Galeon Developers Interview 204
Nachtjäger writes "The Galeon website has an interview with the developers, describing overall project health, current problems, and future direction. There's also a place to ask your own questions for future interviews."
Re:They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:2, Insightful)
And as usual, there is absolutely nothing stopping the knowledgeable user from simply running whatever apps they want on their desktop. As for Redhat, they have switched to a more open process, where outside people have a lot more say in what should go in - make yourself heard!
Re:Galeon RIP (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree. The major problem with Galeon is that it is a GNOME program instead of a simple GTK one. I really don't know why they chose to do this...
my 2 cents (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Galeon's primary raison d'etre is that Gecko is good but Mozilla is bloated. With the growing popularity of Firebird (and the eventual mainstreaming of FB into Moz), will there really be much of a need for Galeon?
Re:They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Galeon RIP (Score:3, Insightful)
* Tab settings - how wide they are, if they should get shortened, etc.
Agree - need this feature back
* a button to erase the address bar - I don't want its content on my clipboard
Definately needed
* focus of newly opened tabs/windows - additional clicks necessary
Edit->Preferences->User Interface->Jump to new tabs Automatically
* rocker style mouse gestures - just pressing RMB and then LMB used to go back
Works for me
* stability
Haven't had any crashes yet
Galeon: A functional browser... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sometimes it is necessary to use Mozilla, mostly for proper Javascript functionality, something that one would think Galeon would inherit. Absolutely no browser can keep up with Apache and the web. This goes for the super bloated and slow
IExplorer too. Opera is fast but 'links' looks like the fastest graphical browser of them all and by many times. There is also the issue of some organisations allowing Windows or Mac browsers to protect their streams. This is the most absurd excuse of them all as it is trivial to intercept and store any 'protected' media.
Lets get some good features back into Galeon. It would be nice if it could completely spoof Mac or Windows for services that require that. (and save the streams at the request of the user) Any serious browser maker would team up with Apache or atleast use their modules if necessary. It is ironic that the 'most popular' browser is slow, insecure and made by a minor player in the server market. I'm sticking with Galeon for the moment. If it gets anymore 'user friendly' (and administrator hostile) I will end up using some other browser that may not even exist today.
Defaults suck: make your own choices. (Score:5, Insightful)
Presumably same reason metacity is default in Gnome: the defaults
in Gnome are being deliberately shoved toward featureless, on the
theory that it's somehow cleaner, or something like that.
*shrug* People who care about features don't have to live with the
defaults, though. It's not to hard to install whatever browser you
want, whatever wm you want (I like sawfish...), and so forth.
Defaults are just that: what happens to you if you default on your
options. So, if you don't want that to happen to you, don't default:
when you install, set up all the options however you want them and
be happy.
Hey, when it really comes down to it, the default computer setup is
currently Windows XP. Feel free to live with the default if you
want, but don't complain when it sucks, because you had your choice.
Re:Galeon RIP (Score:1, Insightful)
- You used to be able to move tabs between windows (go to the tab menu, click "Move to window" and select any open Galeon window). Now you can only detach tabs.
- Detachable favorite menus. These were great when you wanted to open many links from the same bookmark folder. You'd detach that favorites menu, click the links you want to open, and close it. (There's still an option to open ALL of a folder's bookmarks, but I rarely want to do that. You could also use the sidebar, but I've never liked that interface.)
- When using the drop-down history menu (on the back/forward toolbar buttons), you could right-click on any menu item to access a popup menu. This provided features like "open in new window", "open in new tab", and anything else you'd find if you right-clicked a link in a webpage.
- The ability to prevent the browser from recording your actions (history, URL bar history, find history, etc.) by making various files read-only. In the new version, you can make the gconf files read-only, but Galeon shows an GConf error every time you type something.
