Thoughts, comments, flames?

Just curious to see what you think are the advantages of K-Meleon over Firebird. Faster, lighter, meaner?

How about the other way around? Firebird, more compatible, more supported, more stable?

Do a search on Phoenix in the forums. There are a few threads devoted to this topic.

hi,

i can tell you about a big advantage: There are a lot of people that run really _low end_ pc's. like my mum does. cyrix 166 CPU (really running at 133) with 48 MB Ram, running windows 95. to start explorer is a pain, even though it is integrated with windows. phoenix / firebird is slightly better but k-meleon (to my surprise) runs really well on this machine. without the "accelerator" part loaded. i think with projects like these the programmers might hurt the hardware industry because they are not creating a demand for faster machines, on the other there are a lot of people that doesn't need a 2ghz pc to check their mail or occasionally surf the web. it wouldnt make sense to use old, less resource hogging, browsers like netscape 3 or explorer 4 because they can't handle todays www standards. a browser like k-meleon really is the only alternative you have unless you dont care to wait for minutes to see a web page being displayed .

Bye,
Till

> K-Meleon versus Firebird

I think that "vs" is the wrong way to look at it. They are both 2 good browsers playing on the same team. Mozilla FB is the cross OS version of the browser while K-M is the optimized for Win version.

Try out both and pick the one that feel the most right for you

Stefan:

That gets a hefty "Amen!" from me.

Healthy competition is essential to better software on all sides, but at the same time the only real "enemey" are those big, proprietary, corporation types that go fudging the standards for the rest of us kindhearted opensource folk.


Shelumi`El
Jordan

S.D.G

I have tried both Firebird & K-meleon. K-mel is noticably faster than Fb, but Fb is my default for 1 reason. Namely, I loooove tabs -- NOT layers.

I check the K-mel site at least weekly, because I hope [& expect] that it, too, will go to tabs one day. When/if it does, it will be the superior browser IMOH.

shaloha.....bell

Hey -

I'm a diehard Firebird user considering the switch to K-mel, mostly because it uses about 40% less RAM on my machine, and the preloader; both make it faster.

However, Firebird has some feature advantages in my mind:

-The bookmarks toolbar
-An option to make it the default browser in Preferences
-Pop-up whitelisting instead of blacklisting is a better approach IMO. There might be one site that I want to have popups work on, its much easier to set that up than the hundreds of sites I want popups blocked on.

Thanks, great project!

K-Meleon does have support for a bookmarks toolbar. I don't know much about since I don't use it but it's there. Bring up the bookmarks editor and right click, there's a selection to make a toolbar folder.

I've posted a .reg file in the past which will make K-Meleon the default browser, search the forums for it.

Popup control (and control of other Javascript elements) can be done via policies in any Gecko browser:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/components/ConfigPolicy.html

Tried this in prefs and it didn't work:

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "trustable");
user_pref("capability.policy.trustable.sites", "http://www.usefulsite.net";
user_pref("capability.policy.trustable.Window.open", "sameOrigin");

Honestly, I prefer Mozilla and Firebird (Firebird is my main MandrakeLinux browser, and Mozilla is my main WinXP browser) but I must say, I'm very impressed with K-Meleon; it loads much quicker than Firebird or Mozilla. I find myself using it more and more.

I'm looking forward to the 0.8 release. =)

I love k-mel, but a few things keep me from using it over fb. k-mel needs to start with the focus on the PAGE, not the address bar. I'm sure like many others I am used to starting up the browser and scrolling down on my homepage with the mousewheel. In kmel when i do that I get a nice cycling through the past 15 pages I've visited. This has been an issue forever, so I assume there must be some reason the developers keep that focus in the address bar.

Also, I love mozilla/fb's quicksearch option. I have successfully transitioned from those to proxomitron aliases, though, so I can have the same functionality in k-mel. Quicksearches are still easier, though.

Both of your issues are fixed in the k-meleon.1.2.1.exe and bookmarks.dll binaries on MonkeeSage's page:

http://gratisdei.com/KM.htm

Just download those 2 binary files, place them in their appropriate folders and you should be happy. You should also update your macros, history, and toolbars dlls. You may or may not run into a couple issues if you try his full packages though(namely slow load time & user32.dll crashes), so I'd stick to just the binaries. I've had no problems with them.

Well thanks, I guess I haven't been following this site closely enough

With asmpgmr mentioning the bookmarks toolbar, has anyone checked, if

http://kmeleonbrowser.org/forum/read.php?f=3&i=2527&t=2527

still applies?

