Episode: 67
Title: HPR0067: k-meleon
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0067/hpr0067.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:56:17

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music
I don't think let's talk about K-Million.
This is Mad Rush.
First thing you want to know is what is K-Million?
K-Million is a lightweight browser that's based on the Mozilla slash Firefox rendering
engine.
This means that it renders the webpages the same way that either Simunkey or Firefox would.
Now, the main difference with K-Million and Firefox is Firefox uses its own API for the
user interface, where K-Million uses Windows native user interface API.
So I guess the second thing you want to know is, okay, why should I use K-Million instead
of other browsers like Firefox, Rob, or, you know, well, for me, I've been having some
trouble on my laptop lately.
I've been using Windows, and for whatever reason on this particular installation of Windows
or maybe some bad RAM or something on this computer, Firefox has been really acting
funny and, you know, unstable and quirky, and the Opera has actually been crashing.
I've never had a computer where Opera would crash before, but now I do.
So it occurred to me that I'd take a look at this old browser that I tried out a couple
of years back.
In fact, I originally checked it out when Firefox was called Phoenix.
This browser is small and it is fast and it is configurable.
I don't know about you guys, but I always have a problem where, as an example, I use my
Comcast email, I go to compose a message, and it wants to open up a new window.
I don't like Windows.
I like tabs.
That's why I bother with different browsers and I don't inter-explore.
Well, I know for Firefox that, at one point, I'd use an extension that lets you actually
redirect JavaScript windows like new open windows and stuff to new tabs instead.
This one out of the box, it lets you pick the default behavior between, like, either tabs,
like, when you open new links to a tab, it's going to a background tab, which is one
big thing.
I don't like about Opera.
I imagine it's way to change it, but I just never got around to it.
You can, I haven't said that when I open pages and stuff, it'll go to a new background
tab instead of the way Opera does it when you click a link, it goes directly to a new
tab.
It brings you over there.
It's in case, like, if you're from Wikipedia or something and you're just, I'll put up
a million tabs to read through, if you're like me, you'll end up losing your place and
go back track where you were.
I'm kind of frustrating.
This one out of the box, you can set it that way, and you can even have it so that when
you type in a URL to the, except for the, I mean, address bar, it'll open it in a background
tab or a new tab or the current tab, whatever you whatever you like, it's flexible.
This browser is flexible.
It really, if you go to the advanced preferences, it lets you change everything.
It's, that's, you know, really sells it to me.
It has features.
Even though, you know, it's relatively quick and easy to use and, you know, it's still
got a lot of functionality.
Here's back when I used it.
I really noticed a big improvement even, even years ago, even though Firefox was quick
then, it was quicker.
Now, I can really see a big difference between Firefox, it was how it used to be Firefox.
I'm sure plenty of you out there know how much my memory or it can be.
Well, when it eddles on my computer, it's almost at a 50 gig, 50 gig, I don't think so.
It uses about 50 megs, RAM.
K million, let's see what K million, I gotta, I gotta like, I don't know, maybe 10 tabs
open right now, let's say K million's using K million's, I got 26 megs under K million
with like 10 tabs and Firefox, right now, Firefox is at 93 megs, let's see how my tabs
I got open here, I got 4 tabs.