Another problem (not Galeon's fault, the same problem happens with GIMP for example) is that GTK2 doesn't work well with WindowMaker. Occasionally GTK2 apps like to have focus-wars - a new window pops up, and it fights with the old window for focus, causing both titlebars to flash until you click something.Re:They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:5, Insightful)
First, HP (Havoc Pennington) isn't on an anti-feature craze. The point is to develop a desktop that works well for everyone without requiring you to go through dozens of preference dialogs to get something that will work correctly. KDE actually has a preference, off by default, to be not horribly broken on a xinerama setup.
But, aside from that, metacity does support an always on top keybinding (I commited this about a month ago) It's just not bound by default; you can edit it using gconf-editor though.
Also, there has been talk of changing the put on workspace menu. Perhaps if idiots like you could stop whining for two seconds on slashdot and perhaps join in a useful discussion on bugzilla, you can have a say in how that gets done eventually:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.c
Also, there is no new GTK file save dialog yet; this is a feature that won't appear until gnome 2.6, since gnome 2.4 is based on gtk 2.2. The dialog you may have seen is a ximian patch to GTK, and is certainly not the final incarnation of the GTK file save dialog.
Re:They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:1, Insightful)
That's more a function of the window manager than of the desktop.
You simply need to go to your window manager's "preferences" or "settings", usually through the main program tab on the bottom left. Change "focus behavior", and how you want windows "raised" or not during focusing.
This is one of the very first things you should do when considering a new desktop, like changing the mouse sensitivity. All window managers / desktops have some degree of control over this.
If your window manager doesn't offer the degree of control you want, consider a different window manager (e.g. sawfish) but still consider using the same desktop (e.g. Gnome).
As for file managers, I wonder why these are even included in desktop managers -- they would seem better as standalone apps. (I'm sure there are standalone file browsers, but I don't have any suggestions since I mostly use command-line for this kind of thing.)
Re:They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:2, Insightful)
Why don't you go and look at the window manager in windows or in Mac OS X -- two desktops renowned for good user interfaces -- and ask yourself how configurable they are. They answer is they aren't. At all. Metacity is much more configurable out of the box than either system.
And the always on top keybinding is a compromise for advanced users only. gconf keys with no user interface are commonly used in the gnome desktop for advanced options that aren't really needed. And if you don't think that gconf-editor is sufficiently intuitive, why don't you stop whining and write some fucking code.
Man you people just piss me off.
Re:They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:3, Insightful)
I briefly used metacity, last summer, when Mandrake made it the default in GNOME. From what I saw, metacity simply did not "just work". It was a pain in the ass trying to get it to a sane configuration that approached what I had with sawfish, only to find that it couldn't be configured to have sawfish-esque functionality; at the very least the dialogs offered no options and searches on gnome.org could not find gconf keys to accomplish what I wanted. Finally I said, "Fuck it," and I killall -15'd metacity and went back to sawfish. Since then, the only times I've used metacity are for the few seconds it takes to killall -15 it and start sawfish.
The point is that no program can work out of the box for every user. Configuration and customization will always be required for a substantial portion of any userbase. By removing configuration options, you guarantee that not only will your program not work out of the box for a substantial portion of users, but that it will never work for that portion of the users.
I use Windows on a fairly regular basis, and I can barely work with its window manager. TweakUI helps a little. As bad as Windows is, MacOS (any version) is worse, AFAIC. I'll grant that metacity is better than the Windows and Mac WMs, and given a choice, I'd take metacity. I'll also grant that SARS is better than cancer or AIDS, and given a choice, I'd take SARS.
It's gconf itself (not the editor) that I have a problem with. I have yet to see a Registry-esque configuration system that surpasses user-readable configuration files. Maybe part of the problem is the fact that there is no real documentation as to what keys are available (this is true, as far as I can tell, of both the Windows Registry, and of gconf). Windows went from a simple, easy-to-understand, well-documented system of human- and machine-readable INI files to an obtuse, poorly-documented system based on a non-human-readable database. gconf at least is XML underneath, but XML isn't that human-readable.
Feel free to ignore this; the very word metacity (where the fuck does that word come from?) will, unless a new version comes down the pipe that blows my socks off, continue to make me retch.