Last night I installed the browser-only installation of Moz 1.1... it became my default browser 2 hours later. It is a very nice piece of software, quite fast, and all the websites look good in it... I've been a die-hard IE user ever since IE 4.0 came out, and nothing swayed me from it until now. There are some quirks of course, but as a webmaster I blame the webmasters of the quirky sites, not Mozilla.

The question now is this: If 0.7 actually does get released in our lifetime, what will it offer to make people switch not only from IE & co, but from Moz 1.1?? It has to be down right amazing to do that! The biggest competition 0.7 will face is what it is based on.

Just a thought...

K-Meleon offer a better name than Mozilla.

If you're happy with Mozilla then by all means, stick with it.
There is no competition between the two.

Well, K-Meleon is very small... which is why I use it. I don't want my browser to take a second to load like IE.

- KM is small
- KM can run more smoothly on slow computers
- KM's appearance can be easily changed (Moz IS configurable, but only if you have the skill)
- KM offers a very easy macro-scripting

In general, I agree with sven. KM is not made to compete with Moz. KM and Moz are two very different browsers, although they are based on the same engine. You have to try for yourself, which browser you like most.

I still believe K-Meleon's customizability is still the winner at the end of the day. Mozilla, whilst being a nice browser and all, still isn't as user friendly and adaptable as it should be. At least with K-Meleon, you can change almost anything using macros etc. Don't like something, simply remove it! Plus it is still a smaller download than Mozilla ;-)

I am inclined to agree with you, but still, people who don't know Moz and KM will ask the question: "Which is better?", and KM better have an answer. Further, you can easily imagine magazines reviewing KM, Moz & all the other Gecko-based browsers in a head-to-head competition. It's just the same situation as with the IE-based browsers (CrazyBrowser, MyIE, etc...): Why use any of them?

Customisability & configurability are important (they don't call it the _personal_ computer for nothing!), and so is speed. Good so far... anything else?

Yes I am being the devil's advocate here in a sense, but for KM to succeed, it need an image - a PR campaign of sorts. Great programming never made it on it's own - you need publicity. This is especially important too when you consider that Moz has an army of programmers behind it who will make it faster, customisable, etc etc. KM with its hard working programmers needs to be special to keep up.

In short: Don't get me wrong, I am with KM, but I think we need more effort on the PR front.

>I am inclined to agree with you, but still, people who don't know Moz and KM
> will ask the question: "Which is better?", and KM better have an answer.

ummm... isn't the whole point of not developing crappy least-common-denominator software pretty much that you don't have to spend the majority of time and effort thinking about this stuff, and can just go ahead and make something good.

should k-meleon ever suddenly be without a niche (owing to amazing advances in this and that thinger, related to mozilla and whatever else) it would be silly to expend effort to come up with gimmicks to perpetuate it's existence for what amount to viral reasons... this is done with too many things, and is, in a nutshell, why so many things suck.

it's interesting that some people find it hard to understand (remember?) that something might actually be playing with a different strategy...

i'm also just devil's advocating... no offense.

Just my 2c:

I like mozilla for being more featureful. The mail client is quite nice. It is quite bloated.

On linux I normally use Galeon. Galeon is a browser that uses gecko just like kmeleon, and native components for the rest. I think that both mozilla and k-meleon have one or two things to learn fromit (the settings menu is well-done, the integration of bookmerklets is nice, etc.)

Anyway, I would like to say the same about kmeleon, but I simply can't. The site looks like "development stopped almost a year ago" (compare that to any other free software's homepage. There is no hint that there is some actual development.

The fact that I cannot "test drive the latest code" means that I can either use an old software, which lacks many important features, or use mozilla/IE. I usually rather use mozilla/IE.

I don't want to subscribe to a list and start begging people in public to get the latest code. I don't need to be part of an elite club just to test the code. I don't need to comit just to test your code. If you require that from testers, you won't have enough testers.

Go to the list archives to get the link to the latest build. Is that to much to ask? There is no begging required.

The latest build has a few annoying bugs in it. It will crash, almost guaranteed. When these bugs are fixed (Shouldn't be much longer now mozilla has fixed their bugs) it will be released.

Should K-Meleon be like some software companies (A large one comes to mind), and set a release date. They then release the software whether it was ready or not?

"The fact that I cannot "test drive the latest code" means that I can either use an old software, which lacks many important features, or use mozilla/IE. I usually rather use mozilla/IE."

Actually I've seen others mention this, and I guess what you mean is, because there isn't an immediately accessible download link for the latest "beta", which you can find directly from the home page, then downloading and using the latest beta thusly becomes an activity of the "in the know" crowd, which couldn't be further from the truth. To get the latest beta, it does take a couple of extra mouse clicks than what you might be used to, however it is there for *anybody* to test and use. Personally, I tried a couple of the betas myself, however due to what I'd term as "annoying bugs", I went back to 0.6, and trust me, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.
Here's your starting point, click away, no begging required ;-)
http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/9632/2002/

> If you require that from testers, you won't have enough testers.

it isn't required from anyone, and there is no elitist club (hmm... maybe that's why the development is slower than people would like, now that i think about it...).

***_however_*** it's obviously necessary, to at least some minimal degree, to be somewhat in touch with what's going on in order to do any *useful* testing, and even if you don't want to be helpful, just a joyrider, you'll need to read the list just to stay up to date with patches, etc... you don't really think there's a full, fresh bouncing baby build compiled for every little change to a plugin (which is where a lot of the changes are taking place), do you?

so, even if you have the worst of intentions, you'll still want to do a little homework.

sorry.

> The site looks like "development stopped almost a year ago" (compare that to any other free software's homepage. There is no hint that there is some actual development.


Indeed, a quick note like "Hey we are still alive" sure wouldn't hurt.
Right now, I would assume that most visitors just leave before clicking the forums button (and thus never realize that this is an active project).
Last "news" update on a site 10 months ago usually means it's dead and gone.

Stefan
> The site looks like "development stopped almost a year ago"


It did stop,they istead have found it more fun making smart remarks to those that notice.
YAWN.....

"It did stop,they istead have found it more fun making smart remarks to those that notice."

You are trying so hard to destroy this project with you ignorant, false comments. Find an argument that you can actually win, then you can start posting. Until you do you have no chance to do any harm to K-Meleon, Mozilla, or any other open source project.

Hey! I thought you said about a dozen times that you were never going to come back here?

Guess you just can't get enough of K-Meleon so you have to keep coming back.

You remind me of the 'script kiddies' that write worms that take advantage of the security holes in MS software. You just always need to be center of attention, but are not intelligent enough to actually do anything usefull to get it.

Sorry about that, Jason, but script kiddies don't write anything, they just steal something existing and put it in motion "as-is"...

If you say so...
Yawwwwwn...

what are you doing?