Talk:K-Meleon/Archive 1

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Is K-Meleon being developed anymore? I read a post on Slashdot which stated that it was a dead project, but it just might be 'resting'. (The source is open, so this could change at any time.) It's my browser of choice, and you should look into it if you haven't already. -206.15.46.129}}

The project is very much active, the last beta (0.6.5) is from Sep 15. Unlike other OSS projects they don't "release early, release often", though, so it may still take a while until the next stable version is released.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Eloquence (talk • contribs)

Well, K-Meleon version 0.7 was released in October 2002. If you're stuck running one of the compatible Microsoft operating systems, you might find that you will like using this new version. - Two halves (formerly known as 206.15.46.129)

K-Meleon is now at 74 Beta 3 (its forum post is at http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/forum/read.php?8,127127). It would be nice if someone updated its article to contain info regarding the new beta. Zero3K (talk) 19:52, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

Removing:

136K is WAY too big for a screenshot. Jpeg is the wrong format -- PNG would be smaller. And anyway, do we need a screenshot for this? Readers can find one by following the link to the website. PLus it's too wide for the browser window ... -- Tarquin 10:29 Dec 28, 2002 (UTC)

The image and discussion are quite old, irrelevant to the current state of the web browser, and are wasting Wiki bandwidth.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.230.195.77 (talk • contribs)

Can I put in that K-Meleon launches faster than Firefox even where K-Meleon is running on a Pentium 200 MMX and FF on a Celeron 433, or would this be non-NPOV?

I just want to point out that K-Meleon exists before Phoenix (now Firefox). The statement that "[the use of native Windows API] is intended to reduce the browser's resource requirements", just after talking about Firefox, is misleading because it implies comparison with Firefox, while the correct comparison would be to the browser component of Mozilla Suite. I'm still not 100% happy with the current wording—it's still kind of saying that K-Meleon, Galeon, and Camino were/are created to be 'lightweight Firefox' (before the Phoenix project even started)—but at least it's much better than the previous "is intended to". This is not at all about neutrality, but about not giving the wrong idea to readers; you can't say "Mac OS is an operating system, similar to Windows. Mac OS is intended to provide a more user-friendly interface...". — LazyEditor (talk) 04:20, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

^ak|on|it!>

19:10, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, but I don't know how to improve the wording. Specifically, I don't know how to mention the similarity with Galeon et al. without drawing too much connection between them and Firefox. — LazyEditor (talk) 02:26, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Comparisons with Firefox are the most obvious comparisons to make. Historical accuracy can be saved for the point when someone makes the effort to write a proper timeline for the article: the intro is meant to make it obvious what K-Meleon is, so it's best to compare it to the most obvious thing possible. Anyway, K-Meleon currently competes with Firefox, not the Suite, so at the moment it is entirely correct to state that K-Meleon aims to be a lightweight Firefox. Chris Cunningham 10:20, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Yep, I agree that comparison with Firefox is necessary because it is the dominant Gecko browser. As for the "lightweight Firefox" issue... please read these ideas:

• K-Meleon is a lightweight Firefox
• Galeon is a lightweight Firefox
• Firefox is a cross-platform K-Meleon
• K-Meleon is a Gecko IE
• K-Meleon is a Windows Galeon

In my opinion, all of them are reasonable, but not exactly true because the programs' authors don't say so. — LazyEditor (talk) 10:23, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Why there's a claim about using "native ui instead of xul", as far as I see it doesn't user the WPF properly...— Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.234.5.137 (talk • contribs)

I think the table ought to be redone in reverse chronological order, with the newest release first. This is what people are most interested in. What do you think?

I do not think so. It is not the purpose of an encyclopedic article to advertise the latest releases. Those are anyway shown in the summary at the right top of the page. The release history is meant to show how old the K-Meleon project actually is - since K-Meleon is often entitled as a Firefox clone, which is plain wrong. Kko km (talk) 16:10, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/forum/read.php?8,127127 189.100.72.118 (talk) 13:59, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

This article needs a lot of work. It is non-encyclopedic in its language and scope, too many unimportant details are included, and it is lacking updated information.

