The History of K-Meleon

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Christophe Thibault released K-Meleon 0.1 (2000-08-20) after one day of coding. This release did not implement features such as Context menu, HTTPS, History, Cookies saving, Mime types handling, etc, etc... It was mainly a rebranded version of Mozilla's test application for embedding Gecko under Windows; winEmbed.

K-Meleon 0.2 (2000-11-26) and K-Meleon 0.2.1 (2000-11-27) included some improvements, but still lacked many key features. Christophe now put the project on SourceForge?.net, hoping that someone else would work on it. It was not his goal to develop a complete web browser; he wanted to just experiment with Gecko (the html rendering engine from Mozilla/K-Meleon).

The K-Meleon project was inactive until Sebastian Spaeth stepped up as project manager. Although he was not a programmer, he published a new build of K-Meleon 0.2.1 (2001-01-26) using a fresher Mozilla back-end.

The development of K-Meleon quickened with the new publicity of this release and Brian Harris joined the project as main developer. K-Meleon 0.3 (2001-02-15) was a major rewrite in which the project was moved from the BCG library, which became commercial. The codebase was switched toward Mozilla's new (and still current) test application mfcEmbed instead of winEmbed.

Jeff Doozan joined the project as developer and later took over the project manager job after Sebastian. Jeff and Brian released K-Meleon 0.4 (2001-05-11), K-Meleon 0.5 (2001-09-27), and K-Meleon 0.6 (2001-10-30) together before Brian left the project. This was the main development phase of K-Meleon. These releases made K-Meleon into a very configurable and extendable browser by using text files to configure toolbars, menus, menu icons and accelerator keys. The browser gained a powerful plugin system for extending the browser functionality which allows the user to load only wanted features. Plugins for IE Favorites, NS Bookmarks, Toolbars, History, Macros, Fullscreen, Rebar Menu and Bitmap Menus were included by default.

K-Meleon 0.7 (2002-10-31) was initially delayed due to underlying Mozilla/Gecko bugs that for a while made the developers' test/beta version of K-Meleon a lot less functional than earlier releases. These bugs were finally squashed by a new K-Meleon developer, Mark Liffiton. In the mean-time had Mark also rewritten the bookmarks plugin, Rob Johnson had extended the macro plugin, and Ulf Erikson had added the layers and hotlist plugins. Mark and Rob both left the project in the early summer. Jeff, almost invisible for a year, popped back for a hectic week of bug fixes before the new version was released.

K-Meleon 0.7.1 (2003-02-13) was titled Service Pack 1 and included updates to the K-Meleon executable and plugins. It was intended as a minor update while waiting for a new stable Mozilla branch on which to base the next release. The new release didn't come as soon as hoped and Ulf left the project in the spring.

K-Meleon 0.8 (2003-11-10) was based on the Mozilla 1.5 code base and includes many fixes and improvements by Ulf, asmpgmr, and Jordan Callicoat. K-Meleon 0.8.1 (2003-12-13) and K-Meleon 0.8.2 (2003-12-23) fixed many bugs and introduced some new features; the most notable one is the mouse gestures plugin.

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More can be found on Wikipedia.