Today’s Freeware Frenzy focuses on a new addition to the ever expanding group of alternative web browsers. For many of us at PCMech, Internet Explorer has become out-dated and out-classed by numerous other browsers, the most popular being Firefox and Opera. But the list of choices is long, so to further explore the options, I will take a look at K-Meleon v1.02.
The setup first asks you to agree to the General Public License, as is commonplace for open source software. Interestingly, the license notes that the Gecko rendering engine is subject to the Mozilla Public License. So anyone familiar with Mozilla should feel at home with K-Meleon. There are various components you can choose to install.
First, you can import bookmarks from your IE Favorites, Netscape Bookmarks or the Opera Hotlist. Multi-user profiles are available, but I left this unchecked for my single user machine. Of course you can set K-Meleon as your default browser, and choose to create a desktop, start menu and/or quick launch icon. Lastly the “Loader” option will supposedly speed up the program’s load time. I chose to leave it off for now to set a benchmark, but I will add it in later to check for a difference. When K-Meleon first opens, there is a handy introduction with links to the homepage, FAQs, forums, developer’s community and third party plug-ins.
To compare K-Meleon with my current browser, Avant (based on IE), I wanted to test page load speeds. Simply put, I noticed no difference. Though my cable connection makes nearly all pages load quickly, I visited plenty of image and flash-rich sites to increase load times. And between the two browsers, my informal counting revealed equal load times. Even the speed of opening the programs from their desktop shortcuts was equal. So now I wanted to test the Loader. I uninstalled K-Meleon and re-installed it with the loader option enabled. While I still did not notice any difference in webpage load times, there was a noticeable difference in the program opening. Again, my system is fast enough to minimize load times for any browser, but I could tell there was a couple seconds of delay, long enough to glimpse the hourglass, when I opened Avant. Opening K-Meleon was similar to opening a minimized program. So the Loader does work. It sits in the system tray hiding a preloaded browser, so executing the program opens the window nearly instantly. Resource-wise, Avant used around 22,500K and K-Meleon used around 16,500K according to Process Memory Usage.
All of the standard web browser options are available in K-Meleon, such as tabs (called layers) with a couple buttons for a new layer and to close the current layer. I would have preferred the close button on each tab, rather then one off to the side, but that is a minor annoyance. A double click on a tab will close it. I did find the New Layer button convenient; as a multitasker I am constantly opening new tabs. The toolbar also has buttons for Zoom, and you can change this to apply to text, images or entire pages.
K-Meleon creates its own menu for Bookmarks with links to various K-Meleon related sites. This however is separate from the Favorites menu which contains the imported IE favorites. I think one list would have been enough, but if you want them separated, K-Meleon has you covered. You can also save a set of currently open pages to go back to later as a Group.
The Tools menu has various options for Mail and RSS feeds. To check e-mail, simply add the URL of your web mail account or the program file location for Outlook or other e-mail client. The built in Aggreg8 RSS reader includes links to world newspapers and of course you can add and edit feeds to your liking. The Tools menu also has some one click privacy options to block Java, cookies or images, or to clear the cache or history. I also took a few minutes to browse the Preferences menus.
The Preferences come in two flavors, Preferences plain and tall, and Advanced Preferences for some real customization. The basic menu lets you change the homepage, cache, proxy, the download folder, and lists the plug-ins currently installed. Advanced gives you the really detailed settings about toolbars, filters, tab preferences, Java, plug-in configuration, search tools and popup blocking. When it came to plug-ins K-Meleon recognized my Real Player (Alternative of course), QuickTime, and flash, so none of them had to be reinstalled. You can also customize K-Meleon with skins, themes, icons, throbbers (the icon in the upper right of the browser that shows activity), and add mouse gestures.
To conclude, while K-Meleon did not offer anything revolutionary to convince me to change browsers, it is a solid offering full of the options and extras we have come to expect in a web browser. The download is under 5MB at: http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/
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