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Mozilla The Internet

Galeon 1.0 Released 188

Posted by michael from the faster-than-a-speeding-opera dept.
exceed writes: "Finally, after about a year, version one of Galeon -- the GTK+ web browser based on Mozilla's rendering engine, gecko -- has been released. If you plan on installing this for the first time, you might want to read the 'INSTALL' files included within the package for requirements. Head on over to the project's file list at Sourceforge."
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Galeon 1.0 Released More

Galeon 1.0 Released

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  • a little correction (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 24, 2001 @04:58AM (#2606341)
    "Galeon -- the GTK+ web browser based on Mozilla's rendering engine, gecko -- has been released"

    Folks, Galeon is a GNOME web browser, can we start making the distinction? There is a differance, SkipStone [muhri.net] afaik is the Gtk+ web browser and does not depend on any Gnome lib.

    • I fell for that, but looking at their site's FAQ pointed me to SkipStone. (I'm not really a fan of GNOME and I didn't want to install the endless GNOME dependencies.)

      Skipstone is great! I just installed it, and I'm using it to make this post. One of my problems with Mozilla is that it takes so long to load or for dialog boxes to pop up. No such problems with Skipstone...it only takes a few seconds to start and dialogs come up instantly.

      It doesn't appear to have as many settings as Mozilla (although I don't think I'll need the extra ones), and it doesn't appear to have a menu option to bring a file dialog up, so I have to type in the full pathname to look at files, but this appears to be a very nice browser suited for my resource conservative tastes.

  • Why? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by burtonator ( 70115 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @04:59AM (#2606344)
    OK.

    I am seriously not trying to troll.

    When Galeon first came out I really liked it because it gave us the rendering quality of gecko without the weight of Mozilla.

    Then Mozilla started to improve and I haven't looked back. XUL isn't that bad when compared to GTK and the programming model is nice.

    Are there any other major reasons for using Galeon that I am missing?

    It isn't much faster anymore.

    There are some nice feature (and competition keeps everyone on their toes). I do like the ability to have with the browser toolbar.

    Mozilla also needs better bookmarklet integration.

    It would be nice if I could hack the Mozilla XUL framework easier (like I can hack Emacs lisp).

    ... I am sure the Galeon team really believes in the project or they wouldn't have put in all this effort. :)

    Kevin

    • MANIFESTO (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ... OK. from the website. I posted AC so that I am not a Karma whore..

      A web browser is more than an application, it is a way of thinking, it is a way of seeing the world. Galeon's principles are simplicity and standards compliance.

      Simplicity:
      While Mozilla has an excellent rendering engine, its default XUL-based interface is considered to be overcrowded and bloated. Furthermore, on slower processors even trivial tasks such as pulling down a menu is less than responsive.

      Galeon aims to utilize the simplest interface possible for a browser. Keep in mind that simple does not necessarily mean less powerful. We believe the commonly used browsers of today are too big, buggy, and bloated. Galeon addresses simplicity with a small browser designed for the web -- not mail, newsgroups, file management, instant messenging or coffee making. The UNIX philosophy is to design small tools that do one thing, and do it well.

      Galeon also address simplicity with modularity to make a light and powerful application. If something can be implemented using external applications or components, we use it rather than wasting resources in the web browser. Integration will be achived with CORBA, Bonobo, and the ever popular command line.

      Mail will be handled with your favorite e-mail application (Evolution, pine, mutt, balsa, pronto, whatever); GTM (Gnome Transfer Manager) will be used to download files in a standardized manner.

    • Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)

      by pthisis ( 27352 )
      Indeed, on my machine a freshly launched Mozilla uses _less_ RAM than Galeon:

      sumner 23726 22.4 9.8 35376 25052 pts/0 R 05:00 0:03 /usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin
      sumner 23722 0.0 11.7 43232 29896 pts/0 S 04:51 0:00 /usr/bin/galeon-bin

      29MB for galeon vs. 25MB for mozilla. It's tough to tell how much is shared under 2.4 kernels, sadly.

      Both have 4 threads, so stack utilization should be similar.

      Still, I like the fact that Galeon uses the same widgets as everything else (blends with my themes, etc) and it seems faster psychologically. I've not done objective timings.

      This is with Galeon 1.0 and mozilla 9.6.

