VH forum & K-Meleon - no workie

[lordsmurf]

Index, New Posts and Today's Posts links don't work in K-Meleon

The Notifications, Search, View My Settings drop-downs appear about 200-300px shifted to the left

I use Firefox usually, but K-Meleon and Chrome are lower-impact browsers for some olders systems.
FF is becoming a bit of a resource a hog.

[Supreme2k]

I'm using 1.5.3 and it seems to be working fine. Maybe Baldy covertly fixed it?

Chrome works perfectly too.

I agree with FF. I get some astronomical resource spikes (800M!) when surfing with only a few tabs open. K-Meleon is generally in the 30M range.

[lordsmurf]

Nope -- 1.5.3 here, too -- not working for me.

My FF generally wants at least 300MB. On an older 1GB system, that can make the computer start to run up CPU when RAM runs out. It's awful.

[AlanHK]

Same problem in Opera.

[guns1inger]

Even after several hours of browsing, with multiple pages open at a time and a handful of must-have plugins, I never go over around 180 MB with FF 3.6. 300mb is way out of control

[El Heggunte]

Opera 10.10: page layout is fine.

K-Meleon 1.5.3: page layout is broken.

(FWIW, operating system = XP SP3)

Anyway, the main problem is, (JMO) VideoHelp takes much longer to load,
when compared to other VBulletin-based forums. Is this a "side-effect" of the
newest version of vBulletin, or it happens because of other factors I'm not aware of, ???

[Supreme2k]

Can you guys with K-Meleon post a screencap?

Guns1inger, any tweaks for FF or are you using any extensions? I only use Adblock and Noscript. With 4 tabs open (VH, Youtube, newegg, image comics), I'm hitting just over 300 Meg.

[aedipuss]

here's ff 3.6 with what i have for extensions and it doesn't go over 175mb here using win7 32bit.

[Baldrick]

I will try those browser after the olympics....yes, I like cross country and ice hockey .

But the forum loads very fast here(from sweden and the server is in US). But the div layout may be slower than the old vbulletin 3.8 table layout on slower computers.

[Baldrick]

And please discuss firefox memory problems in another topic.

[El Heggunte]

lordsmurf wrote:

Index, New Posts and Today's Posts links don't work in K-Meleon

The Notifications, Search, View My Settings drop-downs appear about 200-300px shifted to the left

That's it.

FF is becoming a bit of a resource a hog.

Firefox's always been a poorly-optimized Netscape 6.


@ Supreme2k:

[Baldrick]

Yep, the header needs a redesign. But it will take some time to learn this new div layout. I'm good with tables

I tried k-melon, incredible slow compared to ff, ie with div layouts. My mobile with opera is faster. .

[jman98]

I work in IT for a living and this is the first I've ever heard of K-Meleon. Honestly guys, let's be realistic here. Testing EVERY browser on the planet for compatibility is a losing proposition. You're incredibly lucky if anyone is willing to test anything beyond IE, Firefox and maybe Safari. I'd suggest dumping K-Meleon and switching to Chrome. I've found Chrome to work really well with everything I've tried.

[lordsmurf]

Chrome/chromium doesn't render vBulletin WYSIWYG properly. It has an ajax issue with a number of things.

There is a growing userbase for K-Meleon, much as there was for Firefox and Chrome. You can't ignore it.

Safari is generally Mac-only, but I do use it for Windows. Still a bit heavy on the code, very slow for some sites.

Opera is still the one that gets ignored. It doesn't render properly sometimes.

Firefox is only faster when the system is really fast. Older single-core CPUs, even 3Ghz ones with 1GB RAM or more, tend to bog down quickly when you use tabs or any plugins. (Seriously, what's the point of Firefox without tabs + plugins?)

Just wanted to give some feedback to Baldrick -- I use all those browsers.

[jman98]

There is a growing userbase for K-Meleon, much as there was for Firefox and Chrome. You can't ignore it.

Ah, yes. The old "I use X. Therefore, X is commonly used." argument. But the stats don't seem to back this up.

Take a look here:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0

I don't see K-Meleon listed. I found several other sites that list "other" market share at between 1.1 % (for "other Mozilla") and about 4% for simply "other". And if you assume that 100% of that 4% is for K-Meleon, you're not being realistic. That's your best case scenario. Heck, I'd argue that 100% of that 1.1% isn't K-Meleon either.

Growing? From what? 0.1% to 0.2%?

Anyway, it's up to Baldrick etc. to decide if they want to worry about it or not. It's not my concern either way.

[lordsmurf]

The site you've linked to doesn't show K-Meleon, therefore it is probably getting lumped into something else, much like Firefox was lumped into Netscape for a few years. K-Meleon is a Gecko browser, so many older stats systems would call it "Firefox" by mistake.

It's as active as Safari, Flock, etc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Meleon

I only started using it 6 months ago, because FF 3.5 was becoming more and more of a pest throughout 2009, and Chrome had too many ajax issues with forums.