Can someone who has some experience with this project weed out all of the unimportant bits and complete sections like the release history? Clearly, this project was dormant for a long time and there has been little to no maintenance done for this article, but with the pending final release of version 74, this article deserves to lose a lot of dead weight and clarify a lot of details. 69.181.226.23 (talk) 05:52, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

I went ahead and took a first pass at updating the page. 69.181.226.23 (talk) 10:22, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

General

• There's quite a few duplicate wikilinks which per
  MOS:LINKONCE
  should be removed.

Prose and sourcing

Lede

• The sentence K-Meleon was one of the first projects to use Gecko outside of Mozilla's original internet suite. doesn't appear to be substantiated by any of the sources in the article. I've removed the statement. The Firefox sentence is more precise.
• The popularity of K-Meleon seems to be unsourced within the article, see the comment in the Customization section below. (Language changed for better precision to match source material.)

History

• Christophe Thibault started the K-Meleon project in the early 2000s is unsourced. While the first sentence in the development section says 0.1 was released in 2000, that doesn't verify that work on the project started at that time. (The source for the launch one paragraph below explains how it was created in a single day in August.)
• Neither Reference 4 [McCracken, Harry (March 2007)] or reference 5 [DeVault, Drew (March 18, 2020)] appear to say anything about the size of websites. I've changed the language to more accurately reflect that the scope of what a web browser is expected to do has grown.
• Reference 5 doesn't appear to verify anything in the preceding sentence. This quote "more viable options are angling for your attention than at any time since the browser wars of the mid-1990s" verifies this statement, " many projects created new browsers."
• I found clippings of Reference 7 (D1, D4) but it doesn't verify the sentence it's attached to as it says nothing about using resources or blending into its environment. The "one-size-fits-all" line is a reference to major cross platform browsers including Mozilla. I've added a more explicit source for native elements and quoted a specific line about being less resource intensive.
• The sentence about pronunciation is unsourced. I've made the language more precise. It's not a statement about the browser specifically but about French pronunciation as users on English wikipedia may be unfamiliar with French.

Development

• The image caption in the development section says "K-Meleon 0.2 was a simple..." but should be "K-Meleon 0.2 is..." in the present tense per
  MOS:TENSE
  . I've used the past tense to describe the development of K-Meleon in the past and the present tense to describe it's current status. This pattern is consistent with other browser articles.
• Reference 11 doesn't appear to support the sentence it's attached to, about K-Meleon being "the first project on Windows to separate the browser from other Mozilla Internet Suite applications"? Orlowski source does support that explicitly. The Paul source is about Firefox's release history. I thought it was relevant in case the average reader expected Firefox to be the first.
• K-Meleon using win32 is unsourced. (Less technical language employed. win32 is the technical term for the native windows interface mentioned in sources.)
• Reference 15 does not support the claim that it was less resource-intensive than other browsers on Windows only that it has a "fast loading time" and does not say anything about Camino. Less resource intensive is cited earlier in the article. That source draws an explicit connection between Galeon and K-Meleon. I've added the release notes from the paragraph below to provide a source for Camino.
• Reference 16 and 17 say that Firefox is similar to Galeon, K-Meleon and Chimera not that they were a direct influence on Mozilla. Rewritten.
• Reference 19 does not support the claim that For a few years, Mozilla promoted other Gecko browsers including K-Meleon, and officially endorsed Camino. Rewritten.
• Reference 20 does not support any of the statements preceeding it, which are otherwise unsourced. I've added a quote to make things more clear in that source. I've also added releases notes as a source for HTTPS web pages and used the specific "SSL" protocol in the language of the article.
• Reference 21 [Jesdanun, Anick (June 16, 2002)] does not support the statement it is attached to. The general way that source describes turning off features is via the text-based system of configs and macros. I've duplicated a source that makes this more explicit. I can also cite directly from the macro/config documentation if it needs to made more explicit.
• Version 0.7 leveraged Mozilla's codebase to support Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) plugins is unsourced. I've used the non-technical language to better reflect the user manual cited. The source cited at the end of the paragraph is the manual (archived) for version 0.7 of KM. The entire paragraph covers version 0.7.
• Reference 25 (I'm guessing it's specifically this page) does not support the sentence it is attached to. Cited a specific chapter of the manual.
• Reference 27 just links to the overall mailing list, I don't even begin to know what would verify the sentence it's attached to, it needs a more specific link. Not possible. There is no stable online archive still in existence. The citation includes the relevant quote to establish Dorian's transition to lead dev.
• For Reference 28, what makes this
  WP:BLOG
  a reliable source? Hao was one of the 2 main developers of KM at the time. He's cited as the author of the blog. His status is mentioned in the sentence cited.
• Reference 29 discusses Cyrillic text in pages and 30 [Pogson, Jeff (December 28, 2004)] discusses the browser itself being localized into Welsh, neither supports the sentence they are attached to. I've broken this up into several sentences. I think this makes the article and the sources more clear.

