Ironically, after being somewhat distracted with skinning in Mozilla, Netscape and Opera, finding myself becoming pre-occupied with the endeavor, I found it quite refreshing when I installed KM to find that simple, thin, sleek, non-distractive toolbar that simply contained the basic functions I need so I can get down to business and continue my work and research and not be so distracted as to how pretty the framing is lol.
After all, it is the content of the web page I'm on the internet in the first place for.

I must say, that the difference between nightly and milestone builds is quite obvious, even for a newbie takeing computer science in highschool and learning C++. Its not that hard. Im an pheoniz fan myself, and i use a milestone build, but i still like k-meleon. I think it feels more complete and is very fast. This is saying something because im running on a 400Mhz on 128 ram. just stick with what you like and accept each browser for what it is and also of rwhat it is meant to be. K-meleon is meant to be fast, not look pretty, so if you dont like how it looks look somewhere else, dont criticize one browser bacuse its not what you want it to be. Enough said, Trippy

I recently loaded K-meleon. It is by far the best browser I have used. I was using Mozilla 1.2b. That is what Kme l0.7 is based on. Opera 7.2b would not print things properly. So far I have not had any issues with Kmel.

To me, Phoenix has the feel of a big, soft, plastic XUL app (probably because it is one...). It's not a bad look, its actually kind of appealing--for an OS composed entirely of XUL apps, or even under QT3 or GTK2...but in windows...blah. Give me a standardized interface over 'flare'!

As for the minimalist grafics and text configuration...I like it! More power to end users With the new macro functionality, the possibilities are limitless! Its basically like having sh scripting built in (ok, not quit so extensive, but its getting there!)

Mabye for users who don't want that much control, or don't have the time to figure it all out, mabye someone could code a seperate configuration app that is full out pointy-clicky, that reads and writes the .cfg and .js files, and has every available option with three settings; enabled, disabled, or default. Just a thought.


Shelumi`El
Jordan

S.D.G

I haven't tried Phoenix - I decided it was too effing fat to be worth installing. From all the raving I hear about its looks, I'm sure I did the right thing (for me). Hold the plastick frosting, I want a webpage. It's K-m for me all the way, EXCEPT for those moments when I have to summon Opera to get a download that the silly lizzerd can't grok. It is extreme proctalgia to click on a dl link and get a "zip" file that is really HTML liberally laced with javascript - happens most of the time on Sourceforge. I have Mozilla, but I hate waiting for it, don't like using it, and it aint no smarter.
I hope to try out Galeon some day soon... big data-fry over a partition bonfire coming up as I prepare to install multiple OS's :Q

> Phoenix ... not a bad look... under QT3 or GTK2...but in windows...blah. Give me a standardized interface over 'flare'!

Hehe, most of the protests against the default theme at the phoenix forums was about it looking "to windows native and with IE buttons"

Anyway I also agree, the looks of a browsers is definitly secondary to the functionality, and K-Mels default theme looks just fine if your goal is to actually look at the websites you are visiting, not just stare at the browser UI

K-Meleon is noticeably faster, but only marginally so on my system (P4 1.8, 512 Meg RAM). Though it excels in speed and footprint it lacks the polish and the 'completeness' of a heavyweight browser like Mozilla. This is evident in the text-based configuration and relative lack of prettified conveniences when compared to Opera and Mozilla.

I suppose Mozilla can be likened to a standard assault rifle while K-Meleon is the paratrooper's carbine version with the folding stock. :-)

As for Phoenix, it's always been buggy for me. Sometimes, I wonder the rational behind having so many Gecko engine'd browsers available. There must be quite a bit of wastage in effort as the different development teams are working at cross-purposes in some ways. Perhaps it might be better to concentrate on 1 browser instead and making sure it gets to be as good as it can be.

My 2 cents.

Bokeh

In my view Mozilla is kinda like the dragon guarding the gold in the cave, who got so big and fat off of the villagers' offerings that it could no longer leave the cave. A big old dinosaur that looms ominously saying "...yes, but whose engine are you using?" While its UI...well Netscape has always looked like Netscape, even when it was Mozilla... ahh yes the good old days of m9 and 10. I'm getting all farclempht...

Then Phoenix comes along 'out of the ashes' and tries to do away with all that bloat (compare the naples phoenix release vs seamonkey 1.3a (no talkback) -- 6 megs vs 11.3 megs). They did a good job of getting rid of the bload an retaining the XPI interface, sidebar elements, &c. But problem is, now that the bloat's gone, where is the speed? Well, as with any interpreted language or markup, you are going to have multiple layers before you ever hit any binary; you need at least a runtime compiler / interpreter, a "host" to serve the uninterpreted data, and it is all done in a very complex object heirarchy (e.g., .classes & .chromes) if you plan on doing anything on the scale of a whole app.

