This may seem like so much ungrateful griping, but I'm going to mention it anyway. :-) The new release takes a long time to load up at first (precaching systray icon disabled, since that just ain't my style.) It is much longer than v.6x I find. In contrast, Opera and IE load much faster (even IE, despite my running W98 w/98 Lite, with IE removed and the W95 explorer installed. Yeah, I then reinstalled a newer version of IE than what came with 98SE, namely v5.5, and put it where I wanted it. Under this setup, IE does not reintegrate back into Windows. The IE dlls in the windows folder can be deleted at will, so long as IE is not running.) I know there's not much the K Team can do about Gecko's rendering speed (though thankfully it is getting faster all the time), but it would be nice if we could get the load-time back down to where it was pre-7. Otherwise, a fine effort and great job guys, thanks a lot. :-)

You're right, it does load a little slower than I would like at start-up, too. I haven't noticed a difference between the two versions I've used, though. I have noticed, though, that version 0.7 *shuts down* a lot faster & more gracefully than the previous version. I don't use the loader either, but not just because I dislike having it loaded all the time, I leave it off because it makes editing my preferences & so on a lot easier without it. Plus, my machine is low on RAM & having any process running all the time is detrimental to my system's performance.

You mentioned how the other browsers load faster, I've often wondered if this is because they also use a method akin to the loader, but only starting it after the first time the browser is executed per OS session. I've noticed, for instance, that -- back when I used IE -- it never really seemed to close after I closed the last window, suggesting that it was waiting for me to open another IE window. It doesn't have a tray icon, but it did have a process running even after I closed it. You also have to consider (like you mentioned) that IE is usually intergrated into the Windows OS, a side result of that is likely to be that the browser remains ready in a "loader" capacity during every Windows session once it's been called for anything as simple as an ordinary window.

Ultimately, while it may not be as fast as the alternative, I find it adventageous that K-Meleon gives me an option of using a loader or not instead of pulling the wool over my eyes & doing it in the background.

Does anyone know if I'm totally off base with this, do other browsers indeed use a "loader" equivelant in the background?

No, I think you kind of missed one of the main points in my initial post (and here I thought I was so explicit.)

With the setup I am running, Internet Explorer is no longer integrated into Windows, in any way, shape or form. IE-related files are loaded into memory only when IE is running, otherwise there are no open processes or threads using any IE-related files. That's what I meant when I said the dlls related to IE in the Windows folder can be deleted if IE isn't running. The same thing goes for all other IE-related files: as long as IE is not running, under my setup, nothing IE related is loaded (and so therefore there is absolutely no precaching of IE under this setup.) So even with no integration or preloading, IE (and Opera) still load far faster than K-Meleon or Mozilla.

Follow-up: I just loaded IE (actually using a shell replacement for IE called My IE (http://myie2.yeah.net/)), browsed a few websites, and then closed it. During this process I ran Task Info (http://www.iarsn.com/) to see what files were open before, during and after. Before I loaded My IE: no IE-related components were in memory. I load My IE and then load a site, the usual IE-related files got loaded into memory and utilized. Then I closed My IE and guess what happened? That's right, all IE-related files were immediately unloaded from memory. I know this may be hard for some to accept or comprehend, and I'm no Microsoft booster (llok at the setup I'm running, which includes Mandrake Linux 9.0 on a dual boot.) The truth is, with 98 Lite running no IE-related files are loaded lest IE is, and once IE is closed, all related files get unloaded from memory.

Oh and for the record, I tried the same thing with the original iexplore.exe, and the same thing happened.

Hmm...Am I in the minority on this one? For me 0.7 loads a good 5+ seconds quicker than 0.6

v0.7 seems to take a little longer, but my computer is old and heavily abused, so its to be expected. It still loads *much* faster than IE or Mozilla though.

Check your plugins. The more plugins you load, the slower the load time. We have some new plugins in 0.7 that you may not need. Also, if you have a lot of Favorites, we've found that it can slow load time.

"With the setup I am running, Internet Explorer is no longer integrated into Windows, in any way, shape or form."

I know, I was just talking about a standard installation.

When I had IE, I used to find an iexplore process running even after I closed it. It was visible in the Close Program dialog. I'm not sure what it did or why it didn't close. I can't rule out the possibility that mine was somehow corrupted & hung on close. I had once edited the exe, after all.

jsnj, if there's that little difference, I wouldn't notice, so it's possible.

Ok, and the whole reason I went out of my way to make that point, was to prove a greater point. Namely, that K-Meleon is the slowest of all three browsers to load. Most might already know that Opera is the fastest to load, and the fastest to render pages, and most would be right. (Opera falls short, however, in terms of standards compliance, and that's a serious drawback.) Most people believe that K-Meleon or Mozilla would be as fast or faster than IE if IE didn't preload a bunch of itself into memory via its integration with Windows. I've shown here that, integrated or not, IE is still faster to load one way or the other. The point? As much as I love K-Meleon and support it, it is just too slow to load. Do not take this as a slight or slam against K-Meleon, because it is not. There are reasons why v.7 is loading a lot slower than previous official releases, and I'd personally like to see them addressed. I'm certain everyone else would too. Let me be crystal clear, just in case anyone is getting defensive: if these comments were about trolling and slamming K-M, I'd be talking trash and offering nothing constructive. Yet here I am, taking a not small amount of time to type these comments and relate my experience and results I've gotten vis a vis my informal testing. In my experience K-Meleon .7 loads a lot slower than previous official releases, in fact it is the slowest off the mark of the three browsers I use: K-Meleon v.7, Opera v6.05 and IE v5.5 SP2. It is something about K-Meleon that's causing the "problem", not an issue with Opera or IE proloading a bunch of stuff.