      Sumner
      • That would make sense for a freshly launched version. Why? Galeon still has to load all of the Mozilla DLLs. Try opening about 20 windows and report back.
    • I sometimes ask the same question. Now that Mozilla isn't that much slower, I mainly use and upgrade Galeon out of habit. And I occasionally fire up Mail/News. It's likely I'll stop using Galeon at some point, but it has been a pleasure to use up till this point.

      Maybe there are plans for deeper Gnome integration with Galeon than would be possible with Vanilla Mozilla?

    • At least two erasons (Score:5, Interesting)

      by VFVTHUNTER ( 66253 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @05:16AM (#2606374) Homepage
      1. You, one click from the menubar, can turn Java and Javascript off. You simply uncheck them (directly from the menubar, not some cheesy pop up window). This is quite nice.

      2. Been using Galeon for about three months now. Interestingly, haven't seen a single pop up (eg X10) in about three months now. And new windows can be set to open not in another window, but in a new tab.

      3. Its bookmarking abilities quite frankly kick ass. Especially the XML-based myportal. You have to use it to see how awesome it is. The "smart" toolbars feature is also equally cool.

      4. In the preferences menu, it allows you to choose what mouse buttons/key combo's you want to do things with.

      5. Gtk is prettier than Qt...no offense KDE folks, it just is, IMVHO.

      6. Its a cool enough project that A) they jumped from 0.12.8 to 1.0 and B)the KDE-propagandist website, "Slashdot," actually saw need to mention it :)

      /me thinks this is so gonna get modded down as flame, even tho its not.
      • RE point 6:

        If you'd told people 2 years ago that Slashdot would be considered a "KDE-propagandist website", a) people would ask "What is Slashdot?", but b) you'd be laughed at by people who did actually know what Slashdot was.

        This place used to be GNOME-fanboy central. It's much more balanced now.
        • I agree with that. For the record, I was just giving CmdrTaco something to think about, and also for the record, I use both KDE and Gnome. My favorite Gnome apps are Galeon, Glade, and Same-gnome, whilst my favorite KDE apps are KPoker, KPoker, and KPoker :)

          Galeon 1.0 still won't compile without my editing the configure script - oaf, glade, and several other dependencies (which exist, with the right versions too) fail. Seems galeon's configure looks for them by calling them from gnome-config, eg gnome-config --blah --blah --libxml, while libxml (correct version mind you) can be found with /usr/local/bin/libxml-config. I had edited the previous (0.11 and 12) versions of galeon to compile correctly. Sadly, this problem has not been ameliorated with 1.0.

          At any rate I rpm'ed it. You wouldn't believe the deps I had to force off to get rpm to install it. I honestly didn't expect Gnome to be alive after I restarted X, but here I am, trolling with 1.0.

          (A few seconds later)...OK, um I just previewed this comment, and all I have to say is it's a good thing the scroll mouse works in galeon 1.0, because the scrollBAR isn't showing up on the new page.

          Was jumping from 0.12.x to 1.0 such a good idea?
          • Was jumping from 0.12.x to 1.0 such a good idea?


            Well, perhaps it's just me but i tend to look at the version number of a program when i install it. Any opensource project with a 1.* (or higher) version number immediately gets my attention since they actually dared to go "stable". As long as they are developing the software, keep that visible in the version numbers. When they consider it stable and want a "release", make that visible in the version number as well.

            If its "stable", its 1.0 imho =)
          • WTF? Galeon compiles just fine if you have the right versions of libs and your system isn't all fucked up. I also installed the RPM, just to make sure your system is all fucked up, and it worked fine. NO need to --force anything.

          • Was jumping from 0.12.x to 1.0 such a good idea?


            Yes. Galeon's version numbers never meant anything with respect to how close it was to a "1.0" release. I.e. 0.12.x was really just a label, it had nothing to do with it being 10 major releases from 1.0. I've felt Galeon has been close to 1.0, if not there already, for a few months now. It's actually very appropriate.
      • Try this for number 1:

        http://www.xulplanet.com/downloads/view.cgi?catego ry=applications&view=prefbar [xulplanet.com]

        Lets you kill fonts, coloring, javascript, AND popups from the toolbar. In Mozilla of course...

        The thing that I love about XUL is that many of the interface-related things that people brag about in other browsers can be (and have been) implemented and installed with the click of a button.
      • they jumped from 0.12.8 to 1.0

        You should read this as "dot twelve," not "dot one two." The versions before were 0.11, 0.10, 0.9 etc. So this isn't a particularly impressive increase in version numbers. (In fact, it is one of the very few projects that didn't seem to feel the need to release 1.0 just because 0.9 was done.)

