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:3, Interesting)
Gnome is rapidly becoming a major clusterfuck these days. Which is a shame, because the only other real option is selling yourself to SCO (aka... Trolltech's owner), and subjecting yourself to the full GPL just to write desktop apps, or paying SCO $3000 for every developer.
Enough with this FUD. SCO own less than 2% of Trolltech. Trolltech put out an extremely high quality GPL'd product, and you complain? Write a better one, fix the problems in Gnome, or shut up.
To be honest... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:3, Interesting)
As for the reasons why it is the default in Gnome, that might have something to do with the fact that MPG is co-operative and convinced the gnome release team he was aligned with their goals, as opposed to the Galeon team, who did not.
as a galeon user who doesn't use gnome... (Score:3, Interesting)
contantly changing ui (Score:5, Interesting)
For instance, I used to be able to have my tabs on the bottom, then i couldn't, then i could, and now i can't again. I vastly prefer galeon's tabs to mozilla's, being one of those features that keeps me with galeon even now, but i'm sick of this on again , off again feature.
Another on again, off again feature I like was the ability to right click on the handle of one of my custom toolbars and opening the entire folder in tabs. They recently re-added this feature in the bookmarks menu, but I really miss it on the toolbar itself.
Frankly, if there were another browser that had a similar level of control of bookmarks and custom toolbars, I'd switch to it in a second. Nothing else comes quite that close to galeon's level of customizibility.
I just wish Galeon wasn't so flighty in it's feature set.
Re:Galeon is unbloated without XUL interface (Score:1, Interesting)
Their MANIFESTO:
"While Mozilla has an excellent rendering engine, its default XUL-based interface is considered to be overcrowded and bloated"
The interview:
"We still have problems dealing with the bad image we have of 1.3 as a featureless POS"
"We've come a long way after hitting rock-bottom"
So, what is that 'problem' ? Let's see, what they want to do:
"Dump the albatross called bonoboui"
"getting rid of the pain called bonoboui"
"Getting rid of libbonoboui. I hate libbonoboui."
But what IS bonobo UI ? Bonoboui is the UI widget set they used, instead of XUL:
"While quite nice for static UI, it's painful for dynamic menus and toolbars"
"Using it has caused a lot of harm to galeon"
This is funny shit. Their MANIFEST says that they wnt to do a XUL-less browser because XUL sucks (they know better), and their replacement sucks two orders of magnitude more.
I have an idea for them: why don't they use XUL for the interface ? It is quite nice for both static _and_ dynamic UI... And I know a couple of XUL browser that are really fast. And modular. And extensible. And maintained.
Re:Oh yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
http://vtbsd.net/galeon_shot.png [vtbsd.net]
This is Galeon 1.3.7 on FreeBSD 5.1, with all ports kept up-to-date.
Re:They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:5, Interesting)
Couldn't agree more about HP's destructive anti-feature craze. It's even hurt Galeon. Where did "Save Session" go? Where did "File Bookmark" go? I use Gnome because I find KDE too circus (cirKus?) -like, but man, they've got to leave *some* features in.
Some other silliness:
I hope the galeon people take getting dropped as a liberation rather than a punishment. Let them get back to making a great browser rather than trying to conform to someone's warped interpretation of monkey-computer interface guidelines.
Re:They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's damn certainly RH's choice, and I'm going to be DAMN pissed if Galeon will be missing from RH X or whatever it's going to be called.
And what comes to Gnome release teams "goal" these days it seems to be to target people with iq10, fine, they may find most potential users there, but at the same time that totally alienates more tech-knowledgeable people, how do they think they're going to get any more developers if those said developers can't even use their own software because it's too damn braindead?
Most people that write software for free do so primarily because they wish to use it themselves, not because they wish to make world better place to live.
Galeon is unstable under KDE (Score:1, Interesting)
Why Galeon is not included in GNOME (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is simply not true. We are trying to follow the HIG as much as we can, but when it comes to a choice between blindly following the HIG or a feature we feel is essential, we'll probably always be choosing the feature.
