Let's discuss other browsers here.

What about me, I've tried almost all browsers on the market (excluding some newest countless Chromium-clones).

My priorities are small system load, functionality and customizability - therefore KM sure ;-)

And what I can say...

Some years ago I was using KM as primary browser and Opera (OperaLE assembly) or Firefox as secondary.

Then, after the EOL of Opera Presto I was forced to look for some alternative (KM was in anabiosis that time). And I found TheWorld Browser - the only Chromium without support of extensions, so it makes this app way lighter and more secure than other Chromiums.

As the points of all Chromiums are simplicity and minimalism TheWorld doesn't suffer much from its cutoff. And it's really good supplement for supercustomizable K-Meleon.

Some words about other contenders:

1) Otter browser - one of projects, aiming to recreate Opera look and feel. Seems to develop into really customizable and lightweight (based on QtWebkit) app.
But still has a number of severe deficiencies, which prevent from it's everyday use.

2) Vivaldi - another attempt to recreate Opera. Blink-based, it's one of the heaviest browsers ever. Comparatively rapidly developed (by the team, that unites a group of former Opera Presto devs) it suffers from superhigh load and almost cannot be used on lower-end and older systems.

3) Opera New - official Blink-based Opera. Also heavy (but way more lightweight thab Vivaldi) it is developed now by new holders from China, so it started to look like typical chinese app with a number of bells and whistles but without real charisma.

4) Midori - original browser on QtWebkit. Very lightweight and pretty stable under Linux it shows big problems on Windows since version 0.5.0. Sometime it gets better (0.5.10) - just to step back again in 0.5.11 (last build). Not usable as primary for now under Windows.

5) Qupzilla - one more Qt-based browser.
Versions 1.x were based on QtWebkit but with 2.0 update browser migrated to QtWebEngine (Blink-based instead of old goog Webkit) - and falls into big problems with workability as well as Otter (it has being released in 2 branches simultaneously - QtWebkit and QtWebEngine, where the latter is hardly usable).

So I found v.1.89 rather good and v.2.00 fully unusable under Windows.

6) Aurora Browser - one of rare modern IE-wrappers. Looks like Chrome but renders pages with Trident from your MS-browser.
Has clear look, inbuilt AdBlocker, Photo magnifier and Pages autotranslator.

Could be good choice to wrap IE if you are forced to use MS-browser. However shows no active development since the only known release 1.0.0.3031 was published.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/21/2017 05:15PM by rodocop.

Very informative list, thanks!
Hm, you don't happen to know if one of those ultralight ones may run on my poor old machine too..? :cool: (perhaps heard from your comrades) Could sometimes use a secondary one for probs with ultramodern websites. Then again, probably also depends a lot on the system and plugins, not just the browser, sigh.

Maybe try ReactOS with KM natively running there? ;-)

I don't really know any worth alternative to KM 1.x and Opera Presto for Win98

Siria, install Puppy Linux (or some other lightweight distro) and try out some of these:
http://www.qutebrowser.org
http://www.netsurf-browser.org
http://links.twibright.com
https://pwmt.org/projects/jumanji/
https://fanglingsu.github.io/vimb/
http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/
http://lynx.browser.org
http://www.dillo.org
http://w3m.sourceforge.net
http://getswiftfox.com
https://github.com/mason-larobina/luakit
http://tkhtml.tcl.tk/hv3.html
http://dooble.sourceforge.net

... and K-Meleon under wine :cool:

A+

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Mozilla/5.0 (x11; U; Linux x86_64; fr-FR; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Ubuntu/12.04 K-Meleon/76.0

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Web: http://jujuland.pagesperso-orange.fr/
Mail : alain [dot] aupeix [at] wanadoo [dot] fr

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Ubuntu 12.04 - Gramps 3.4.9 - Harbour 3.2.0 - Hwgui 2.20-3 - K-Meleon 76.0 rc

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/18/2016 07:05AM by JujuLand.

This option was so obvious that I didn't even cosider posting it here ...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/18/2016 09:37AM by panzer.

:O Thanks for trying to help, but you guys are kidding... Am merely looking for a TINY modern browser for win98, not for a whole new, giant and complicated operating system :cool: Neither enough free disk space (near zero) nor learning time, if I could I'd long since have done it. Or rather switched to XP or win7, but I'll sure do as guenter did and ten minutes after going online with a new system destroy it again by some evil malware <fear>

Puppy is only around 200 MB big and not that difficult to use ... Just delete one movie from your comp and you will have enough space ...