Follow-up: some may be wondering about the statement I made about dlls unloading immediately after I close IE. That is not the default befavior, and indeed Windows is setup to keep binaries resident for a while after an app has closed just in case you reopen the app again (leaving some binaries resident allows the app to load faster the second time.) I've enabled direct unloading of dlls upon exiting of an app using the reg key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\AlwaysUnloadDLL , so whenever I close an app, all related binaries (dlls, for example), get unloaded from memory immediately (and free the memory they used for use in other apps.)

we're all happy that you spent hours or days disabling and reinstalling IE for whatever reason whazzat. real proud of you. but on whatever hacked up configuration you have maybe IE, Opera and Moz do load faster, I dont know, but that doesnt mean you're the rule. From what youve said you represent about .0001% of km users as far as configuration goes, so your testimony is irrelevant.

Is km .7 slower than .6? i havnt noticed but its possible.
Is km .7 slower than opera, IE or moz? no way!

Based on this statement:

"There are reasons why v.7 is loading a lot slower than previous official releases, and I'd personally like to see them addressed."

You seem to imply that you know the reasons. Care to share?

What the hell are you talking about, "Rob"? What exactly is the game you are playing in posting such a comment? It doesn't matter if I represent whatever % of K-Meleon users. K-Meleon is based on Gecko, and Gecko is known to be slow (though improving) to render web pages. Opera is known to render the fastest, where it falls down is in standards compliance. I'd personally say IE (at least v.5.5 that I'm using) is about as fast as K-Meleon/Gecko in terms of rendering. It is generally accepted (except by those with a "political" axe to grind), that Opera is also fastest to load. In my testing vis a vis my setup, IE comes second, and then K-Meleon (we are talking load times here. Mozilla I'm fairly sure would come 4th but I haven't tested that.)

I didn't spend "hours" setting my system up the way it is I can assure you, so there are no worries that I wasted any time (though I am concerned that I'm bothering to respond to you, given you are basically a flame-baiting troll right?) While your post here amounts to "K-Meleon rulez, it can do no wrong!", some of us here are interested in actually making it better. You are so bent on being a mindless K-Meleon booster that you conclude the results I've come to are irrelevant? Well hey Rob, that's more reflective of you than it is of me or the results I can assure you. :-) In truth, you have no idea what you're talking about, you are talking out of your ass as they say. Are you one of the developers? I don't think so. The developers (Andrew for example), know exactly what I'm talking about in terms of what I've done with my system and the results I've encountered with my "real-world" testing.

It's nice that you love K-Meleon so much that you are willing to dismiss anyone and anything that doesn't conform to your limited, uninformed view of things. Meanwhile, some of us are actually interested in improving K-M. Anyway, like I said, the devs know what I'm talking about, and frankly I'm wondering why I even bother to respond to you now. :-) What can I say? Your arrogant and ignorant attitude irked me a bit.

Andrew: I sinscerely don't know, but that's the logical conclusion. I wish I did know. I hope you don't think I'm subtly knocking your coding skills, that's not my intention.

You people still surprise me.

Why on earth would anyone compare browsers loading speed at all? I mean it's like comparing cars but not based on their features but by speed at wchich they can be driven out of garage. I'd understand comparing car speed on highway, comparing security and comfort but comparing garage or parking lot drive-in and drive-out times?

What do you guys do all day long - restart your browsers like twice in twenty minutes? Or do you find time to actually browse the web too?

Gecko is the most complete browsing/rendering engine out there atm. Browsing engine, not bells-n-whistles (opera) or nice integration (ie) engine. Yes I am web developer and yes, I work with IE, Opera and Gecko every day. Opera 7b1 was released and only now they've brought the engine up to decent standards support so it remains to be seen where O7 final will stand (looks quite promising though).

Gecko has it's weak points (like slow dhtml) but in general layout loading & building and script parsing it's as fast as you can get in 2002.

As for "removing IE from system" - IE 5.5 sp2 standard setup is 56MB of cab files. I'n not talking about postinstalled size on disk, I'm talking about installation files size. Granted, that includes OE as well (about 20M and secfixes (which are mandatory anyway), but hell, its still whopping 30-36MB. For a browser. It contains many non-browser system files which it patches. Why do you think it needs to do that? I mean - if it was just a browser with no integration at all then it wouldn't need to update other files, right? Mozilla doesn't need to do that and Opera doesn't need to do that. Why should IE? Think about it. IE can hook up to already running subsystems like favourites or cache management or profile management so it really doesn't need to load them itself. Don't delude yourself about removing or unloading all IE components.