 146.58 K

FF 43.04 will not run the Flash plugin without a full installation, which adds several files, including the DLL, to the Windows\System32\Macromed folder. Version 18 doesn't work at all; I had to install version 20.

KM 75 will run the Flash plugin up to version 18 from a standalone DLL in the plugins folder without installation. The latest Flash version (20), however, must be fully installed, and the DLL must be present in that Windows subfolder.

Still, there is one thing I sacrifice by using a lightweight browser: The ability to manage bookmarks directly from the bookmarks bar (e.g. drag and drop, copy and paste, rename, etc.). Actually, two things: Holding Ctrl when clicking on a bookmark should open it in a new tab, like it does in FF.

In KM I don't use the bookmarks bar anyway, because I need to leave the status bar visible to see the URL when I hover over a link. This uses up the vertical space I'd normally give to the bookmarks bar. FF has no status bar, but still shows the URL at the bottom when hovering over a link.

---
Gerry

Today I was troubleshooting one respectively old laptop (Dell 1300, Intel Pentium M based). His owner is an old Opera-fan (classic Presto, sure) and time from time he gets new problems with different sites in his Opera.

Tonight one of his web-players (embedded from different sites) started to inject new ads which do not show the way to close them and watch the video itself - in Opera only, sure.

I tried to load this page in Firefox, and not only it was elefantly slow-n-heavy but also this player refuses to load at all.

Sometime ago we have installed Vivaldi as he claims itself the best successor of old Opera - but it's even more heavy than FF+Opera together ;-)

I have a copy of KM on that laptop for my 'sysadminity' as I do some help there periodically. I tried to suggest it to my friend but he refuses to test something he is unfamiliar with.

But tonight I just tested that page in KM - and our lizard loads it at times faster than Opera and even more other browsers. And it loads all fine - the player itself and the buttons to stop show an ad - etc.

This is the answer. Sure - KM still is the best choice for older and low-end hardware.

But - it's a pity - on the modern 64bit systems KM can be even more RAM-hungry than latest FF. I've also finally tested this out last days.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/30/2016 01:42AM by rodocop.

A lot of this has to do with how one uses a browser, i.e. what kind of content one looks at. In my case, I watch very few videos, and have the JavaScript disabled for most of the sites I visit. Exceptions are streaming webcams, such as those on EarthCam and an independent one in my hometown, plus the occasional YouTube video. In the case of YouTube, I generally watch only an excerpt to see if it's what I want before downloading it to my hard drive -- mostly music videos, from which I extract the audio and delete the video file. News videos can be really annoying, because they'll start with an ad lasting 15 or 20 seconds, when the clip itself is only a minute or so long. Example: http://www.cbc.ca/news

Corporate websites are very heavy, but I spend very little time on them, mainly to access accounts with my bank and my internet provider.

Considering the above, and the fact that I'm running relatively new hardware with Windows 7 (not 64), I actually have very little to complain about regarding RAM usage. KM is definitely faster than Firefox, of course, even the older and less bloated Firefox.

As for Vivaldi, well, I tried it once and couldn't figure out how to import my bookmarks from either KM or FF. It also has one of the ugliest user interfaces I've seen in a browser, and is far less flexible than KM and FF.

BTW, it has also occurred to me that if the ex-Opera developer of Vivaldi wants to continue using a musical theme for the name of his new browser, which I believe is still a Norwegian product, then why not use a Norwegian composer rather than an Italian one -- Grieg, for instance?

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Gerry

Win 7 x86 is the last system where KM is more lightweight than FF (and any other beast) without exceptions.

And under Win8 and newer OSes some usage scenarios constantly do show that KM eats more RAM for some reason. Also some issues do appear under Win7 x64



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/30/2016 01:45AM by rodocop.

Quote
foliator
In KM I don't use the bookmarks bar anyway, because I need to leave the status bar visible to see the URL when I hover over a link. This uses up the vertical space I'd normally give to the bookmarks bar. FF has no status bar, but still shows the URL at the bottom when hovering over a link.

With a macro link targets can also be shown in a tooltip, not at page bottom but directly at the link. Like "ShowLinksDest", using an old bookmarklet by subsimple:
http://kmeleonbrowser.org/forum/read.php?9,137435

Must admit have it tested so far only in KM1.6, but since it's done by modifying the page with pure javascript, it should run in other versions too (I hope :cool
The one thing I'm not completely happy with, is that a page must first be finished with loading until the macro works - unless JohnH or anyone knows how to start a script earlier...? If possible, not too complicated ;-)

Quote
siria
Love KM too, since many years, but always interesting to read how it compares and looks from the 'outside'. A viewpoint that I'm completely missing myself, ...

I'm afraid that reading about how it compares and looks from the 'outside' will hardly give you a clear picture because:
1. almost everybody has its own way to use the browser or even the internet.
2. what's important for one, might be irrelevant to someone else.
3. hardware is an important factor.
There are more things to take into consideration but the above are IMO the most important ones which came to my mind.
I have 3 browsers installed, which I use for different tasks. Opera Presto 12.17, FirefoxESR 38.6.0 and K-Meleon 75.1 which I use most of the time.
OS is Win7_x64 running with a quad core processor, 8GB of RAM and 1TB of disc space.
I have absolutely no doubt regarding experiences witnessed by others. That doesn't mean that I'm experiencing the same.

Among the 3 browsers Opera Presto is the lightest on resources (no wonder, since its developement has ceased many years ago) and K-Meleon comes as second.
However differences in resource consumtion among all 3 browsers are small. If you have 8GB of RAM, it's not relevant if 100MB, 300MB, or 500MB will be used by your browser. Nevertheless I still care about resource usage (mostly because I was used to from the times when I had only 250MB at disposal).

Out of curiosity, I've looked to the size of my profile folders. Opera Presto = 331KB, K-Meleon = 14MB, FirefoxESR = 17,7MB.
My HD has 1TB. Imagine what difference it makes if my browser's profile folder has 331KB or 17.7MB.
Nevertheless I would hesitate to install a browser with an installer of 200MB. Not because of disc space but for other reasons. I would ask myself about all the stuff such a browser contains, things I have no need for or I would ask myself about how sluttish it was coded.

As for speed, I can't see any noticeable difference on my fast connection among the 3 browsers. (Maybe worth to be mentioned that for most of the time scripting is disabled in my browsers.)

Yogi,
your report is precisely the same I see around:
under x64-systems KM eats more RAM than old Opera and under x32 ones - it has more frugal requirements.

( Is it possible to get your skin config where your personal button images - published earlier - are used?)

Rodocop,
For me Opera 12.17 was slightly lighter on resources than K-Meleon even on W2k_x32 with a Pentium III and 1GB of RAM.
However the difference of resourse consumtion between the 2 browsers in Win7x64 is minimal and definitive not noticeable on my system at least.
Keep in mind that whereas development of Opera Presto ceased many years ago, Mozilla is stuffing more and more things in their browser at every release.

I've simply zipped the folder of my modified Klassic skin folder and uploaded it here.

Quote
siria
The one thing I'm not completely happy with, is that a page must first be finished with loading until the macro works - unless JohnH or anyone knows how to start a script earlier...? If possible, not too complicated ;-)

Nop... with macro language.

This can't be possible in K-meleon because the only event where you can inject code is OnLoad, and OnLoad means when the page has been fully load. (You can inject on demand, but I think you understand me)

If you create an extension such as flashblock, this is, a Gecko extension, yes, you could interact with the code prior to being rendered, but that is far from my knowledge. For me that language mix of javascript and xml is pure gibberish. I just can't deal with it.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/30/2016 05:11PM by JohnHell.