      • Even better, you can detach the menubar that has the Java/Javascript settings, and then you can leave it floating on the side and turn things on/off really easily.

      • You say:

        1. You, one click from the menubar, can turn Java and Javascript off. You simply uncheck them (directly from the menubar, not some cheesy pop up window). This is quite nice.

        What is configuration options this complex doing on the menu? That will just serve to clutter the menu and make it harder to find what you want.

        I couldn't find the research (see Microsoft Research [microsoft.com] or Tomalak's Realm [tomalak.org] for the link), but there is an optimum complexity of the menu length versus menu depth. And having configuration on the menu makes it into a 1x16 depth menu, instead of a more useable 4x4 or 2x8 menu.

        • No. here's the menubar:

          File Edit View Tab Settings Bookmarks Go Tools Help

          Java/JS Stuff is under Settings, and it's only 9 deep.

          This is one situation where Free Software greatly exceeds proprietary software: Because the users themselves are writing the code, and because they are under no shipment deadline, they have time to actually use the app, and get input from others, as to what things to have quickly available, and what not to.

          Just like everything else, the "optimal GUI" only exists in theory. However, because humans (who vary much more greatly than any physical device) are what we are optomizing for, the hitting the target of "optimal GUI" is a much more lofty goal than developing an optomized version of anything else (eg, transistor, blood pump, etc).

          You can write tons of books about the correct way to create a GUI, but no two people will feel the same way about what you create. But having access to the code, and the input from others, allows developers to create GUI's that please the most people (it also lets them know what things people are going to want to customize by themselves). So the majority wins, just like any good democracy :)

          • As the users are the coders you often run into two things:

            • Coders aren't designers
            • Oooh oooh! Look ma!

            The best result is when you get some aesthetics / design / useability people working alongside the coders to knock out their stupid features. The programmer may be able to figure out that C-c C-x C-n C-q is the correct key combination to exit the program, but most users just want a big 'X' in the corner.

            Then there is adding lots of useless itty-bitty features. Here FS really shines. Take for example hand-editing of prefs.js in Mozilla. The majority of the stuff that goes into there would make the interface far too clunky, but for the few people that want to frob it, the ability is there.

            Now regarding theory vs practice ... I've found the 2x8 (two deep, eight items per depth) is good in practice. At one time my documents where organised in a 4x4 (four deep, four items per depth) fashion - very deeply nested, that sort of thing. Finding documents was a nuisance. So I recategorised them into 1x16 (one deep, sixteen items per depth), and it was just 1 click to find what I wanted. But that got a little bit unwieldy as I added more categories, and I eventually settled on a 2x8 solution.

            FWIW, the Mozilla crew have got quite extensive useability and other things in their documentation. They actually spent plenty of time on planning how it would act. Cheers Netscape! And you too can request features for Mozilla (file as severity 'enhancement').

    • Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)

      by yota ( 165006 )
      > It would be nice if I could hack the Mozilla XUL framework easier (like I can hack Emacs lisp).

      You might want to try PatchMaker for that:

      http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/patch-maker/

      it should allow you to hack the framework fairly easily.

      Andrea

    • Why Galoen is great. (Score:5, Informative)

      by benmhall ( 9092 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @06:08AM (#2606435) Homepage Journal
      After finally getting tired of waiting for Mozilla , I had been using Konqueror all of the time up until about a month ago. Since then I've been using Galeon non-stop. I now think that it's the best browser option in Linux. Here's why:

      1) It uses Gecko, so the rendering engine is pretty much second to none. I almost never have any problems viewing any webpages with it.

      2) Because it uses Gecko, I get a lot of great things from the mozilla project. I have all of the plugins I want, I have a browser engine that most webmasters have heard of, so they listen if I complain, I get great standards compliance

      3) Because it is an actual gnome app it integrates very well with other GTK apps. Where Mozilla/NS6.x goes it's own way and as a result doesn't really integrate properly in any OS, Galeon looks and behaves just like all of the other great GTK apps I use (grip, sylpheed, j-pilot, gimp, abiword, gnumeric etc.)

