I've been using K-Meleon for a couple of hours, and so far it seems to be working fine and loading pages very fast. To tell the truth I've been trying to move away from IE for a while now and was just waiting for a good free alternative to appear.

One avenue for improvement has to do with support for download managers. I used DAP (Download Accelerator) with IE, which significantly improved my download speeds. One thing about DAP is that it has to integrate into the browser, otherwise its becomes quite difficult and tedious to transfer URLs to the program. While DAP can integrate into IE, Netscape and Opera it doesn't support K-Meleon integration.

Is there any possibility of including such support in the future through a plugin or something? Alternatively, do any download managers exist that support simultaneous streams that will work with K-Meleon?

One suggestion would be to ask the DAP Developers to provide support for K-Meleon.

Andrew

Indeed DAP is a good download manager. But there is also the problem of DAP being adware. (When I tried it, it seemed to get some of the downloads through its own server, so where's the guarantee it's not spyware?) Or, actually, the question would be whether a bona fide nice and clean freeware application like K-Meleon should have anything to do with software based on aggressive advertising and/or possibly spying on users. This is a political question (of course, it's everyone's own choice) and I know people who would make their decisions largely on that basis. Personally I like K-Meleon because it is free of any kind of monopolistic behaviour and commerciality and because it is based on the good will and good intentions of the nice people who develop it.

FreshDownload has promised to take K-Meleon support in their plans. There is also a good clean download manager called GetIt (no longer supported, unfortunately) which seems to offer some potential for connecting it to K-Meleon (even from K-Meleon's side IMHO, although I don't have the necessary skills to do it -- maybe somebody here does?)

All that I wanted to say was that some care should be exercised in that matter.

i don't know much about the subject - i don't use one - but it seems curious to me that this is one area of software developement that just plain smells bad... is there an explanation for this? is it possibly due to the inherently consumeristic (and downright grasping) nature of such things? or what? i'm just curious, since there seem to be fairly wholesome versions of most other types of applications being produced by good folks with good motives...

Yes there are normal and clean download managers available on the web. But a download manager is a very good and easy chance to get one's hands on the clients' personal information and habits with almost interactive connection, so it must be tempting for those who sell and buy advertising information. After all, the world economy has to grow minute after minute ;-)

If the first download manager to support K-Meleon is adware, I am afraid that many K-Meleon users will download that and they may thereby increase the income or satisfaction of some people with not so good motives, and that would place the folks with good motives in an even more disadvantaged position.

One such "normal and clean" download manager for Windows is DLexpert (http://www.yanew.com/english.htm). I haven't used it in a while but it worked very well when I did.

Perhaps the author would be interested in making it work with k-meleon (and thus being the first & only :-) ?

I just tried it.

If DLExpert is loaded in memory and you let it monitor the clipboard, doing a right-click and select copy url in K-M, DLExpert opens the job window and you can start downloading.

Next step could be, that when clicking on a download link in K-M DLExpert is called into memory and the job window displays with the correct information, but it is workable as it is now.

Bernard

Could K-Meleon have a plugin that monitors certain extensions (like exe, zip etc) and when some of those comes up with clicking, always copies the file URL to the clipboard. In that way DLExpert would be usable even with messed download links (as on many of those big sites like www.cnet.com)?

It would even be better if that plugin also called DLExpert into memory, if not there already. In this way the automation is complete.

Bernard

Just another sidenote (my speciality), DAP doesn't actually display adverts any more. The banner just shows a permanent DAP banner. And also, you could easily block the banners before, I forget how, but I think it was just a matter of write protecting the folder the ads were stored in.

As for integrating, DAP has an option that says "Monitor URLs in clipboard". I will try this in a few minutes and see what happens.

Yep, if you enable that option, copying a url of one the set file types (exe, zip etc) will pop up a box that let's you add that file to your download list. You do of course have to have dap running first though, rather than it starting automatically from browsers it integrates with.

When I was using IE, I used flashget < http://www.amazesoft.com/>; as a download accelerator for 56k hookup. It was faster than the IE system search for mirrors, and resumes after a disconnect. It can download several streams at once, which didn't do me much good but would be good for broad band. They offer plugins for netscape and Opera. With this software, you have to be careful of spyware.
When I started using km, I found that there must have been some buffering, either in km or in Naviscope http://www.naviscope.com/ which is the ad killer/ proxy that I use. I now find initial down load rate speeds of nearly 30kbs which gradually taper down to 5-7, with the net result being a considerably faster download than I way getting with any other means.
I do wish, however, that with km I could get a resume feature.

It appears there's a plugin for GetRight:
http://www.getright.com/opera.html
It does click monitoring for Gecko and Opera. Just tested it, works for KM, but it shows a new page and you must click on the back button after it catches the click. Source on that page too (havn't tried looking at it though).

something worth mentioning, maybe (but again, this isn't a subject that i spend a lot of time thinking about, so forgive me if i'm overlooking something obvious) is that with k-meleon being as configurable as it is, and a far more powerful macro scripting plugin in the works, it may not matter too much about download apps having k-meleon-compatible plugins or other shell enhancements, since it will be easy enough to inegrate any little utility into k-meleon via context menu or whatever (for example, right-click on a link and have it sent to any number of web utilities you care to adopt). this is what i'm eagerly looking forward too, in general, and i would imagine it probably applies to this subject as much as any other... does that make sense?