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Very Good (4.0/5)
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Softpedia Editor's Review for K-Meleon
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Free web browser based on Gecko, the Mozilla rendering engine
Written by Elena Opris on November 26th, 2012
K-Meleon is a web browser based on the same Gecko layout engine used by Firefox. It provides a fast and secure browsing experience, and it should mainly be used on older computer systems.
The interface is very simplistic. K-Meleon supports tabbed browsing, as well as several languages. It is also completely customizable when it comes to its menus, toolbar buttons, macros, accelerators, and others, but you need to edit their configuration files (this would be hard to accomplish by novice users). You can also change the skin (there are three options in total).
In addition, you can enable or disable K-Meleon plugins, and these include bitmapped menus (displays icons in menus), Netscape bookmarks, IE favorites, full screen, mouse gestures, history, Opera hotlist, session saver, and update checker.
You can also apply shortcuts to links (i.e. hotlinks) for instant access, as well as select the mouse accelerators settings (default, Firefox, SeaMonkey, Opera).
Furthermore, you can translate the contents of a whole page by using Babel Fish Translation or Google Translate, but you can also view the Error Console (errors, warnings and messages).
Sometimes, Error Console takes a long time to load, and it makes K-Meleon look like it froze. Plus, we could not activate the Mouse Gestures plugin. The Preferences menu lacks the "Ok", "Apply", “Cancel” buttons, and they are replaced by "Back" and "Next" which are, quite frankly, useless. Every major change here requires for K-Meleon to restart, but Mouse Gestures simply did not work after we restarted the web browser.
So, if you want an alternative to Firefox (especially when we are talking about older computer systems) that uses a low amount of system memory, then K-Meleon might be a good fit, if you can overlook the minor issues.  Read an in-depth analysis in our professional review for K-Meleon
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K-Meleon description
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Here are some key features of "K-Meleon":
Choose Your Desired Bookmarking System:
· K-Meleon is the only browser that allows you to use your existing Internet Explorer Favorites or Opera Hotlist in place of or along with Netscape/Mozilla's Bookmarks system.
"Tabbed" Browsing:
· Through the layers plugin, K-Meleon offers a convenient way to manage the many sites you may visit during a browsing session. Commonly known as "tabbed" browsing, this feature allows you to keep multiple web pages open simultaneously, navigating easily between them by clicking on each page's "tab" located beside the others on a separate toolbar within the browser. This can be quite helpful when doing extensive web search as it eliminates the need to go back or forward repeatedly to find a previously viewed page. If you wish to have other applications running, this feature will provide a less cluttered Windows task bar.
Mouse Gestures:
· Introduced and popularized by Opera, mouse gestures are now a common staple among alternative browsers. Through the mouse gestures plugin, K-Meleon offers a quick, easy way to navigate the web by right-clicking on a page while sliding your mouse left or right to go back or forward. Like all of K-Meleon's other features, the mouse gestures plugin is very customizable and allows initiation of almost all commands and macros.
Complete Toolbar, Menu, Context Menu, & Keyboard Shortcut Customization:
· One of the defining characteristics of K-Meleon is its extensive user customization feature. You can easily revamp your main menu and context menus by deleting or adding the items of your choice, access any function from your toolbar or assign any keyboard shortcut to any function. There is no need to extract and compile jar files or download various different extensions which may add other unwanted items to a desired feature.
Block Popup Windows:
· A hazard of browsing the web is the annoying popup window advertisement. K-Meleon comes equipped with a Popup Blocking feature that blocks these popups and also allows you to quickly enable popups at a particular site.
Fast Load Time:
· The time it takes for K-Meleon to open from when you click its application icon is the fastest of any Gecko based browser. There is even a symbiotic loader to further reduce start time for older, slower PCs.
Easy Web Searching:
· Click on the Search button in your toolbar to enter items to search for with Google. By default the keyboard shortcut to view the search prompt is Ctrl+G. This, of course, can easily be changed along with the search engine. K-Meleon also supports searching directly from the URL bar with support for Mozilla keywords and Microsoft Quick Search.
Themes & Skins:
· K-Meleon is one of the simplest browsers to skin and all of its images can be changed to your liking. Visit the TutorialSkinning Guide for instructions. Various user contributed Themes and Skins are available for download.
Macros:
· K-Meleon's unique macros plugin greatly expands its features and capabilities. Take a look at just some of the many examples in the MacroLibrary. Once you gain a better understanding of the MacroLanguage you can customize the macros to your liking or submit new macros of your own.
Requirements:
· 32 MB RAM minimum recommended.
· 6-7 MB of free hard drive space for download. 16 MB of free hard disk space for full installation.
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· It improves security and Windows Vista/Seven compatibility. Currently available in English, German, French, Spanish, Russian and Polish.
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 | |  | | Softpedia guarantees that K-Meleon 1.7.0 Alpha 2 / 1.6.0 Beta 2 / 1.5.4 is 100% FREE, which means it does not contain any form of malware, including spyware, viruses, trojans and backdoors. [read more >] |
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