It's Human Interface Guidelines, we are still allowed to think for ourselves.
Is it just me... (Score:3, Interesting)
Or is this "interview" really not all that interesting? For someone, such as myself, who has not followed Galeon closely for the last year or so, it would help to provide some concrete background on the problems they've had. Instead, this so-called interview is basically comprised of two topics, rehashed over and over: libbonobo sucks, and Crispin 0wnz.
This interview sheds very little light on Galeon's past, present, or future. It seems mostly like a page full of bitching by the main developers, with little substance. Tell us about the recent history of Galeon, good and bad, the direction the project will hopefully take in the coming months, etc. "We need to get back to 1.2" is not very helpful, especially for people who don't follow Galeon closely.
Re: Why Galeon is not included in GNOME (Score:3, Interesting)
> the Galeon developers do not seem to be 100% behind GNOME's goals
The same can be said for the newsreader Pan: the author ripped all the GNOME stuff out a while back.
I wonder whether this might be the beginning of a trend, and kind of hope it is. IMO GNOME 2 has been a major step in the wrong direction.
Re:They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:3, Interesting)
Full moherproof browser (epiphany) for default, and yours on demand for people who need features.
As for me I'm very pleased with Epiphany, dumped Galeon just because I don't wanna bother with features and second reason are bookmarks
What default browser needs is not features it's higher usability as a non brainer.
Re: Galeon RIP (Score:3, Interesting)
> I had almost daily crashes with early 1.3 releases. At least since 1.3.5 things are shaping up, I only get an occasional crash now and then, about once a week or so. Version 1.2.x was rocksolid here, I could keep the same window on my desktop for weeks without having it crash.
I think there's a very slow memory leak in 1.2, since it gradually eats memory and crashes on me very predictably every 2-3 weeks or so.
Of course my usage habits may be somewhat out of spec. Once they introduced tabs I almost completely quit using bookmarks. Right now I have 1-5 Galeon windows open on each of 12 virtual desktops, and 1-50 tabs open in each window. I may be asking for trouble.
Of course that makes it a big pain when I have to restart Galeon and let it reload a few hundred pages over an unreliable telephone link.
> No, the other way around. If you open a link in new tab, without automatically jumping to it, it still gives focus to the new tab. It should keep the current tab in focus, which for example will give you a PageDown on hitting the spacebar (very usefull when reading
I'm not quite sure what you're describing, but it sounds similar to the one thing that I find most annoying other than the crashes. I like to read a story, opening interesting links in other tabs as I go, and then read the tabs when I've finished the story. But apparently the scrolling focus is lost whenever another tab finishes loading. I use the arrow keys to scroll down a story, but something happening in another tab will make it lose focus and I have to click the page or the scollbar to make the scrolling work again.
Re:They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:2, Interesting)
*looks at his XFCE 4 desktop*
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your GNOME and KDE.
RC 3 is due out tomorrow, why not give it a try? You might be pleasantly suprised.
Almost Perfect (Score:4, Interesting)
I have to admit that I'd like to see the per-site preference behavior of cookies extended to Javascript, image loading and animation, font forcing, color forcing, zoom, etc. Probably the most valuable improvement would be a way to use a different text editor entirely, in another window if necessary. But, mainly, it now has almost exactly the feature set I need in a browser, and hardly anything else. I wish it would stay that way.
I've been using 1.3 since the beginning, and it was pretty sucky for a while, but I'm glad they did what they did. The version I'm using now is so much nicer, all around, than Epiphany, that it is clearly only politics that made Gnome switch to the latter. I'll never switch, because the Epiphany developers are a bunch of ideologues who have announced they will never add the features that make the browser useful and usable for me.
Re:They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:2, Interesting)
Umm...this has been around for like 2 years now, right? And while it isn't perfect, its worlds better than the default dialog. Why in the world hasn't it become the default, at least until someone writes something better?