The big problem I've had with IE, and with browsers based on it, is that the scripts used by a few of the websites I visit are not fully supported. In some cases, IE-based browsers and IE itself (they all use IE's error screens with the IE logo) report that a page can't be opened, even though KM and FF open it easily. I have IE9. Perhaps IE10 or IE11 might offer better support, but I can't upgrade beyond IE9 on this machine, and I don't want a newer OS, either.

The other thing is CSS rendering: In Trident browsers, the appearance suffers on my own website, and on some other sites using CSS. Fonts are smaller than they're supposed to be, form input fields are not the designed length, certain elements are misaligned, etc. On the other hand, they look fine in KM and in Firefox. My own site looks exactly as I intended it in both. As for non-Trident and non-Gecko browsers, Vivaldi makes a total mess of my own CSS. Haven't tried any of the Chrome clones yet.

---
Gerry

Well, curiosity got the better of me and I've managed to get Vivaldi running acceptably (version 1.2 official release). It is, as rodocop points out, extremely heavy, and consequently takes a long time to start up. Once it's running, things are pretty smooth, but there's one very annoying bug: The internal player intended for HTML5 media will not play MP3 audio or MP4 video files. It will play WEBM videos, however. Normally I'd simply make the browser open the files by association, but there's no such option in Vivaldi (mimetypes, etc.).

I must say the font rendering is very good, and there are a few nice features, but at the cost of speed. Older machines would have a really tough time running Vivaldi!

KM is still the fastest and lightest browser I've ever used, yet full of features, once some macros and customizations have been added.

---
Gerry

Quote
foliator
KM is still the fastest and lightest browser I've ever used

I wonder if Linux lightweight browsers can match it ...

The only Linux lightweight is Midori. But is isn't as mature as KM even under Bodhi Linux.

siria,

take a look on 2 retrobrowsing projects:

1) Retrozilla - old SeaMonkey for Win95 with backported new features.

2) SeaMonkey95 (Firefox95) - the almost same-aimed project

Quote
rodocop
The only Linux lightweight is Midori. But is isn't as mature as KM even under Bodhi Linux.

Sorry, I thought about minimalistic lightweight browsers like qutebrowser, Links, dwb and xombrero.

I have tried out many browsers and have switched to Pale Moon as my main browser for the time being! :O
It is just so simple and easy to use and upgrading to the latest version is simple and even automatic if you want! (though I doubt many here would care for that feature )
I also enjoy the simple compatibility with the Firefox addons, but without the insanity of running the absurd piece of garbage that Mozilla has made Firefox into over the past few years. It is the true successor to Netscape Navigator IMHO, and it seems to have even more manpower behind it than K-Meleon and SeaMonkey put together! (They actually have full-time developers and they are sane people, unlike most at Mozilla!)

Of course K-Meleon will always have a special place in my heart, but it is hard to keep up on the developer side, as well as that upgrading K-Meleon is a difficult, time-consuming task for simple users like me!
Also, though I appreciate K-Meleon's noble goals of embedding Gecko into native Windows, it seems like that is a much more labour-intensive task than using the XUL interface that is more similar to Firefox, and we seem to have less manpower than most other browsers. Of course I appreciate the great work of Dorian and others, but that is just my situation at the moment!
I do miss special K-Meleon features like being able to save a session so easily, but Pale Moon has the Firefox plugins I need like uBlock Origin and Ghostery, as well as Stylish for certain sites (which again can likely be done in K-Meleon if you know what you're doing with userContent.css but again it's just easier for me with a Google search and one-click automatic install! And with the Foxscape skin it looks very nice on my system just like classic Netscape!

As a secondary browser for if I need the most cutting-edge rendering features on occasion, I have used the latest version of Opera, which I know has pretty much become another Chromium clone, but I still like it better than Google Chrome because it is in the illustrious tradition of music-themed browsers (like ViolaWWW, Cello [the first Web browser for Windows], etc.) And it just looks nicer IMO.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/10/2016 04:40PM by thomase13.

Quote
thomase13
As a secondary browser for if I need the most cutting-edge rendering features on occasion, I have used the latest version of Opera, which I know has pretty much become another Chromium clone, but I still like it better than Google Chrome because it is in the illustrious tradition of music-themed browsers (like ViolaWWW, Cello [the first Web browser for Windows], etc.)

