If you are looking for a fast browser... K-Meleon

then you have come to the right article. If I would ask you to name five browsers, which would you mention ? Most likely Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari as the first four but would you be able to name a fifth one ? One that is actually still developed which means old browsers like the Netscape Navigator would not cut it ? How about K-Meleon ? I stumbled upon this browser every now and then and today's article at the Download Squad finally convinced me to give this one a try.

K-Meleon is based on the same rendering engine that Firefox uses and it's actually very fitting how Brad at the Download Squad described the browser: Like Firefox, but without the bloat. The first thing that you notice when you start K-Meleon is that it starts faster than any other browser you have ever tried. Some might accuse me of exaggerating to make this article more interesting but I ask you to try it out for yourself. You will see a noticeable difference. The second realization comes when K-Meleon is loaded: It does look a bit look those good old browsers from the past.

It looks basic but I can live with basic if it provides the functionality I need. Since it uses the same rendering engine that Firefox uses it should not have any problems with most websites. I did not run into difficulties yet after some extensive tests with K-Meleon. The usual plugins do work in K-Meleon as well which means that you get Java and Flash support for instance in this browser as well.

You get access to many configuration details of the browser, more than you get in Firefox when opening the configuration menu. Some features look really interesting. It is for instance possible to add pages or layers - tabs in Firefox - to groups that can be opened even if the browser has been closed in the meantime. K-Meleon got a lot of this small interesting functions that would require add-ons in Firefox.

Talking about add-ons. One big problem is that add-ons are not supported, at least not the add-ons at the Firefox website. I'm only missing some add-ons, one is the Adblock add-on which I consider essential. I was not able to find out if there is an alternative available for K-Meleon. The browser is however skinnable, supports macros and supplies several necessary features right of the box.

I can really say that I was surprised by the speed of K-Meleon which is definitely one of the key features that I need. If the developers would add support for some of the popular Firefox extensions I would definitely make the switch to it.