K-Meleon 0.9

So I did play around with Mozilla Suite 1.8 Alpha 6 for about a week, and I quite like it. Composer is more usable than I expected, and the browser has some nice features if you don't ever want to have to tweak it. I ended up uninstalling it because it kept fucking up my RSS bookmarks in Firefox.

But tonight I saw on mozillaZine that the Gecko-based but awkwardly-named K-Meleon 0.9 was released yesterday, so I had to try that, too. Apparently it's been around for just over four years, but this is the first I've heard of it. And I really like it so far. It's very simple, but extremely customizable, even compared to Firefox and Opera. It doesn't integrate RSS and Atom feeds as smoothly as Firefox, but at least it does have a nice little RSS reader, which can be viewed in a tab (K-M calls them "layers"), which is more than can be said for Netscape. There are some very nice, elegant themes available as well, but K-M's best asset is its speed. It's just a really, really fast program in all respects, much faster than any other browser I've run on this admittedly slow machine, including IE. Without extension support, it doesn't offer the kind of range you get with Firefox and Mozilla Suite (I really miss Adblock), but I can't imagine not using this browser on a regular basis, at least as much as I use Firefox now. I'm sure I'll find more faults, but this is the best first-impression I've gotten from a piece of software since Thunderbird.

By the way, after I installed Netscape 7.2, I had four Windows hard-locks in less than a week. When I uninstalled it, they stopped.