K-Meleon: It's like Firefox, without the bloat

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Browser Tips

K-Meleon: It's like Firefox, without the bloat

by Brad Linder Apr 29th 2008

K-Meleon is a light weight web browser for folks who don't need a ton of plugins, options, or much of anything except for a good utility for viewing web sites. The browser uses the same rendering engine as Firefox, so pretty much any page that you can access in Firefox can also be opened in K-Meleon. But don't expect your Firefox add-ons or Greasemonkey scripts to play nice with K-Meleon.

Because K-Meleon lacks some of the bells and whistles you'd find in Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Opera, the browser is fast. Like really fast. It also doesn't use as much RAM as Firefox, which is known to be something of a memory hog.

That's not to say that K-Meleon is a one-trick pony. The browser is customizable, and you can choose from a variety of skins and themes. And K-Meleon supports tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, pop up blocking, and macros.

K-Meleon is Windows only. But if you're looking for light weight Mac or Linux web browsers that use the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox, check out Camino or Galeon.

Tags: firefox, gecko, k-meleon, web-browser

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

jccalhoun said 10:31AM on 4-29-2008

K-Meleon has been around forever. It was out before Firefox. It is a nice alternative for old machines.

Brad Linder said 10:32AM on 4-29-2008

Yeah, this falls under the "I can't believe we hadn't written about this before" category.

Franklin said 3:17PM on 4-29-2008

I heard about K-Meleon years ago but forgot about it since the developers appeared to have lost interest in further developing it. Nice to see that they have indeed been updating K-Meleon.

Damian said 6:55PM on 4-29-2008

It's nice to have a light version of something, always easier to do in open source. But I think Fx3 really catches the right balance between features and performance.

aanidaani said 7:00PM on 4-29-2008

Funny how Firefox was supposed to be IE "without all the bloat."

Franklin said 7:01PM on 4-29-2008

Even if you use FF3 (as I do), give K-Meleon a try. I don't use it as my primary browser, but it works very well as a "back-up browser" for those rare times when I need to do simple and fast Web browsing (like when I'm running multiple memory-hogging apps at once on my computer).

Transcontinental said 1:05PM on 4-30-2008

@aanidaani,

The only bloat in Firefox is the extensions we choose. Cannot have both an empty flat and a furnished one for the same price.
I remember first install of Firefox 2, it loaded very quickly, was light as a feather. Now with my 70 extensions (like my kids, love them all!) the fox is getting fat, but rich!

Relequestual said 12:14PM on 5-01-2008

I read the first line of this post.
Thats the point where I stopped reading it

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