      4) When I really get surfing I often have >10+ browsing sessions open. With Galeon this is all within a single window, and is handled brilliantly. I really miss the browser tabs when using Konqueror, I get a better rendering engine than Opera, and the tabs are more configurable/faster than Mozilla. As a complete bonus, I keep all browsing sessions between uses of Galeon. As far as I know, Mozilla does not do this. Also, when I'm using many browser sessions I find Galeon to switch between them much faster than Mozilla (though this is getting better)

      5) Fewer UI inconsistencies. Mozilla has many odd XUL-related UI bugs. (for instance, open preferences and expand out all of the options. The options go past the end of the dialog, but you can't scroll down, so some options are cut off.)

      6) Galeon is very simple and stable. I've been using it exclusively for a while now and I've had exactly one crash in this time. This is by far the best stability I've seen in a browser more complex than lynx for some time.

      7) It has many other nice extras. Bookmarklets are nice, the security and cookie options are easy to understand and change, the portal is great, the search tabs are handy, and everything is fast and integrated.

      8) It's just a browser. It lets me easily use whatever mail client I want (sylpheed, kmail, evolution etc.) it lets me use an extrnal ftp/download manager if I want.

      To sum up, I like Galeon because it's fast, stable, and has a ton of features that are either missing from Mozilla and other browsers, or are better implemented in Galeon (like tabs and cookie management.)
      • I still use Konqueror, and probably will continue to use it (Kate is my favourite text editor, makes sense to use the KDE libs for more than 1 prog). The *only* thing from Mozilla and Galeon that I miss is tabbed browsing... it's a real killer feature.
      • Cool! I haven't used Galeon before, I prefer Opera, but, the reason that I prefer Opera is because of the tabbed windows in the browser. I didn't know that Gecko did this, so now I'm going to have to give it a try. I love Opera, but I have an email client, and an chat client, I want a browser and it looks like Galeon might fit that bill.
    • Are there any other major reasons for using Galeon that I am missing?

      It isn't much faster anymore.

      It is, at least on my AMD380 with 192MB RAM. Galeon starts up within seconds, whereas Mozilla takes at least 10. Also, Galeon is much more responsive with opening new tabs, etc. For me personally, Galeon has been more stable and feels more solid than than any of the Mozilla-releases.
    • There are some VERY good reasons...
      1) When you re-start after a crash (which is usually the fault of Mozilla), you get an option of opening each page you were viewing when it crashed. Very nice...
      2) It IS still a lot faster. At least on my 500Mhz Athlon / 256 MB. Some people tell me I should upgrade. I say "I don't need to; I run Linux". And then they say "Ah ... but what about Mozilla. It's SLOW." And I say "I don't need to; I run Galeon". And they shut up.
      3) The config system is well thought out. Things are where they should be, and everything behaves as expected.
      4) The themes are SUPER cool. And they acutally work, unlike Mozilla themes, which need to be re-written every new moon and are sub-standard anyway.
      5) The rendering is actually faster than Mozilla. I don't know why this is, since it's based on Mozilla, but it's true.
      In summary, I think there are a LOT of things besides the speed improvements that Galeon has to offer. When I upgrade to an Athlon XP, or possibly a Clawhammer, I will still use Galeon.
      • Just to take issue with point 2, I have a P3-500, generally acknowledged to be slower than your spec, also with 256MB.
        I don't feel the need to upgrade either, and I run Windows 2000. The only reason I can see for upgrading in the near future is divx compression.

        While people with 486s may use the Linux argument, once you get to 500MHz Athlon, Windows isn't the sluggish beast people like to claim (can't comment on XP though)
    • Why do I use galeon?
      1. Because I can close a tab without going to it (each one has it's own x)
      2. Because 1.0 has a button to clear the location box!!! Now I can actually use my 3rd button to paste stuff! This alone is enough to make it my primary browser!
      3. Because it can use GTM to download. (Better than having the full browser running while I download a 600MB iso.) It doesn't seem to like my version of gtm any more (0.4.9) any one else had issues?
      • > It doesn't seem to like my version of gtm any more (0.4.9) any one else had issues?

        you need >= 0.4.10 because of its change in using oaf instead of gnorba
      • In preferences (under User Interface, Mouse) you can set the middle button to "Paste and load selection as url". This means you don't even need to use the "clear location" toolbar button, you can just click with the middle button on the page you're viewing. Fortunately, this doesn't interfere with clicking on a link with the middle button (which opens the link in a new window/tab).

    • Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by GauteL ( 29207 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @06:30AM (#2606457)
      1. It looks and feels like a native Gnome-app, unlike Mozilla.
      2. It has a few nice extra features yes.
      3. It still loads faster.
      4. The tabbed browsing feels more mature.
      5. It has nice crash-recovery.

