Equally important, K-Meleon is one of the first applications designed to showcase the Gecko rendering engine that was developed by the Mozilla.org team. Gecko is the technology that speeds up the display of Web pages.
The long-awaited Netscape 6 browser, due out before the end of this year, will employ Gecko. And Netscape parent America Online Inc. (NYSE: AOL) is encouraging developers to include Gecko in other applications and products so as to "Internet-enable" them.
Not to be outdone, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) is fine-tuning its own set of rendering engines, called Universal Canvas, and making them a key component of the company's next-generation .Net user experience.
K-Meleon features the Internet Explorer (IE) bookmarking system, and its interface "attempts to mimic the IE MFC (Microsoft Foundation Class) interface as much as possible," according to the Web site. It includes a tool bar almost identical to IE's, as well as a similar "Favorites" feature.
Microsoft did not respond by deadline to an inquiry on how closely another product may copy IE's look and feel.
K-Meleon is the brainchild of Christophe Thibault, the developer behind the K-Jofol multimedia audio player that runs on Windows.
