The three most known web browser rendering engines are Trident (IE), Gecko (Firefox) and Webkit (Safari/Chrome). In a previous article I covered some Trident alternatives, and in this one we’ll tackle two that use the others.
K-Meleon
Engine: Gecko
Web site: http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/
Although its name suggests this is a Linux browser, it’s not. K-Meleon is a Windows-only browser.
What I like about it:
- Very fast
- Runs on even the slowest of PCs
- User agent can be changed to "fool" web sites into thinking it’s Firefox or IE
- Tabs can be placed on the top or bottom
- Has a macro scripting language where you can program custom functions into it
- Will run some Firefox add-ons
What I don’t like about it:
- Seems better suited for Windows XP compared to Vista/7. Some wonky UI things happen in the Vista/7 environment when using it.
- Has some learning curve, particularly when setting preferences.
- Some web sites will not display correctly.
Midori
Engine: Webkit
Web site: http://www.twotoasts.de/index.php?/pages/midori_summary.html
This one will run in Windows or Linux.
What I like about it:
- Quite possibly the slimmest GUI-based browser. Absolutely no "fluff" to speak of.
- Very fast
- Very little learning curve
- The easiest browser to set preferences in
- Can be scripted easily
- One of the very few browsers that has sidebars that make sense
- Clean look, easy-to-understand icons
- User agent can be changed similar to the way K-Meleon can
What I don’t like about it:
- Windows version has no installer. You must use 7-Zip to extract to a folder of your choice.
- Has issues displaying some Flash content
- "Blanks" some web web sites on load
- Address and Search bar not resizeable (as far as I could tell)
What’s a User Agent and why should you care?
The user agent is the signature, so to speak, that a browser uses to identify itself to a web site. A web site "knows" what browser you’re using from the user agent. It also contains what OS and OS version you’re using.
If you’ve ever visited a web site that popped up a message that said something to the effect of, "You can’t use this web site unless you have X browser", it was the user agent that let the site know that.
When using an alternative browser such as K-Meleon or Midori, the UA at times must be changed in order to use specific web site functions. Both allow you to do this easily.
A good example of browser detection via the UA is Yahoo! Mail. That site on attempt to load from either K-Meleon or Midori will result in this message:
To avoid nastygrams like this, changing your UA to "fool" a web site into thinking you’re using Firefox 3 or Internet Explorer 8 fixes that issue.
Sample cut-and-paste User Agents you can use
Mozilla Firefox 3.6 running under Windows XP:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6
Windows Internet Explorer 8 running under Windows XP:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
The Firefox identification string is the easier of the two to use and will work more often compared to the IE string.
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