Customization

• Reference 85 doesn't appear to suport the statement that K-Meleon was popular with libraries, only that it was a potential good choice for that situation.

I'm going through the list of GA review issues above. As I resolve them, I'm crossing them out and providing an explanation of the change.

Rjjiii (talk

) 06:49, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

One comment about the

Windows 2.0x, for example, is very old software but the article is a GA, and it refers to the software in the present tense even though it obviously has been replaced with more recent versions of Windows. The same is true of K-Meleon 0.7 in the caption; it still supports themes, even if its not the most recent version of the software. If the goal is to make this a GA, I would compare it with articles in Category:GA-Class software articles, not with C and B-class articles that need cleanup. - Aoidh (talk

) 07:22, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Another example, K-Meleon 1.0 allowed localizations to be stored in separate library files within an existing K-Meleon installation. If I were to download K-Meleon 1.0 (which is still available), would it no longer allow localizations to be stored this way? It still would. There's no reason to put that in the past tense because it's still a present thing that exists. - Aoidh (talk) 07:33, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

I don't know what you want. Here's a quote from Windows 2.0: "The

Rjjiii (talk

) 07:54, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

With the example above, K-Meleon 1.0 still does the thing that the sentence describes, it is not a thing of the past that it no longer does. If you download 1.0, it does exactly that, there is no reason to write it in the past tense, per the Manual of Style and just basic fact. Unless that feature has been removed from the 1.0 release, it is still something that should be writen in the present tense, the same with most things about older versions that aren't date-specific (such as "was released on..."). - Aoidh (talk) 07:59, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

I've updated the 0.7 screenshot caption to all present tense. I disagree on the body text. I'll explain. Look at your Windows 2.0 example. Does the basic edition still support that mode? Yes, but it's using past tense. When speaking about the development of a piece of software it will be necessary to use the past tense in places. This means that when talking about the development of features you will face the choice of either remaining in the past tense or switching tenses. It's common to remain in the past tense to improve readability. I can double check to make sure the features, captions, etc, are all in present. It would degrade the K-Meleon article, OR the Windows 2.0 article to use present tense in the way that you're suggesting.

Rjjiii (talk

) 08:55, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Also some of the things you've crossed out are still outstanding issues. What I referred to as Reference 5 above (but is no longer the 5th reference) does not have that quote, and does not verify the statement it's attached to. That specific reference is the issue there, not the other reference that does have that quote and does verify the information. What I called reference 7 above (the Simonds newspaper article) is still attached to the statement that it does not verify. The article can't just have sources sitting at the end of sentences that they have nothing to do with, that's an issue. I'm also sure better sources can be found than this weirdly written WordPress blog. What makes this a reliable source? These aren't the only issues, but a few of the above crossed out items are still outstanding issues that still need to be addressed before the article can meet the GA criteria. - Aoidh (talk) 07:46, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Just noting, I've replaced the blog with an article from ZDNet that explains the growth of browsers from the perspective of security.