Im on XP now and I'm sorry, that I don't have the time to have a look at it myself. :-(

Just tested. It doesn't apply anymore. Following the steps mentioned in the linked thread I got the same results with and without the bookmarks toolbar enabled. There seems to be a resource leak from KM after you've been browsing awhile and have opened many windows/layers during the session, but not bookmarks toolbar specific.

jsnj,

Is the memory leak layer-specific ? Can you narrow it down to any specific thing to help in debugging it ?

Well I only use layers. The layer catch pref is true so I don't know if the same thing happens when the layer plugin is not in use and only new windows are opened. I always open many layers during a session but I only check resource use if I notice weird things happening within the browser or other apps not opening etc. That always seems to be the case when I've had a long session. Then when I check resources, they're down to 1%. Upon closing KM they go back up to above 70% or higher depending on what other apps I have running. But this is consistent behavior. I know now that whenever I have a long session w/many layers that I'm gonna have to close KM sooner or later and to copy the URL address or bookmark it if it's important. I assumed this was known since I've heard others report similarly and was to my knowledge the main impetus behind MonkeeSage considering MDI.

I'm using the k-meleon1.2.1.exe and plugins from MonkeSage's page running on Mozilla 1.2b. Win98se.

jsnj,

Sorry I can't help you there, layers and the loader are the two things in K-Meleon I've never looked at, no interest. It would be useful to know if this also happens normally (no layers) with many windows open to determine whether it's a core problem or a problem within the layers plugin. I remember MonkeeSage saying that memory usage is improved by later versions of the Mozilla code so you may want to try his 1.4b build and see if that helps, at the very least try updating the Mozilla code to 1.2 final or 1.2.1.

About policies, I use something like this to restrict all Javascript to specific sites, about: is also there to allow about:plugins to work.

user_pref("capability.policy.default.javascript.enabled", "noAccess");
user_pref("capability.policy.jsok.javascript.enabled", "allAccess");
user_pref("capability.policy.jsok.sites", "about: http://www.goodsite.com");
user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "jsok");

Other policies should work in a similar fashion, if you use noAccess instead of allAccess then the sites listed don't have access but all others do.

user_pref("capability.policy.default.javascript.enabled", "allAccess");
user_pref("capability.policy.nojs.javascript.enabled", "noAccess");
user_pref("capability.policy.nojs.sites", "www.badsite.com");
user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "nojs");

what i like so much about phoenix/moz is smoothscrolling. i tried installing it from the mozdev page, but to no avail. searching in the address bar is cool to, and the right click options for moz are better. the mozdev project to fool sites into thinking you're using another browser it good too, some sites only want you to use ie.

km is good because it's ultrafast and light and the "galeon" skin is the best i've seen.

joe,

- Generally stuff from mozdev won't work in K-Meleon.
- If by searching from the address bar you are referring to bookmark keywords then that's in the unofficial build of K-Meleon at http://gratisdei.com/KM.htm
- Which right click options are better ?
- You can already change the useragent string - Preferences->Privacy->Browser Identification

Just 2 cents... I decided to try the bird after reading all the nice comments here. I rather like it in some ways, but will probably stick with the old lizzerd for everyday use. However, I was able to post with it in a forum that I have not been able to get into with K-M (although it has been proven possible by someone else - beats me). So I will be keeping it as a decent alternative to Inept Experimenter for kinky days. If I could get the gui skinnied down a bit I might trot it out more often, but I don't know how committed I can get to tweaking more than one browser
Life is good with K-M.

when i tried them, they said a required dll (xpcom.dll in 1.2.1, xpcom_compat.dll in 1.4b) wasn't found, and i did download the ones not for xp.

as for right click options, pretty much everything. "properties" is one example.

thanks for the pointer on user agent.

Firebird (AKA Phoenix) is more oriented on user-friendliness.
I use it as my main browser (the march 30 build, recommended on the "Firebird Help" page, 0.5 used to crash after a while on my win98 machine)
It's easy to use, easy on the eyes and searching is fast and convenient. The skins are big and beautiful (but can be put smaller), and the new configuration menu is well laid out.

K-Meleon sometimes has a weird display problem after a while. Also, I'm not a big fan of it's visual aspect, be it the small buttons, or the layers. But, still, I use it on my older computers, 'cause it's real fast and efficient, ressource wise.

One of the big pluses of K-M is that its skinning is simply bitmap files (which are much more accessable to the end user than files hidden somewhere in some .jar file).
You can make it look like any browser you like, or like no other browser. Whatever fits your fancy.

Though, at some point it would be nice to see png and other formats added as well (mabye via mozilla's implementation of imglib?).

Check out the resources section of this site and see the bottom of my K-M page () for a few different skins. Also search the forums here for skins; some other users like lynchknot and boogomatic have made some nice ones as well. The sizes vary from small (20 px.) to big (36+ px); you should be able to find something you like.


Shelumi`El
Jordan

S.D.G