Then there's that other music-themed browser, Vivaldi. Why its Norwegian development team didn't select the name of a Norwegian composer (Grieg, Sinding, Svendsen, Halvorsen, et al.) is beyond me. Oh yes, and it's pretty ironic that a music-themed browser like Vivaldi can't even play MP3s on a web page; in fact, it's just plain silly.

I read a forum post by an Italian user who said he prefers the Vivaldi browser because its author is Italian, like himself. Someone soon corrected him! At any rate, that browser is yet another victim of the Chrome epidemic. It's not bad, however, and has some unique features, but is awfully cumbersome. KM beats it hands down for both speed and flexibility.

---
Gerry



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/12/2016 04:29AM by foliator.

But the name "Vivaldi" sounds like music itself! Unlike those other names, ough. Just from the pure sound of it, at least in my clueless non-musician ears... Just a nice name that people already know and easily remember in all countries, and hopefully can speak in all countries too. The other names are much too unknown in general public, and just the sound of them, oh well... Hey it's a common internet browser, not specializing on musicians

Quote
rodocop
take a look on 2 retrobrowsing projects:

1) Retrozilla - old SeaMonkey for Win95 with backported new features.

2) SeaMonkey95 (Firefox95) - the almost same-aimed project

Thanks for the tips, looks promising!
Must say in a first step didn't expect much after seeing those are meant for win95, even 2 generations behind mine. But shocked and delighted to read there that FF10 can still run on Win98!! All those years thought that FF3.6 engine was the last chance, or then again, perhaps confused it because KM1.7 was the last KM-version? no idea.
Anyway, have first tried now FF10 and - it starts! No probs! Woohoo, looks GREAT... except that it now even FREEZES on prob sites where KM1.x simply doesn't work Oh well. But am sure that on semi-problematic sites it still works better as FF3.6/KM1.7
So, will probably try those 2 progs as well, when getting around.

And just read on kernelex-wiki again: FF11 is supposed to run too, just very slow and with glitches. So had dismissed it when first trying FF10 and forgotten again, but may now try that too...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/12/2016 11:17AM by siria.

Quote
siria
But the name "Vivaldi" sounds like music itself! Unlike those other names, ough. Just from the pure sound of it, at least in my clueless non-musician ears... Just a nice name that people already know and easily remember in all countries, and hopefully can speak in all countries too. The other names are much too unknown in general public, and just the sound of them, oh well... Hey it's a common internet browser, not specializing on musicians

Yes, I guess Antonio Vivaldi is a more widely known composer than the Norwegian ones (with the possible exception of Grieg), but maybe it's time they were better known. When I used Opera Mobile a long time ago there was a discussion about music in one of Opera's off-topic forums. I made the mistake of saying that I didn't like opera, and then had to explain that I was referring to the music genre, not the browser.

---
Gerry

Quote
foliator
When I used Opera Mobile a long time ago there was a discussion about music in one of Opera's off-topic forums. I made the mistake of saying that I didn't like opera, and then had to explain that I was referring to the music genre, not the browser.

That's hilarious!

I think it should have been named Grieg as well, although he is one of my favourite composers!

That piano concerto??
Doesn't get much better than that!!

Quote
thomase13

Quote
foliator
When I used Opera Mobile a long time ago there was a discussion about music in one of Opera's off-topic forums. I made the mistake of saying that I didn't like opera, and then had to explain that I was referring to the music genre, not the browser.

That's hilarious!

I think it should have been named Grieg as well, although he is one of my favourite composers!

That piano concerto??
Doesn't get much better than that!!

Yes, Grieg is a favorite of mine, too. That concerto is one of his most popular works. I prefer his works for solo piano, however, especially his "Lyric Pieces". There are 66 of them in a 10-book series. I have all of them on a single MP3; it's well over three hours long!

My all-time favorite music, however, is the orchestral music of Frederick Delius, one of Grieg's close friends. Grieg intervened when Delius' father tried to stop his son from pursuing a career as a composer.

Now I'm afraid I have to say that I don't like Vivaldi, but this time not the music, but the browser. I've been evaluating it lately just out of curiosity. Vivaldi never takes less than 20 seconds to start up. Sometimes it takes longer, and on a couple of occasions, after having waited about 60 seconds without seeing it come up, I looked in my task manager and noticed that 8 or 9 instances of vivaldi.exe were running. Even when it starts up normally, it still drags its feet loading websites. Not only that, but it has more bugs than a New York City hotel room (been there, seen them ).