[El Heggunte]

If a Web page doesn't appear correctly under K-Meleon, probably it's because the source-code of that page is not standard-compliant. While I was using Linux a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that even Seamonkey was able to display the new Videohelp forum "correctly". A big surprise to me, apparently Seamonkey's engine has become as flexible as Opera's "Presto", whose high tolerance for the "IE-optimized" code has always been seen as a great "feature".

---

EDIT: For the curious:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3

and

http://acid3.acidtests.org/

Have fun!

[finalcutter]

Hello Jman, I have no idea of your field expertise but in web development it's the browser engine which counts not the browser name.

For example; If you test code on Internet Explorer and it works fine then it will naturally work with all IE-based browsers like Maxthon. Same goes for any browser using the same engine, so testing with safari does not need further testing with any other QTwebkit powered browser like Chrome or Iron etc. When you test with Firefox and your tests came positive then rest assured all gecko browsers will work O.K. with that same code.

Website displays properly in Firefox= Website displays properly in SeaMonkey, Camino, Flock and K-Meleon.

You see there is no need to test with every single browser, you just need to test with the main engines powering all browsers nowadays and those are 4 types of rendering engines:
Trident(IE, Avant, Maxthon ), Gecko(Firefox, K-Meleon, Camino, Galeon, Flock, SeaMonkey), QTwebkit( Safari, Chromium, Konquerer) and finally Presto engine which powers Opera.

But sometimes a website that displays properly in Firefox for example will not display properly in another gecko, the problem is with something called browser detection javascript or commonly "sniffer", it's the js that is used by the website to detect which browser is visiting and injects different code accordingly. Many sites, most of them even use bad detection that checks for the browser name(brand) instead of checking the layout engine(gecko or webkit ). When they don't get a Firefox string they will automatically assume that the browser is IE or IE based and start injecting Trident code which is not standard compliant and then those browsers do not know what to do with that code and the site gets broken.

check this link http://geckoisgecko.info for more information regarding how to properly sniff for engine instead of brand.

The old detection which is unfortunately still used with many many sites was passed over from the old days when there were no variants using same engine, when there were only 2 browsers(Netscape and IE) so checking the brand was good enough. Then the bad js detection was changed from Netscape to Firefox when the latter took over Netscape's place even though at that time there were already other browsers using the Gecko engine, many of them were even older than Firefox itself.

geckoisgecko was put together by several developers of those browsers as they were getting tired of bug reports about a website not working when the bug lied in the website itself not properly identifying those browsers so thir users can quickly send feedback to those websites in one hyperlink explaining the problem, which brings us to another issue: Market Share.

Market Share is very flawed, especially when counting Gecko browsers. You see, the users of lesser known browsers have got accustomed to spoofing their User Agent as Firefox, sometimes the developers of those browsers provide an easy way to change the UA automatically to end complaints and sometimes they already use a Firefox UA as default and not their own to end headaches. Market share is mainly based on statistics gathered from major websites like MSN or Yahoo or Google or Myspace or Facebook etc. Almost all major websites are still using old detection and hence many Gecko browsers are counted as Firefox. In 2005 when Firefox/Phoenix/Firebird was beginning to make great strides in taking over IE; one of Mozilla's marketing executives acknowledged the shortcomings of proper usage statistics based on certain websites that will only allow features to Firefox and not to other Geckos, he ended his statement by ".. but we're not complaining".

The question is does K-Meleon have enough users to consider in website designing? I think so and the EU which bases Market Share on different websites than used in the U.S. ranked that browser as No.7 on the windows platform. Bear in mind that K-Meleon is a windows only browser and not available to mac and linux and naturally a platform-specific application will have less users than a cross-platform one. The EU ranking could be wrong as well, you can never tell the real market share of a Gecko browser unless all major websites fix their sniffer but I can tell you that Firefox's Market share is quite incorrect. I don;t know what's the true percent or Firefox in the markey but I estimate around 10-15% of Firefox's market numbers are other Geckos.

But in the end you don't need to worry about testing the website on every single browser or consider K-Meleon in your tests. Make sure it works properly on Firefox, make sure you are using a proper Browser detection in your code and all Gecko browsers will render the same.

I hope I didn't intrude and you find my post useful. Best regards and Best of luck to all.

[guns1inger]

It is not so simple as saying that testing in IE means everything that uses the IE engine will draw the same. Different versions can have an impact, so your statement should contain that restriction. IE6, for example, does not draw the same as IE7/8.

[finalcutter]

You are correct since IE8 is more standard compliant but IE6 isn't really something to consider in web design anyway very non-standard compliant and it's being phased out by web developers and apparently some countries too.

Everybody hates IE6 :P

IE-based browsers are shells and, they use whatever Trident version embedded in windows.. I just stated it as an example.

[lordsmurf]

It's probably a coding compliancy issue. Baldrick will surely find it.

If you like IE but also hate IE -- try Avant.
Avant is a great Trident browser, that is compliant and not so full of bugs and annoyances.
It's another popular browser among folks who must use IE-only sites but can't stand IE itself.
(And yes, this means it's another browser to quickly test with sites you make!)