      The main thing for me, is the Gnome look and feel. In all these years with Netscape and Mozilla I've only dreamt of a browser that feels "native".
    • My main machine right now is the Tabernacle of Sin. I built it 4 years ago before coming to college, and by today's standards it is slow. It has a PII 300 with 256 MB of RAM. The Mozilla interface is a bit too slow for me to comfortably use on this machine. Galeon fixes that. I also like the ad blocking features, tabbed browsing, search bars, and other options that Galeon provides. I know Mozilla is getting some of these things integrated, but why use something slower when I can use something faster?

      I am in the process of building a new box with a 1.2 Gig Thunderbird. I'll probably still use Galeon on that.
    • I still use moz for my main machine but galeon works so well for my laptop. The best thing about it is the ability to use the full screen to surf, using the whole of my laptop LCD is really fucking sweet. Doing the same on my monitor doesn't give the same effect, 1280x1024 is just to big a res to browse at.
    • I love the tabs. They have really changed the way I surf the web. I middle-click on everything that looks interesting, and it loads in the background while I continue reading the page.

      The bookmark editor is so easy to use. I don't have to bring up a new window to edit each bookmark's properties.

      Being a GNOME app has some advantages. Tear-off menus are really nice. You can tear off a bookmark folder for example. Another GNOME (or Gtk?) feature is that you can assign hotkeys to any menu item. Since bookmarks are menu items, you can assign hotkeys to them.

      Right-click to go back a page is a nice feature. It's really handy for surfing, as I don't have to move the mouse pointer all the way to the left corner to click on the back button, nor do I have to use the keyboard.

      - Amit
      • > They have really changed the way I surf the web. I middle-click on everything that looks interesting, and it loads in the background while I continue reading the page.

        Opera users have been doing this for a few years now :)
    • Mozilla also needs better bookmarklet integration.

      Can you elaborate on that? The bookmarklets I wrote work fine in Mozilla. (I can't test Galeon because it only runs on Linux.)
    • Galeon is definitely, noticably faster than Mozilla. On slower hardware, this difference can be quite noticable. I have a dual Gigahertz workstation class machine, and Mozilla is still definitely slower!

      Galeon is MUCH more stable than Mozilla. This may have changed recently, but Galeon is rock solid. Mozilla crashed within 5 seconds the last time I tried to use it (admittedly about two months ago).

      Galeon has had tabbed browsing support for much longer, so it is likely to be much more stable in this area.

      Galeon has very nice GNOME integration. Handlers for mail, ftp, news, etc. can use programs defined in the GNOME control panel for those URL types. To be fair, I don't know where Mozilla is with this, last I heard it wasn't happening.

  • Some of the changes.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anthony Boyd ( 242971 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @04:59AM (#2606345) Homepage

    At least at this point, there is no list of what's new on their Web site. If you download the file, you can check out the changelog. Here are some changes for 1.0 and previous release (which is where most of the interesting stuff happened):

    • disable gfs for 1.0
    • toggle the history dock on history menu activation. bug #65151.
    • support for spinners in ~/.galeon/spinners
    • additional check for NULL returned from gconf on /apps/galeon/gconf_test to __TIME__ comparison.
    • Added pt.
    • remove the fixed width of the persistent data manager dialog. bug #64413.
    • use a build identifier = __TIME__ in /apps/galeon/gconf_test to test if we are not running a new build/version. If so set the mozilla prefs explicitly.
    • Including "xpinstall.enabled" = FALSE and "network.http.accept-encoding" = "gzip, deflate, compress;q=0.9"
    • do not load mozilla prefs explicitly. Mozilla does it. This was causing the autoproxy bug
    • Fixed bug where window positions were not being saved correctly in sessions.

    Also, they added a few new themes [sourceforge.net] (Azundris & Glass66 & Glass75) and some new spinners [sourceforge.net] (I believe Netscape used to call these "throbbers").

  • Bloat almighty (Score:2, Interesting)

    by GnulixRulz ( 453448 )
    While I applaud the efforts of the Galeon and Skipstone teams, they are just front ends depending on the full set of libs from mozilla itself -- about 25 megs of overhead compiled, and a lot more time and space if compiling everything from source.