Then you have K-Meleon. Where you have native gecko and native UI (and even XP theme support so everything matches!). And its the fastest browser in all~~~ Mexico epah, epah, ondele, yeehah! Mozilla can't get out of the cave, Phoenix is slowly starting to fly, and K-Meleon has already been to both their project pages and read all their headlines

Thus, you have the die-hard Mozilla junkies....God bless them for the rendering engine! But they're living in the past. But then again when the ISO standards folks are incorporating _your_ standards, you can live wherever you want.

You have the novum crowd over at Phoenix, chopping the swell and trying to make Mozilla what it was supposed to be in the first place. More power to them. If they can do it, they deserve the renown that Mozilla once had.

Last but not least, you have the rejects--the speed and control freaks who say "we don't need no stinkin' facy preference dialogs" and then drink dirty bathwater and eat their cigars. We rock! Actually, the developers rock, and we're lucky enough to get to jam to their beat (which happens to be about 180 bpm!)

Did I mention that I'm a K-Meleon fan?


Shelumi`El
Jordan

S.D.G

My main problem with Phoenix was the memory leaks. Sometimes I'd leave it for about 20 minutes, come back and it was using 165MBs of RAM just for viewing three mostly text page tabs. Other times, I couldn't even get Phoenix to show up on the screen, but I'd check the task manager, and there Phoenix was, going up 1MB of RAM a second and it didn't even load on the screen. I trashed Phoneix right after that.

Plus, the themes were ugly. Why so much praise for them? They looked so childish.

K-Meleon runs A LOT better than Phoenix does. Plus, the themes are basic and smooth, unlike Phoenix, where the themes were just ugly and tacky.

I've never tried Opera, but with K-Meleon running so good for me, I no reason to mess around with another browser.

Skin? What's that? All I have is the Menu Bar, URL, and tab bar. No buttons for me!

I think skins are a personal preference. Personally, if KMeleon looked nice enough by default, I could care less about skins. But it tries too hard to look like Internet Explorer.

And to you people who say you dont care what the browser looks like, I'd expect to see you driving a beat up Geo Metro since you dont care about looks. Damn the fact that it probably needs a paint job and a new interior; it gets you where you want to go with sixty miles to the gallon!

I keep IE for Windows Update and The Sims house exchange-does 98 lite really work as well as that site implies? I found Opera 7b has a problem figuring out whether you have Quicktime or not-I couldn't get it to work-although I like being able to change addresses in the address bar more than once, without having to open another tab. (Is that a Mozilla "thing"?)

I have also used the three of them and I had good experiences with all. Opera is really fast, well polished, but unfortunately not open-sourced (though I am from Romania, where wages aren't too high, the price isn't really a matter for me). I'm using Phoenix right now. Not as fast as Opera seemed to be, presents a lot of common facilities with it, especially the <Ctrl+Click> (<Shift+Click> in Opera) to open a link in a new tab/layer. I used K-meleon and despite its amasing speed, it loked too unpolished to be used as a productivity tool. Anyway, I got the sources, I'll have a look at the code and I will try to volunteer some improvements.
Concerning the skinability, it's true it isn't important for those who know what they want, but consider that to grab the traditional users of proprietary software, one has to give some polished UI to attract those who choose a product because it's fun or good-looking.

On some of the recent threads on this forum there are some links to screenshots of KM. Some of these (lynchknots esp.) look very "polished" and show what can be done with just a little time & effort.
I am currently building my own skin something I wouldn't even contemplate on Opera or Phoenix.

To be fair, I tested out the Phoenix browser today and here are my thoughts as how it compares to K-Meleon:
1. The 'tabbed' browsing (at this point) is superior to KM's. (ex: tabs don't jump all over the play, there is an X button to close each tab, you don't see more than one window in the taskbar when you switch between tab, no tabs menu when only one website). I know, layers and tabs are a bit different but this is just my assessment. Who knows what magic Ulf will be able to pull!
2. It's initial loading time is significantly slower than KM's (I know its been mentioned many times), although actual browsing speed on websites is pretty similar on my cable connection.
3. There is less customization that you can do in Pheonix (sometimes I like to add some menus using macros), but it still has its fair bit of nice features.

Conclusion,
Phoenix, though suffering from slow loading time, is pretty decent browser. K-M certainly is excellent in its own right, in terms of speed, but the layers need a little work still ^^.