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Gerry



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/17/2016 03:12AM by foliator.

Firefox Quantum? :O
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/quantum/



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/29/2017 03:36PM by J.G..

Quote
siria
Wrong title :cool:
http://kmeleonbrowser.org/forum/addon.php?0,module=recent_messages

Oh, thank you for the advice.
I tested FF Quantum beta:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
HTML5 test: 486/555
It works with Windows 7, Pentium 4 SSE2, 512Mb RAM:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/57.0a1/system-requirements/

Quote
J.G.

Quote
siria
Wrong title :cool:
http://kmeleonbrowser.org/forum/addon.php?0,module=recent_messages

Oh, thank you for the advice.
I tested FF Quantum beta:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
HTML5 test: 486/555
It works with Windows 7, Pentium 4 SSE2, 512Mb RAM:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/57.0a1/system-requirements/

Kmeleon 76RCpro is still better for me than FF Quantum beta.

FF 57 crashes a lot, it has several problems with fullscreen mode (e.g. it still has the weird "click twice F11 to solve taskbar problem" from version v.12), and it stop working if maximum instance of workload is selected (i.e. disable automatic performance configuration and select maximum number, where four is the default onoe and seven is the top one). Such a disgrace inmho. :mad:

Tried Basilisk bro from PaleMoon team.

Started with special Basilisk XPmod of it, prepared by roytam1.

Found it suddenly smooth and comparatively lightweight against regular Firefox - rather usable on my 8 years old laptop.

Basilisk is the next step in forking traditional XUL-based Firefox. PaleMoon team announced this fork as new 'platform' - UXP (Unified XUL Platform).

Now based on FF 55-56 (last non-Quantum) and in this mod has backported XP support along with all oldschool stuff - XUL-addons, np-plugins...

Good try! Like it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/21/2017 09:46AM by rodocop.

Quote
rodocop
Tried Basilisk bro from PaleMoon team.
(...)
Good try! Like it.

Main features:
- Full support for JavaScript's ECMAscript 6 standard for modern web browsing.
- Support for all NPAPI plugins (Unity, Silverlight, Flash, Java, authentication plugins, etc.).
- Support for XUL/Overlay Mozilla-style extensions.
- Experimental support for WebExtensions (in gecko-target mode). Please note that some Mozilla-specific WebExtension APIs are not yet available.
- Support for ALSA on Linux.
- Support for WebAssembly (WASM).
- Support for advanced Graphite font shaping features.
- Support for modern web cryptography: up to TLS 1.3, modern ciphers, HSTS, etc.

Important differences with Mozilla Firefox:
- Uses Goanna as a layout and rendering engine. Goanna behaves slightly differently than Gecko in certain respects and may result in different display of web pages. e.g.: Goanna renders gradients in a more accurate color space (non-premultiplied).
- Builds on UXP, our XUL platform in development. As such XUL is alive and well in this browser and will not be deprecated.
- Has some long-standing known issues with the Mozilla code-base fixed (e.g. CVE-2009-1232).
- Does not use Rust or the Photon user interface. You can expect a familiar interface as-carried by Firefox between v29 and v56.
- Does not use Electrolysis (e10s, multi-process browsing).
- Does not require walled-garden extension signing.

http://www.basilisk-browser.org/features.shtml

Some good ideas for future Kmeleon release -- if possible. :O



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/21/2017 04:30PM by J.G..

A very nice linux light weight alternative is Suckless Surf.

... or qutebrowser ...

Otter and K-Meleon Goanna are your best bet for Windows XP. Another good choice for XP (which will also work on SP2) is Advanced Chrome's custom build http://www.browser.taokaizen.com/ although it isn't updated too often.

Since there are 2 pertinent threads to this topic I am posting this info a 2nd time:

Quote
me !
Pale Moon community member Feodor2 maintains a fork of the official Pale Moon browser (dubbed "Mypal"), especially for XP:
https://github.com/Feodor2/Mypal

I tried it to see if it will run on XP SP2 & it worked splendidly !!!
This is very good news for me as it is very much like the 'old' FF & K-M.

My h/w is new-ish, so the following is not a problem forme, but:
The new bit of info to me was where someone wrote that the majority of browsers today will crash with 0x1d on systems with non-SSE2 CPUs.