    I understand that nowadays disk space and memory are almost free (wrt those quantities), but besides not wasting even abundant resources, it seems to be somewhat futile to write a fast front end to a browser when it is such a small part of the total code base it needs to run.

    Five years ago, when working at the University's computing labs, we handed out floppy disks with a full working browser (nutscrape-1.0). It was an old version, granted, but the newest version at the time was only minimally larger (but didn't fit on a disk anymore). In the years since, have our desires of a browser's capability increased by a factor of 16 like the resources used have?

    While the optimisations scheduled to be worked on in mozilla after the next version hopefully will reduce its footprint significantly, I think the current state is rather sad.

    But at least the free browsers are a viable alternative to Internet Exploider now.

    PS: Christ, Malda, Daylight Savings Time ended almost a month ago!

    • Re:Bloat almighty (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I agree with you, however, I do know that the mozilla team are working on improving the embedding packages - there are already some at ftp.mozilla.org and work is being done to reduce the inner circular depndancies from within mozilla to make the embedding packages only contain really whats needed to run a browser like SkipStone or Galeon.
    • > PS: Christ, Malda, Daylight Savings Time ended almost a month ago!

      This is offtopic, but before x people make comments I'll clarify.

      I checked my preferences and as I registered over the summer, the time zone was set to EDT, which didn't revert back to standard time. Kind of useless then, maybe there should be an EST5EDT option?

    • Re:Bloat almighty (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Really, you sort of dismissed your initial point of bloat. The fact is that any system capable of running Mozilla/Galeon/GNOME well can spare some disk space.

      As for the point? There's no real need to rewrite the rendering code, since gecko kicks butt, but some people don't like the Mozilla for whatever reason. As a Galeon user, I much prefer the user interface. The interface is native (ie, it looks and behaves much more like the other GNOME applications I use), and it is easier to use. Mozilla, for example, just recently integrated support for tabs, but this support kinda sucks as there is no real kill tab button. Furthermore, there still exists a sizable speed difference with things like opening new windows in Galeon over Mozilla.
    • have our desires of a browser's capability increased by a factor of 16 like the resources used have? Yes, they have. There are a few of us, (myself included, on very rare occasions) who still use lynx as a browser, but even I am ready to admit that I expect much more "web experience" [:-)] now than I did 5 years ago, or even in the good ol' days of MILNET/ARPANET. Yes, I am that old:-)

  • Under Win32 (Score:1, Informative)

    by jeriqo ( 530691 )
    For those forced to use Win32, the alternative to Galeon is K-meleon.

    It is available from Sourceforge.net too: kmeleon.sf.net [sourceforge.net]
  • HTML is not such a complicated standard, it's well documented now, and there are lots of HTML parsers available. Why aren't there more full HTML rendering engines besides Mozilla, IE, and KHTML? And why is Mozilla so big? Even if the Galeon front end is pretty light, it still uses the same rendering engine.

    (BTW, I find Galeon has been getting less stable for me: downloads have started to fail, it crashes with some frequency when exiting, etc. I hope 1.0 will fix that.)

    • It's not only about simple HTML; a good rendering engine has to handle all the other things besides that like CSS, DHTML, JavaScript etc.
      I'd say that these cause 70% of the headaches and amount of code (some would say 'bloat').
      • Well, I'd be happy without those features--just a decent, complete HTML4 renderer.

        Still, I don't think even adding JavaScript and DHTML should make the renderer all that big either.

        • Then use links [freshmeat.net] or lynx [freshmeat.net] (links is better by a mile IMHO... but open source is about choice, after all).

          If all you want to view is the text without and display enhancements (which is what CSS is used for by any self respecting web designer), you need not a graphical web browser.

        • DHTML is just a marketing term.

          What DHTML is, is really a combination of four things. The first is a content model. That's HTML. The second is a property set for these objects; CSS fills the bill. The third is a scripting language to actually do stuff with; JavaScript comes into play here. And the last thing you need is an object model, like the W3C DOM.

          In and of themselves, none of these four things are terribly complex. However, putting them together makes life a lot more interesting for the developer.

          You're right in that browsers don't have to be huge, even in this day and age. Opera proves that. But Mozilla has one further goal in mind: portability. That becomes a much greater issue, because it can greatly influence design decisions which can afffect speed and footprint.
    • HTML is not such a complicated standard

      If only there was a standard...
    • HTML in all its forms, and the number of sites that break those standards, plus supporting GIF, JPG, PNG, CSS (1&2), DOM, Javascript, HTTP/HTTPS/FTP protocols, plus rendering all of the above acceptably is NOT easy.