Rjjiii (talk

) 08:23, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

I've done a major update of the long-standing release history table. Previously, all versions included a textual note. While updating the table I omitted these notes for several versions as I was not sure they met WP's criteria for notability. If anybody disagrees, the textual notes are all visible in this rough draft and can be copied directly into a note tag:https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Rjjiii/sandbox&oldid=1142754378

Also here is a link to the older format: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=K-Meleon&oldid=1053873294#Release_history

I initially just updated information within that format but noticed several issues. On narrow mobile screens, the table scrolls, cells become narrow, and it is not very legible. Even on Vector 2022, the new default theme, the Significant changes column is very narrow and difficult to read. The table stretches so far vertically that it doesn't visually come across as a table. Updates to make the table work better in narrow content views include: wrapping dates, removing the multi-row cells, condensing minor versions, omitting many verbose notes, and moving the remaining notes into footnotes. Additional changes include: highlightable rows, sortable columns, collapsibility, a default collapsed state, row heading tags for accessibility, and a simpler embedded key.

This review is

transcluded from Talk:K-Meleon/GA2

. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Colin M (talk · contribs) 18:24, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

I see that this article had a failing review in December of last year, so I'm going to start by focusing on the issues raised in that review.

The

(I'll refer to citations by number, using this version. I'm just going to jump to a few random spots in the article and list some that have potential issues.)

• 1.
  Personal blog
  . A charming example of early web design, but not sure it's appropriate to verify the claim of "quickly attracted attention to the project".
• 8. Also appears to be self-published blog.
• 23. Not seeing how this verifies the claim. The mention of K-Meleon in that article seems to be by the author of the article, not a quote from Mozilla.
• 50. Verifies the claim, but is a
  self-published blog source
  . Probably should not be relying on it unless the author is an established subject-matter expert, which I'm not seeing evidence of.
• 52. This is a forum post written by a developer, so it's okay as a
  WP:PRIMARY
  source, but we shouldn't be relying on too many of these in constructing the article. (Also, technically the text of the forum post doesn't precisely verify the claim that this was the first release to use XULRunner, but it's close enough that I'm not inclined to make a big deal of it.)
• 54. Primary source. I'm not seeing how this verifies the claim that this was the final version to support Windows 2000.
• 84. Seems to be another self-published source. Also, my French is rusty, but it seems like the source says that M-Meleon does support Firefox extensions (though it doesn't implement the entirety of the chrome). How does it verify the claim that it was "not compatible with those previously used by other Mozilla applications"?
• 86. Primary source. Also doesn't exactly verify the claim, though I can see how it's in the right neighbourhood.

This is just a sampling and is far from exhaustive. My main concern at this point is that the article relies on a lot of primary sources (which should be used sparingly) and self-published blog sources (which should be used not at all). I also have some concerns about some citations not supporting the claims they're attached to. This article is really impressively detailed, but you might have to think about cutting it down if there are significant chunks of information that can't be verified in reliable secondary sources.

I'm inclined to

Thanks for looking through the article, fixing errors, and providing feedback. Go ahead and conclude. I'll respond to your comments below, but I'm not disputing.

For the blogs that you mentioned, I'm adding alternative sources. For developer blogs, I'll add a comment in the ref tags. Source 84 is a KM developer and a few other blog sources are KM developer blogs. Your French is fine; perhaps it's not clear what it would mean to support the format without implementing the chrome? Each version of each Mozilla application uses its own chrome or user interface. The XUL-based extensions were mainly written to target specific versions of specific applications. I've added the release announcement referenced in source 23 as its own reference.