So, you know, I don't know if there's just like some kind of enormous memory leak on
the Windows version of Firefox or if my computer is just going crazy or Firefox is, Firefox
is just that bad nowadays, but yeah, it's taken up 93 megs, that's ridiculous, not every
computer has a gig RAM, you know, this computer is about 12, it's pretty good, but you know,
when your Firefox is using 100 megs or 4 tabs, I don't know what to do, you know, like,
so anyway, it's a K million, it's still, back in the day when I was just reusing it,
it really lacked as far as features, getting things like Flash on there, kind of like
non-existence, because even on Firefox, you know, back then, it was, you know, you had
to have, no, no thing at all, before you could get it, well, I don't know if it's a consequence
of already having Flash installed 4 Firefox, but right out of the box, I downloaded K million
and it has, I go to YouTube, no problem, it all works, so, aside from that, there's a
lot of other things that are nice, that are built in, that for Firefox, you'd need
like an extension, one of them is the Opera users, mouse gestures, so, you know, it's
got mouse gestures, you have your user agent switcher, you know, I think that's pretty
much standard, standard stuff nowadays, this is a user agent switcher, which is nice,
in case you get this website to say, oh, you're an explorer, you can't use it, it's got
a neat little thing, it's basically a session manager, let's you add, they call groups,
let's you add pages to a group, or layer, or layer, and in this browser, for whatever
reason, something I don't know, dislike is they, they call tabs, layers, whatever, same
thing, different name, anyway, the groups, if you have a couple of pages, well, the same
kind of interest, let's say web development, it would work on a website, and you want
to see how a few different pages look, when you change your style sheet, all at once,
well, you know, all in one window, so let's say you got five of those, the M2 group, when
you close the window, you can get back to them quickly, instead of making a new tab
for each one, you all you got to do is go to groups, and you pick your web development
one you just made, and it's also got a feature like how Firefox allows you to return
your previous session before you close the browser last, it lets you, as a defaults group,
if you will, it says last session, and you pick that same thing, so one of the things
that I like about this, I've had trouble in the past where I can't get the toolbars
exactly the way I want them, whether they don't let you put the address bar up with
a file menu, or they actually don't let you move the file menu, I think I believe Firefox
is like that, or was, I'm not sure, anyway, on this one I managed to get it down to two
rows for my other window, which means I have the most real estate possible for the web
page, which is great, because on this laptop, it only does 1024x768 natively, now right
now I've got to hook up to an external monitor, so I can do more, but it's still, you know,
it's something I want to do for when I am using the internal display on the laptop, it's
nice, you know, you can hold the machines, you can really make things smaller, visually,
you know, it uses that real estate, so now there's a couple of buttons on here, right
on the default toolbars that don't come on other browsers, one of them, which is really
nice, which is reminiscent of like, if you're using the Windows Explorer, or if you're
using Conver, it's an up directory button, or up one level, it lets you backpad all
up a level in the directory of the website, like let's say it's got, you know, your four
levels deep into some, some odd thing, and you can go back one, or up one, you can run
over there and, you know, to hit a back button to go there, instead of clicking the address
bar to leading the, whatever directory you're in, hitting enter, you hit one button and
it goes up, that's nice. Next up, it's got a go button, which is the same as every other
browser ever made, it has a, you type in the URL, you hit go, it goes, same as any answer.
Now this one, as far as the address bar is concerned, instead of having two separate
text entry fields for the search, you know, I like the Google search, or whatever, you
know, your favorite search engine is, the search and the URL area are together, it's
one. So it kind of, it's kind of nice when you end up putting like a, you know, a 10-page
long thing, it's a little search thing, and you only see a little bit of it. It's nice,
it's got like other browsers you can add or, I guess, remove your search providers, and
this one actually comes, unlike other ones, it comes with a quite a few, you know, you
can, I could go to the list, but it's this kind of point I was able to see for yourself,
it's got a lot. And I like the way it handles adding and removing them, for, for inner explorer,
for Firefox, actually, maybe just just for Firefox, I know you got to get like a little file,
I mean, it's a simple file, whatever, but you still got to go get it, you got to go look
at a list of extensions, search in there, find your wand, you know, this is just got like,
I guess you'd say that like a table view when you go to the preferences, and you can just
put them in right there, it's nice. So one of the problems you're going to face, which is browser,
is because it doesn't use the user interface that Firefox does, extensions for Firefox
aren't going to work. That sucks, that's one of the biggest things I like about Firefox,
so that's a kind of a problem. Now, at least for me, the most important extension I use on
a daily basis is adblock plus, and it turns out the guys who make that already, you know,
I guess they must have seen this browser, or maybe they use it even, they have a compatible
version for it. I looked at their website, it says, okay, download the adblock plus for Camellian,
unzip it to your Camellian root directory, and then follow these steps. Well, I started
looking at the steps, and I got a little confused, because they had you editing what would be the
equivalent of the Chrome user preferences for Firefox, the same sort of thing I hear, and there's
some discrepancies between what they wanted you to do, and what Camellian told you was the right
syntax, and this and that, and some looking around, looking around, and I said, you know what,
let me just try it. So I closed Camellian, I opened it back up again, what do you know, adblock
plus is installed, it says, hey, I found adblock, would you like to use it? I say, oh yes, I would.
So I got adblock on here, no problem. I bet you there's some other other ones out there,
but it's not going to just, you know, plug and play with other extensions, which is really
the deal breaker, but for me, as long as I have adblock, I can survive. That's the big one.
So cover groups, cover the extensions, or lack of extensions, I guess. Let's see what else we
got here. Mass festures, I mentioned that, yeah. Well, I think that's pretty much it.
If you get any questions about this, or comments, corrections, suggestions, whatever,
just give me a message at medrushatcomcast.net, and hopefully the audio quality of this one
wasn't too bad. I'm trying to find out a good, you know, go ahead, do things. Maybe next time
you better. I don't know. All right, see you later.
