The Best Browser You've Never Heard Of

I haven't messed with the K-Meleon browser in over a year now, but I understand it's still a damn fine browser. Indeed, it may be the best browser you've never heard of.

K-Meleon uses the Gecko rendering engine— just like Firefox or Mozilla— but its user interface is written in native Windows code rather than in XUL. KM is lightning fast— it may well be faster than any browser you've ever seen— and it will run nicely on even the most dinosaurian of computers.

K-Meleon can be endlessly customized, extended with plugins, whatever. It has a built-in macro language which will let you make it do almost anything. KM is extremely easy to use, once you've got it set up. But caution, KM is not easy to customize: it's mostly a matter of editing config files and writing macros, in ways which are often poorly documented or not documented at all. I do believe there was a time when the macro language itself was largely undocumented. You were just supposed to figure it out on your own. I remember one no-holds-barred fight on a KM forum where one of the regulars was arguing heatedly that anyone should be able to learn how to use the macro language simply by glancing through an alphabetized list of its commands.

K-meleon has a community of devoted and fiercely loyal users. Yet KM is next to unknown, even among people who are into alternative browsers. Firefox, K-Meleon is not. Hey, KM isn't interested in being the biggest, only in being a fast, light, flexible, and rather geekish best.

These days I'm a Linux man, and Opera has long been my browser. But I have to confess, if I were still on Windows, and if I weren't using Opera, I'd probably be websurfing with K-Meleon.