K-Meleon
KMeleonWiki > Welcome > Resources
The available resources are grouped into different categories depending on what you want to do.
The best source for K-Meleon information is in the Documentation section. There is also the User's Guide and Reference Manual, both for K-Meleon 0.7 and last updated in 2003. Among the external K-Meleon resources you can find some links to other general K-Meleon pages.
The skinning tutorial shows you how to install a new skin that you have downloaded from the Themes page. You can also download older skins for 1.1.x & previous versions Old Skins. Extra Throbbers can be downloaded and used together with any skin or theme. The external K-Meleon resources page has links to skins and themes pages located throughout the web. To customize your Windows desktop or personal web page there is also a list of Icons, Buttons, and Banners for K-Meleon.
You can download translated versions of the K-Meleon menus from our Localization resource section. That is also the place where you should find links and pointers to help you localize the Mozilla part of K-Meleon.
This information is kept in the ConfigFiles. You can edit these files through the PreferencesDialog. Beginners should use caution when editing these files and it is helpful to create a test profile for extensive customization.
Much of K-Meleon's behaviour can be altered through the PreferencesDialog. Even more can be altered by editing the PrefsJS?, UserJS, UserChromeCSS? or UserContentCSS files directly. These files are read by the Mozilla/Gecko rendering engine. Further information is available in the following documents.
Macro Library
K-Meleon has a small MacroLanguage that allows you to extend K-Meleon's functionality. A set of ready made macro snippets are to be found in the Macro Library.
K-Meleon uses the same plug-in architecture as Netscape/Mozilla to interact with ThirdPartyPlugins. Extended information is available at mozdev.org - plugindoc.
You can, for instance, install and use an external bookmarks manager or an external cookies manager together with K-Meleon. Or you can use an external mouse gestures program. You can also use a download manager or miscellaneous tools like a tool to make K-Meleon your default browser or a password manager.
The history of this type of extensions dates back to private K-Meleon 0.7 and 0.8 versions.
MonkeeSage? (Jordan Callicoat) inspired others by his example e.g. of his Mtypes add-on, a mimeTypes.rdf editor, for Firefox (and K-Meleon). K-Meleon 0.82+ (a private build by Dorian) showcased several add-ons of this type to a broader base. Version 0.9 saw the first official use of e.g. Aggreg8, a RSS Feed aggregator, for K-Meleon 0.9/1.0. After that many users tried this also. E.g. alain, disrupted, kko, Sebastian Deutscher, guenter... (to mention some of the earliest and most successful) made more add-ons usable and created some tools that made things a little easier.
For K-Meleon 1.0 the prototype of an integrated SeaMonkey extensions installer by kko and guenter was ready for deployment but was not used officially because it was considered a security risk. However K-Meleon 1.0 included a few Firefox add-ons. They were adopted as official and gave K-Meleon improved functions: the Console² extension developed by Simon Bünzli and contributors, the Flashblock extension developed by Ted Mielczarek and contributors, and a proprietary Mtypes editor 0.3, a XUL add-on not for Firefox but for K-Meleon.
K-Meleon 74.0 supports rudimentary mechanisms to make add-on install a lot easier. That brings tools into reach of almost all users that are willing to undertake the adventure of trying to hack a Firefox add-on that they find would be nice to have with K-Meleon.
At the time of this post, November 2014, we must still do many steps manually. So let us set up a tool-chain. We need Firefox, 7z to unpack/pack, an editor that can do UTF8, a few add-ons and a recent K-Meleon with an Error Console² that works. And we use a macro to make K-Meleon XPI ready: {{{Edit?.}}} Or we could go to the URL about:config and create the preference "kmeleon.install_firefox_extension" manually and set it to true.
We also look into the URL about:config for the keyword "compatibility" and set all add-on checking that is still true to false, otherwise we need to add K-Meleon as target application into every install.rdf:
<em:targetApplication>
FirefoxESR24 should be installed anyway to test whether a bug is K-Meleon or GRE specific. Now not all add-ons are made for this version so we suppress most compatibility checking by using the FireFox? add-on "checkcompatibility".
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/checkcompatibility/
We install and inspect the add-ons we want first with Firefox. And those that look promising we export to K-Meleon. To export from Firefox to K-Meleon we use an Addon Exporter.