      Any one could knock up an HTML parser in a couple of days but feed it some of the shit living out on the web and it soon be on its knees whimpering.


      The Gecko engine is meant to eat anything approaching standards conformance for breakfast which explains why it's so large. To be sure some of the largeness is attributable to a Mozilla perennial favourite - bloat (inefficient structures, duplicate strings, overuse of inlining, overuse of XPCOM etc.) but the code is pretty lean.

    • Strange that galeon crashes for you. It has been rock solid for me since probably 0.12.5 (maybe earlier). I'm using 0.12.8 now and it's super stable. I'm pretty sure I haven't had galeon crash for 2 months or so. Can't even remember the last time it crashed.

      I don't go to sites that use java, although I do go to sites that use flash and use to go to sites that used quicktime (I could see it using codeweaver's crossover plugin, but that stopped working for some reason).

      Perhaps it's not galeon's fault and you just have a buggy system. I use Debian GNU/Linux Sid (unstable). It maybe be unstable but apparently they're doing something right since I never have galeon crash.

  • I really like the idea of lean and mean front end, and sophisticated rendering backend. I mean, I really like it. So why am I not using Galeon yet?

    The main reason is that one has to have up to date mozilla source handy to build it, and the mozilla source code is huge. Downloading the latest mozilla source tar.gz over a modem takes about 2 hours, and for me (and most other Australians on a permanent link) would cost nearly $7 in bandwidth charges alone. It's just enormous.

    Now that Galeon has hit 1.0, is it feasible for the gecko component of mozilla to be extracted and packaged as a library perhaps, to be downloaded seperately for use with galeon? I know that it would certainly encourage at least one more person to try Galeon out.

    • In my experience, just using the latest Moz release for the latest Galeon packages works quite fine. Of course, it's not quite as clean as source for some people's situations, but... *shrug*

      And from what I've read, they're working on improving on this, maybe providing a Galeon-only Moz download. Now if I could only get Nautilus to play nicely with Moz...

    • You don't need the source, you can use the precompiled tarball or the rpms. What you do need however, is the header files, but instead of getting the source tarball, I just get mozilla-devel-0.9.6-0.i386.rpm. That contains all the header files you'll need.

  • Laundry list for the galeon-dev folk reading (Score:5, Informative)

    by VFVTHUNTER ( 66253 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @06:47AM (#2606472) Homepage
    First off, you guys are doing a great job. Themes, spinners, preferences, no pop-ups, Flash, etc. All wonderful stuff. Tabs and myportal especially.

    Here's a few things that are bugging me tho:

    1. This may be a gnome or gtk problem, but when I click to download a link and the directory chooser window opens, if I click on another directory in which to store the file, the pop up window kills the name of the file and I have to retype it in all over again. Very annoying. Also, the preferences menu won't show hidden directories. For the record, Anjuta-0.1.7 has a button which toggles the display of hiddens. Quite nice.

    2. I mentioned this another post...yeah, um, my scrollbar is GONE. Couldn't find a place to toggle it on/off in the preferences menu. If it is in there, it obvoiusly needs to be turned on by default. Perhaps it will help the developers if I tell you that I've got my bookmarks folder docked, and there's a scroll bar in it. They also show up in the preferences menu, just not my html window.

    3. And this is nit-picking: If the number of items in a particular toolbar exceeds the width of the window, then the bar needs to add vertical space and continue on a sort of "next-line." The buttons aren't much use when I can't click on them, but I am not aware of a browser that doesn't have this problem.

    Damn...these are really the ONLY things that bug me about galeon. If you knew what a little bitch I am, you'd be impressed with that. Did I mention how much I like the scrollable history in the smart bookmarks folder? Being able to scroll thru a list of text searches you've already performed at a site is just damn sweet. And the text zooming...don't even get me started with how nice that is (If you bought as many parts online as I do, and got really sick of the Edit-->Preferences-->Fonts routine whenever you got to a site with a way-too-small-font, well then you understand :)

    /me doffs his cap to the entire galeon crew
    • these have been longstanding problems

      for 1 and 3 the reason is simple:
      I think there is an agreement among most of the team that hacks on top of the standard gtk+/gnome widgets are evil. Hopefully these issues will be addressed in the newer gtk+/gnome releases.