This article is really impressively detailed, but you might have to think about cutting it down if there are significant chunks of information that can't be verified in reliable secondary sources. This is why I say conclude. Relying solely on secondary sources yields much information about K-Meleon's beginning and it's now somewhat bizarre support for legacy platforms, but between those two masses is a sea dotted with islands of trivia some larger, some smaller. I would much rather provide the reader a coherent article and than an incoherent, but technically proper, article.

Thanks again,

Rjjiii (talk

) 04:17, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

I understand your ambivalence. I sometimes miss the early days of Wikipedia when there was a more relaxed attitude toward

WP:OR and primary sources, and I certainly can't blame you for wanting to preserve as complete a history of the topic as possible. Colin M (talk

) 17:16, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

A few last comments:

I think that leaving the review open briefly after a QF decision is a good way to handle reviews. It feels respectful, and I appreciate it.

Also, it goes past completeness or nostalgia. I do appreciate your analysis and don't want you to feel that I'm disregarding it. I've already acted on it in the past few edits to improve the article.

My position is that I'm fine with following Wikipedia's policies if they serve the reader or even if they have minimal impact. I'm not willing to (intentionally) write something false, misleading, or confusing. In this article, for example, the in-depth coverage on early betas (combined with the tendency of later articles to draw from that early coverage) means that secondary sources generally say that K-Meleon does not support extensions and that Thibault is the lead developer. In reality, K-Meleon supported multiple extension formats (none of which took off like those of Firefox), and it has had a string of lead developers including Doozan, Erikson, and Boissonnade.

Thanks again and take care,

Rjjiii (talk

) 05:26, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

I don't recall which ones I spot checked when making this edit earlier, but in this article it remains easy to find sources that don't verify the information they're attached to. I pointed out this source in the first GA review in December and it is still an outstanding issue, but the 2002 Spartanburg Herald-Journal article (available here and is on page E8 rather than E7) says nothing at all that would verify the sentence The config files provided a way to customize the browser or hide interface elements. I don't know how many of the sources in this article fail to verify the information they are attached to, but I checked four references today and three of them did not verify what they are purportedly verifying. This article is not a B-class article at this point because of the issue with the references failing verification. - Aoidh (talk) 02:33, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the link; I've added it into the reference. Your tone sounds defensive. I am asking in order to improve the article. I'm not critiquing your evaluation. Take care,

Rjjiii (talk

) 02:54, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Not being defensive, just thorough so that there is no room for misinterpretation. I have again restored the C class status, as this article remains very problematic in the area of basic verification. It is still a long way from B class. You didn't remove the source that failed verification, adding a new source while still retaining the problematic one still leaves that issue, and that is only one of many, many failed verifications throughout the article. Please do not try to reassess this article again in a more favorable manner than is warranted, since throughout 2 GA Reviews and several discussions the basic issue of verifiability still persists, many on the exact same sources brought up in the initial GA review that you marked as "resolved" but were not resolved in any way. Let someone else reassess the article when you feel those issues are resolved, but the article still requires a substantial amount of work before it gets to B class. Marking it as B class when it isn't means someone looking for an article to improve might overlook this one in favor of another C class article, part of the point of that quality rating is to that editors have a good idea of what needs to be improved so that they can make those improvements, and marking this article as a B class when it is not only hurts this article in that process. - Aoidh (talk) 14:05, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Ah, it can be hard to tell in text sometimes. I think you said something before about not wanting to discourage so let me return the favor, so you don't feel like your time was wasted or your input blown off:

1. You previously said that you could not verify this passage from the source: The config files provided a way to customize the browser or hide interface elements.
2. I added a reference to the user manual with this quote: Under the Configs tab you find all the configuration files that K-Meleon uses. Here you can configure all what can also be done from the other tabs, and a lot more.
3. And while I felt that A. Mutch in the original ref was describing configs, I took your feedback into consideration and found a source to cite Mutch going into much clearer detail: The configuration files are a set of simple text files that you can edit to change the appearance and functionality of the browser. Turning off a menu item or removing a toolbar button is as simple as deleting the text that references the item to be disabled.

