Want a Faster, leaner Browser ?

I was following a thread at Digg about someone proposing a lighter version of Firefox. He argued it would help defeat IE on older machines on adoption rates. But the chances of getting Firefox forked to have a lighter edition by the same set of mainline developers  - seems very remote. They are busy with original Firefox.

There are some other good options to check out if you are reeling under the RAM requirements of Firefox. I am definitely one, because my Compaq nx6320 Laptop has just 512MB of RAM.

Opera 9

Opera need no introductions. It definitely is an excellent browser. It used to be my default browser before the Web 2.0 (read AJAX) days. Lately Opera with too many tabs crashed on me. Firefox still survived with poor response to mouse and key inputs. The ‘Session Restore’ feature of Opera was good in such situations. But the crashes were too often. I gave up. Still You may want to give Opera 9 a whirl. I also disliked the adblock option of Opera after seeing the very convenient Firefox Adblock plus.

Safari

The new kid on the block. I loved the anti-aliased rendering. Don’t know if there is any extension for Firefox which would do that. I miss it dearly. But Safari too crashes too often. Blame it on my bad habit of keeping too many tabs open. I could even handle the crashes if it were to ‘save the settings‘. The worst thing about Safari for Windows is that - It never saves the customized settings. You painstakingly set the options ; restart Safari - everything is gone. I quit Safari at least for the moment. But this is very light-weight and good looking with perfect standard-compliant rendering.

K-Meleon

He is the hero. Has anyone tried this yet?. K-Meleon is my default browser for last one week. Awesome startup times and is very very responsive to user inputs. The K-Meleon controls are native ones - unlike the XUL based cross-platform ones which FireFox uses. The current core of K-Meleon is based on mozilla code 1.8.1.4. It works excellent for my needs. I could get AdBlock working for K-Meleon. There is theme support too. It looks like there are ways to get many Firefox extensions working on K-Meleon. It’s fast and eats lesser RAM compared to Firefox. Perfect fit for your older Celerons and K6s and for my dated laptop!

Konqueror, Galeon and Epiphany

if you are on Ubuntu, these are the ones to consider. I particularly like Epiphany for its speed and rendering quality.

If you are still stuck with IE, but is willing to explore the real Internet, you must checkout the Alternative Browser Alliance Site.