Interview with Opera founder Jon von Tetzchner Options

[Christian J]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/07/op...l_gone_to_crap/

Indeed Opera 15 and later seem completely unusable, but I must say there were growing problems even with the "classic" (Presto-based) versions.

FWIW http://otter-browser.org/ is apparently an attempt to create a Blink-based browser, but with the classic Opera features that today's Opera company seems uninterested in.

[pandy]

I tired of Opera a looong time ago. The Opera crowd's attitude didn't help either. Still, I was sad to see it go. This new thing isn't Opera. I hate where browsers are going. As a user I care less of cutting edge rendering, I want a tool I can use and live with. I fear featureless browsers like Chrome is where we are heading.

K-Mel was the last good browser for me. Actually, it's still possible to use with a newer gecko inside, but who knows how long the guy that is providing that version will keep it up. Mozilla killed the fun when they killed embedding support a couple of years ago. FF is as clunky as ever.

[Christian J]

K-Mel was the last good browser for me. Actually, it's still possible to use with a newer gecko inside, but who knows how long the guy that is providing that version will keep it up.

Wasn't the last update from 2010 or so, or can you get newer Geckos than that?

Mozilla killed the fun when they killed embedding support a couple of years ago.

What happened? Here's another Mozilla variety that's still maintained: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Moon_(web_browser) . Very similar to current Firefox, but it does let you block third party images (such as tracking beacons). Just like with Firefox, javascript and (third party) iframes can be disabled with the Noscript extension.

Even classic Opera can't disable iframes (like MSIE it just hides them while the iframe content is still loaded in the background), and AFAIK it can't block third party images. Furthermore its browser extensions require that javascript is enabled on web pages, which IMHO is not a good design. Privacy/security failures like these will probably make me stop using the classic Opera browser, even though I love its keyboard navigation.

[pandy]

Not the official version, no. But some guy found a way to use the last K-Mel baked together with a newer gecko. It's messy with double folders and so on, but it actually works. I never found out how to configure the thing to get rid of the tool bars I don't want and get the ones I do want though. There are two config directories, but changes don't take no matter which I use.

They just decided to remove support for embedding. That's why K-Mel died. Not that the developers have stated that they have stopped working on it, not that I know of, but obviously it's a fact they have.
http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2011040100439NWCYSW

I was happy when I found Pale Moon, but it turned out to be no fun. Maybe I should try it again. Been a while.
http://forums.htmlhelp.com/index.php?showtopic=17260

[pandy]

Pardon my French but WTF! I went to K-Mel's site to check how old the last update was and what greats me? This!

2014-01-16: K-Meleon 74 Beta was released. This release include Gecko 24 fixing incompatibilites of the old releases. Currently only available in English.
Read the announcement in Forum for more info about this release.
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/

Here's me downloading!

[pandy]

Things are missing - like the main menu - but sites work in it. This will be good in the end.

[Christian J]

I was happy when I found Pale Moon, but it turned out to be no fun. Maybe I should try it again. Been a while.
http://forums.htmlhelp.com/index.php?showtopic=17260

I had forgotten that thread completely. Was there anything wrong with Pale Moon, besides being too similar to Firefox? Is it worse than FF somehow?

When I first installed PM it booted much faster than Firefox, but as soon as I had added my extensions both browsers booted equally slow again. Apparently extensions slow things down (at least the ones I use).

2014-01-16: K-Meleon 74 Beta was released.

[pandy]

I don't remember about Pale Moon. Just that it didn't cut it, but not in what way.

I've got the menu in K-mel now. If you download hit F2 to get Preferences. It was just that it wasn't enabled. Still can't make the toolbars movable though. I don't remember where that is in the config files, but I'll find it.

[pandy]

They are getting there!

2014-09-08: K-Meleon 74 RC2 (Release Candidate-2, almost final version) was released.
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/

[pandy]

And now they are there. K-meleon 7.4 is out. And it's nice as ever. They even include the old skin so everything is back to normal and I'm a happy camper again. Go try it, Christian.

[Christian J]

I downloaded RC2 already (but I mostly use Tor for special duties nowadays, so K-Mel hasn't been tested much).

At first I thought it was buggy because tabs became blank all the time, but maybe it was just due to me accidentally double-clicking on them (this can be changed in the menu).

Not sure I ever liked the skin, I had to move things around a lot to get the menus where I want them, and some icons (e.g. for new tabs) are very small. Not that the other browsers are much better.

[pandy]

Of course you have to move the menues around to get them as you want.

I don't know abuout the tabs. That's the first thing I turn off.

I like the classic (IE-like) skin because the chrome doesn't use up a good portion of the available screen estate, as with for instance FF and especially Chrome that doesn't even use the chrome for something usefull.

I find the text on the Privacy bar small and squiggly, but that's about all.

Main thing for me is that it's lightfooted and fast, lets me resize text only (hate zoom), have proper menus and doesn't clutter my screen with it's chrome. I get incredibly annoyed by the latter, can't get used to it.

You know that you can configre a lot more than what's appearent from the menus? But you need to learn to use the config files. They used to have pretty good pages about that, but I'm not sure if they do now.

[pandy]

But, the downside is obviously the slow developement. They've been quick about it now. Maybe there are new guys on the team. As it's been earlier they've always been behind and there has been too long between versions, as you use to mock me about.

[Christian J]

When I start K-meleon 74 it keeps saying a new version 74 (sic) is available. I installed that "new" file just to check. On its first run it tried to open "resource:///readme.html" which wasn't found. It also overwrote my previous browser settings.