The third Big Browser?

[Elledan]

If you don't know it already, a new browser for Windows has been released: K-Meleon

It is based on the Gecko engine of the well-known Mozilla project, which makes the program very fast when it's about rendering pages. The program is very small too: 2.8 MB

The official site: http://kmeleon.org

Who has used it and why? If you haven't used it I'd like to hear why. I would also like hear what you think what the chances are that K-Meleon will become The Third Browser.



BTW This post has been typed in K-Meleon (v1.0beta). Some more juicy details: No explorer.exe was used. I was running OptiShell, which takes over explorer.exe and makes it far more stable and reliable. OptiShell is part of a set of handy tools, called Optix.

[PeterW]

I use opera as well... the window management is pretty good.

[Nicky]

I shall have a look.
If anyone has used it please may I have some comments on it for my research! Especially in terms of speech and accessibility.

[Caesar]

Hey, the screenshots are pretty impressive ...

[James]

I will download it to try it out, but I don't really expect to give up IE.
The screen shots look pretty similar to IE5+, Microsoft will probably sue for copyright infringement when they see them.
I will download it now and see how it goes.

[Elledan]

I want to say one more thing: Read the site well, since it contains valuable information.

Especially this thing I'd like to emphasize: This is only the FIRST release of K-Meleon, so it's not a totally complete program yet.

I'm looking forward to what you guys have to say about it

[Justin S]

I like what it says under the copyright statement LOL. Actually I wrote about this program on geekarea (http://www.geekarea.org), and a few people posted comments saying that it worked really well. Fast, stable, etc... I think it looks a lot like IE though...

[mjames]

Regardless, IE is still my choice for browser.

[Smarky]

Third big browser ? I don't think so its just a repacked netscape 6 if you like. Just like neoplanet is a repacked IE. there are many broswers that repack IE and add diffrent features. Now with Geko around it looks like this is happening to this as well.

[Elledan]

Originally posted by velocity
Third big browser ? I don't think so its just a repacked netscape 6 if you like. Just like neoplanet is a repacked IE. there are many broswers that repack IE and add diffrent features. Now with Geko around it looks like this is happening to this as well.

Slight correction: K-Meleon uses the Gecko-engine that is used in the Mozilla browser. The purpose of the Mozilla project is to make as much programmers use the Gecko engine. The reason why is clear since it's the most effecient rendering-engine in existance.

K-Meleon repacks nothing. It uses the Gecko engine since it would be stupid to try to build a more efficient rendering engine. The rest of the browser is build up from the ground.

BTW I've tried to run Neoplanet some time ago, but the only thing it did was making my PC freeze as soon as it started...

[Smarky]

Elledan I know what you are saying and i understand fully, but with neoplanet it takes IE rendering engine and this one takes netscapes one. Okay, i know its mozilla but mozilla is 80% netscape and was set up for netscape so it is kinda the same . Mozilla may want as many things as possible to use geko the same can be said for IE and microsoft as they make it easy to imbed IE into apps whihc is more or less what neoplanet does.

[Hierophant]

Neoplanet had plans to incorporate the Mozilla engine as well. It would let you switch between IE and Mozilla on the fly to view webpages. I stopped using the beta and Neoplanet because of all the overhead they started adding to the program so I don't know what happened to that project.

[Elledan]

Ok, time for some truth:

Netscape planned to use it's own rendering-engine first, but since that one was too slow and not accurate enough, they decided to use the Gecko engine.

I know that the Mozilla project was started by Netscape, but that doesn't mean that it's a 'Netscape-engine'.

[Smarky]

Grrr i know it aint the netscape engine but it is kind off . my point was this new browser is just the same thing the neoplanet did and other browsers will do in the future. I may of bended the facts a bit to get my point across but that is all i am saying. Newscapes new interface is better than the one seen in pr2, So i will wait for that before giving up on netscape. The IE interface is clean but its a bit boring ,

[Plebius]

IE runs off the Mozilla engine. Look at the user-agent for IE sometime. Here is an example:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)

that doesn't make it netscape and the fact that k-mellon uses whatever code, doesn't make it just a souped up version.

[Smarky]

Ehhh ? isint that just a name microsoft used. I remeber in the past IE was reporting its self as netscape and some scirpts where deceting it wrong when netscape had market share. anyone know more on this ?

[Hierophant]

It all goes back to the first browser which used Mozilla. That browser was public domain and open source, it was called Mosaic or something like that. Netscape took the code, improved it and released Mosaic Navigator 1. At about the same time a company called Spyglass took the same code and made their own modifications to the code and released it as the Spyglass Browser.

It was at this time that Netscape changed the name to Netscape Navigator and adopted their little lizard mascot that they happily named after the rendering engine their browser used.

Time passes... Netscape continues to make the improvements and now they are up to Netscape Navigator 2 and added a lot of bloat and features to the original browser. Spyglass has done the same. Unfortunately for Spyglass, Netscape has about 95% of the market share. Spyglass decides to sell. Who should come along to purchase this little known program? Microsoft. They tweaked the interface and released it free as Internet Explorer 1. Internet Explorer didn't have a lot of nifty features like Navigator did but it was smaller and faster.

Microsoft put millions of dollars of research into their new browser and componentized it to make it run faster as you only loaded the components you needed when you needed them. Netscape tried this with plugins but the core program was still bloated and heavy. As time went on Microsoft surpassed Netscape in features and the resulting bloat but with a caveat, you didn't have to download the bloat if you didn't want it. This is the end result of IE 4. Netscape found it couldn't compete with the new standards and the componentized feature set of IE so it went back to the drawing board. Off of that drawing board the Mozilla project and its Gecko engine was started.

The Mozilla in the user agent string, refers back to the original rendering engine that both Major browsers use for their display.

Velocity:
Your partially right. Microsoft browsers have always had the MSIE in the user agent string, but when 5.0 was released it was determined to have it display 4.0 so that it would be backwards compatible with scripts that used that to determine browser version. This was a mistake and they should have forced everyone to update their scripts.

[Elledan]

Nice detail: I'm most of the time browsing the SP forums using K-Meleon, but although it might look like IE, I've constantly the feeling that I'm using Netscape... Strange but true


BTW I still haven't heard any replies of fellow KM (my own abbreviation for K-Meleon) users...

If we're ready with discussing the history of the browsers, can we please move on to the topic this thread started with?

[aspen]

there is already a 3rd browser, thats WEB TV in my opinion, just looking at server logs it makes up a fairly substantial portion of my traffic, more than you would think since I dont know anyone who uses it.

Chris

[Smarky]

okay nice post wluke thinks for taking the time to point it out. you learn something everyday