I have a habit of making many small edits to catch if I am breaking something in one of the many different types of syntax, so if you looked at a single diff, I could see how it would like I was leaving the source there. Take care,

Rjjiii (talk

) 16:20, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm not looking at any diffs, I'm looking at the current version of the article, and in this version the Spartanburg Herald-Journal reference was simply moved to a different statement, which it also doesn't verify; the reference doesn't say anything about sysadmin or end user access, just that K-Meleon's author says other browsers don't let him turn off features the way K-Meleon does, making them difficult to manage in multiple-user settings. - Aoidh (talk) 17:03, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Further in the spirit of letting you know your time was not wasted: was simply moved to a different statement < It was not. I appreciate you looking for additional areas of improvement though. Take care,

Rjjiii (talk

) 07:56, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

My comment above is not an edit of the closed GA Review, this is a comment at the bottom of that template at Talk:K-Meleon, not an edit of the closed Talk:K-Meleon/GA3. Please do not move my comment again. - Aoidh (talk) 00:05, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

My comment was made at this talk page not the review, but the confusion seems to stem from how the template handles the edit button; if you edit the section it takes you to the review template itself, so to help avoid that confusion I have added a section header. - Aoidh (talk) 00:32, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

My initial comments were just that, initial. The more detailed review goes into more depth.

Please note, many pages are later questioned in

it stands out from the crowd

is also not there. Quoting further:

Editors should evaluate various aspects of the coverage: the depth, duration, geographical scope, diversity and reliability of the coverage. The depth of coverage in the sources should be significant and directly about the software. Coverage of the software in passing, such as being part of a how-to document, do not normally constitute significant coverage but should be evaluated. Inclusion of software in lists of similar software generally does not count as deep coverage.

Maybe at one time this page was notable enough. For certain the version of Jan 2019 was much cleaner, and 1/3 the size, although it also was almost completely primary sources. I am certain that if I relisted it the vote would be close for

WP:TNT. I am doing the editors a favor and giving them a change to correct the page. Ldm1954 (talk

) 22:35, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

The idea that something that was once notable can become unnotable is not how notability works on Wikipedia, and the presence of blogs and self-published sources

WP:NSOFT. - Aoidh (talk

) 00:25, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

I think you are stretching things. The quote from the article you mention is:

"Another seven browsers, namely Sleipnir, Green Browser, Maxthon, Avant, Flock, K-meleon, and Slim, will be randomly ordered on the rest of the screen. They can be viewed by scrolling sideways."

As I already quoted from

WP:NSOFT

, "Inclusion of software in lists of similar software generally does not count as deep coverage.".

I do think it would be better to clean up the major problems rather than continuing this discussion. Ldm1954 (talk) 01:33, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

I have replied to the GA review here.[1]

I have no intention to dispute this quickfail. K-Meleon is the weirdest out of the articles that I have tried to improve because so many of the highest quality sources are either completely out of date, or narrowly focused. I can be superstitious and will take the three strikes as a sign to move on to clean up something else.

@

Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk

) 01:45, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

One small note, on does it make sense why notability is not a part of the GA criteria? per

WP:GAN/I#R1 it kind of is. The issue is that notability was not the concern here. - Aoidh (talk

) 01:59, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

In that way, yes, but not a criterion to be reviewed against. The consensus on the talk pages has been that if that's the issue, bring it to AfD. And I agree that notability is not a concern for this article; I was lectured about notability when I nominated the Simple English Wikipedia stub for deletion.[2]

Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk

) 02:17, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

@

WP:NTEMP issue not least of all). If you're going to fail a review for notability issues moving forward, at minimum check all the references; how do you know the article has no sources showing notability if, as you said in your review, you didn't check them all? - Aoidh (talk

) 01:54, 27 October 2023 (UTC)