Retro Markus 🇩🇰🇩🇪Apr 9

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogFind #kmeleon #windows

Catch of the Day: The Lightning-Fast Chameleon! 🦎🪟

Hey Retro Fans!
Today, we are shining our exclusive spotlight on a very special guest from the Windows 9x era that popped up in our logs: K-Meleon (Version 1.8.0.5)!

Anyone who had a PC with low RAM around the turn of the millennium absolutely loved this little masterpiece. Under the hood, K-Meleon used the same powerful rendering engine as Firefox (the Gecko engine). The developers' brilliant trick, however, was to ditch Mozilla's resource-heavy standard user interface (XUL) and use the native Windows API for the frontend instead.

The result? An incredibly lean and lightning-fast browser that breathed a second life into aging computers back in the day. The fact that K-Meleon is still running on 16-bit/9x systems today to visit the Frog pond is pure nostalgia and impressively proves: Great code doesn't age!

Stay fast and lightweight!
Your FrogFind Team 🐸

Show threadColinApr 22, 2025

It does seem kind of a shame with K-Meleon though, but not surprising given the browser/engine landscape these days.

I used v0.7-0.8 for some short period there in 2002-2003.
I hadn't yet purchased my Dell Dimension 2400 w/XP yet, and was still on Win98 on my Celeron 533mhz machine. Mozilla 1.0+ (application suite ... pre-Firefox) ran like a DOG on there and IE6 was getting long in the tooth / missing features I wanted. #Kmeleon ran AMAZING and provided much nicer experience. RIP…

Andres BravoAug 9, 2023
Watching YouTube videos on Windows XP with K-Meleon Browser…
#youtube #windows #windowsxp #browser #kmeleon
WEBLIB.RE par Samuel VermeulenApr 25, 2020
#ActuLibre Vieux Geek, épisode 194 : Camino, Galeon et Kméléon, les navigateurs basés sur Gecko… -> http://frederic.bezies.free.fr/blog/?p=20145 #Mémoiredevieuxgeek #mémoiredevieuxgeek #logiciellibre #Informatique #Trucsdegeek #MS-Windows #navigateur #Libreries #geekeries #vieuxgeek #xulrunner #logiciel #Kmeleon #macos-x #Camino #Galeon #libre #linux
Vieux Geek, épisode 194 : Camino, Galeon et Kméléon, les navigateurs basés sur Gecko… – Le Weblog de Frederic Bezies

Le Weblog de Frederic Bezies
Show threadexo ✨Mar 9, 2020
anyways definitely check #kmeleon out regardless, it's a very fast 32-bit browser despite some shortcomings    http://kmeleonbrowser.org/
K-Meleon

K-Meleon is a fast and customizable lightweight web browser for Windows, based on the rendering engine of Mozilla. K-Meleon is free (open source) software released under the GNU General Public License.

Show threadNobody [LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1)]May 4, 2019
I also looked to see whether #K-Meleon http://kmeleonbrowser.org/ was still in development, to check whether it is affected. But (A) the last released version was 3.5 years ago, (B) I think it used a different system for its extensions
K-Meleon

K-Meleon is a fast and customizable lightweight web browser for Windows, based on the rendering engine of Mozilla. K-Meleon is free (open source) software released under the GNU General Public License.

Justin (koavf)🌻🍉🇪🇭🌿Jan 23, 2019
In a truly shocking development, advertising/browser/search monopoly Google has decided to remove the ability of ad-blocking software in Chromium: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/22/google_chrome_browser_ad_content_block_change/ And now that Edge and Opera are basically Chrome clones, that leaves Firefox and Safari (proprietary) along with a long-tail of niche browsers that are not Google money-making schemes. K-Meleon, anyone? #google #monopoly #internetadvertising #chrome #chromium #kmeleon #k-meleon
Wow, fancy that. Web ad giant Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome. For safety, apparently

How many ad blocks could an ad slinger block if an ad slinger could block blocks?