K-Meleon is going in the right direction, remember it is still only V0.4! I agree that the user interface of Opera is by far the best of all browser 'models'. Most people either seem to love it or hate it though!!!!! I think when I first tried it, I disliked it straight away, and was close to uninstalling it. I was still die-hard Netscape man. But I stuck it out, and after only a few days realised HOW much better the user interface was, the organisation and scope of the hotkeys, the document management, THE SPEED! Anyway it still has some problems, because it tries to be standards-compliant - but no-one really cares about standards-compliancy. Still, this means about 5% of sites don't render properly in Opera.
K-Meleon, IF they get the user interface right, will be in a much better position, because they are running on the gecko core. By getting the user interface right, I mean doing something MUCH better than just an IE clone.
However, I see that for both EPOC and now a QNX IBM embedded system, Opera is the dominant browser - as EPOC (aka Symbian) and other operating systems start working in smart devices, Opera seem well placed to capture this market, which will be HUGE!) Both IE and Mozilla/gecko simply can't compete because the rendering engine is bigger and slower.
So, there may be a split between mobile/dedicated web devices, and desktop machines.... I hope both Gecko/KMeleon AND Opera have a good future...
(p.s. check out
http://www.qnx.com/iat/ for an incredible demonstation of the power of their operating system, they fit the WHOLE operating system, internet connectivity, a text editor, and web browser AND a game running under java on JUST 1 FLOPPY DISK!!!!!!!!) Nothing else needed.......