We export them into ./K-Meleon/browser/extensions, maybe into a test install?
In the ./user-profile/extensions/ they would be deleted when the name or anything is wrong. But even at ./browser/extensions they need the right name to work.
After the export we may need to rename the add-on because this add-on-exporter sometimes changes the name of the export. The correct name is in install.rdf under ID. Use 7z to look inside the install.rdf if it is an archive/xpi.
Example: in <em:id>{4BBDD651-70CF-4821-84F8-2B918CF89CA3}</em:id>, the XPI would be named {4BBDD651-70CF-4821-84F8-2B918CF89CA3}.xpi. The unpacked archive would be named {4BBDD651-70CF-4821-84F8-2B918CF89CA3}.
Now we are ready to start our new add-on in K-Meleon74. We look into URL about:addons (bookmark this URL, we may need it again, I used the hotlinks plugin for this).
If we are lucky the add-on works and needs no configuring.
If we are more lucky the add-on not only works but also has a preferences panel that gives us acces to all its internal functions.
Example: chrome://rvjmimeedit/content/pref/pref.xul
Maybe also bookmark the URL for easier access. We can make a .kmm later or leave it.
If prefs do not give all the access we need we look for another URL in the chrome folder
Example chrome://cookiekeeper/content/ for an alternative.
After some tries we find:
chrome://cookiekeeper/content/cookiekeeper.xul
This download contains old cookieculler+button.7z and CookieKeeper?.
internal://b127cff42584249fed40ef028e0aff44.zip
is the URL that we want and bookmark it for further use.
(Where is the content? Usually in the add-on folder chrome/content/ or inside an archive jar/.../content... Look it up in the chrome.manifest of the add-on if you have a problem finding it.)
They are Firefox add-ons after all. Firefox' GUI is XUL based, K-Meleon's is not. Any add-ons that manipulate the GUI will not work. This includes functions in an add-on that otherwise would work. No button in a bar/GUI, nor the connection from add-on to browser if it is relying on an element that belongs to the GUI.
No go. You will probably not even get a message from the console2.
Most add-ons have functionality implemented in JavaScript. One single error stops the code. So when an add-on does not work you need to look into the Error Console.
But you cannot do much unless you know JavaScript which means that you are a developer. If it was an essential add-on that a dev wants he would have fixed it already - so no help. A 'Fox add-on dev will not help you either - you are using a FF clone that he does not support.
No help from outside, you are on your own. But it is not always a lost cause.
You need a little HTML, other coding and daring to do anything. With that you can try to comment out and change little things, trial and error. For a password exporter I merely had to comment out ( // before the lines) functions that threw an error and were not really needed. You must save Js as UTF8 - same with install.rdf.
The skinning tutorial shows you which files to edit to make K-Meleon look the way you want. Visit the ThemeTools page to see a some of the recommended applications that can be used to help create K-Meleon themes.
If their licence allows, you can also try to adopt a Mozilla theme, Firefox theme or Opera skin.
To help develop K-Meleon you need to get your BuildTools and read some of the DeveloperDocs.
K-Meleon uses Gecko, the rendering engine from Mozilla.org, and should be detected as such. You should use K-Meleon to see how Gecko handles your pages, not how K-Meleon handles your pages. Gecko aims to be fully standards compliant. If K-Meleon fails to follow the standards due to limitations in Gecko (and thus is also visible in Mozilla and/or mfcEmbed) you should report your findings to bugzilla. If K-Meleon is the only browser that fails to follow the standards on a certain page, it should be reported to our bug database. Never ever try to get K-Meleon to "work around" bugs we have. Write standards complaint pages and let us know if we fail to handle them correctly. That's all.
On the Unofficial K-Meleons page you can find unofficial versions that could be interesting for you.
Non-official plugins are available here.
(broken link) K-Meleon Extension Setup (KMES): On the K-Meleon Extension Setup pages you can find a description of this extension setup system and more interesting for the users, a lot of extensions (some Mozilla extensions, for example) adapted for K-Meleon.
K-Meleon Extensions Central: http://kmext.sourceforge.net is the place where you will find many of the popular mozilla xpi extensions modified to work with K-Meleon as well as many other non-xul extensions written especially for K-Meleon.