      and 2. The problem is sporadic and so far it seems noone has been able/willing to track it in more detail. Insights on why it happen would be much appreciated. bug 60881 [gnome.org]
      The known cure: reinstall mozilla and galeon and remove ~/.galeon/mozilla (the last one kills all your cookies, certificates, passwords, cache etc. so you might want to try without it, only reinstalling)
    • Type in a '.' on the filename and hit . Hidden files and directories should then appear though normally visible stuff disappears. This applies to all GNOME file open/save dialogs, though for some strange reason Galeon insists on killing filenames on chdir when prompting to save downloads. Slashdot really isn't the place to complain, http://bugzilla.gnome.org is. Btw, thumbs up to Jared 'solomon' Johnson for doing a great job packaging Galeon so far for Debian GNU/Linux.
    • All of the above and:

      4. Why did they change the style of the toolbar buttons? I really liked the flat "hover" style buttons. At first, I thought it might have been my GTK theme, but it seems the developers went with "normal" style toolbar buttons (they look especially ugly on the smart bookmarks toolbar).

      5. This may be a Mozilla problem, but is it possible to have a "white list" for cookies instead of having to allow all cookies then clicking "no" on the warning dialog? It's annoying having to deny cookies for every single new site I visit (and not to mention how big the "Cookie Sites" list gets after a while).

      Having added those nitpicks, I should add that I love Galeon!

      • 4. I think that's a global setting, whether toolbar buttons are flat or not. Somewhere in Behavior, I think, and Galeon just uses the global settings. Could be mistaken, but it's certainly flat for me.

        5. Well, you can tell it to block all cookies and then add site manually with Tools/Cookies/Allow cookies from this site. Haven't tried it, but it seems like it should work and do what you want.

    • For some reason on my Linux From Scratch machine, Galeon's configure process screwed up the src/Makefile. I ended up getting hundreds of undefined references when trying to link galeon-bin. I had to add "-lgnomevfs -lgdk_pixbuf -lxml -lglade -lgnome -ldb -lesd -lgnomeui -lart_lgpl -lglade-gnome" to GALEON_DEPENDENCY_LIBS in order to fix it.

  • I need this like I need colonic irrigation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the gnat ( 153162 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @07:47AM (#2606527)
    Netscape 4.7 crashes all the fucking time. It's really an obscenity. It's bad on Linux, but atrocious on IRIX- which I still use for a number of weird reasons (nice UI, classy computer)- and this is quite unfortunate since I like the way Netscape renders on IRIX. I'll try to buy books online and the browser keeps going down like a transvestite in a subway restroom. If I turn JavaScript off, stability is fine- and pages look like ass or don't even load. Especially if they're made for IE.

    Galeon's home page uses DIV and SPAN tags everywhere. I get one column about an inch wide on the left with all text and images. My CPU sounds like it's about to puke. Turn JS off, and I get a 1994-style page with gray background. None of the web pages I create have this problem, but I'm not trying to awe people with my mastery of Dreamweaver. If it can't be done in Vi or Emacs, it's not worth doing.

    I'm with Jamie Zawinski [jwz.org] on this one. The web has become a giant, soggy mess, and it seems as if the fall of the dotcoms has made everyone even more desperate to prove they've got their shit together by throwing up a huge Flash/Java/DHTML/pop-up-enabled masturbatory home page. My computer used to be used for number crunching and modelling- still makes a great X terminal and molecular graphics workstation- but that 150Mhz MIPS CPU doesn't stand a chance against today's web.

    Galeon appears to have some useful features. Perhaps it'll suck less than Netscape 6.1 on Linux. Konqueror is nice, except that running it on anything other than Linux (or perhaps BSD) is rather troublesome, and it's still unstable, and I only get 8bit color running it remotely over X. I would pay cash for a browser that would ignore pop-ups, ignore Flash, ignore Java, and render all pages correctly and quickly. In the meantime, I'm going to have to keep running 'killall netscape' every thirty minutes. I could get a better computer, but this one does almost everything I need. I guess faster 3D would be nice- and compiling can be sluggish- but why should I upgrade my computer to use the Web? This thing blew away any PC on the market when Netscape 1 came out. I refuse to be sucked into the forced-obsolescence cycle. Fuck the economy, I like my computers old and working.

    That giant sucking noise you hear is my computer loading msnbc.com.
    • Thank God, someone else has the same problems as me! I use Netscape 4.7 on a P166 and can confirm every claim of the above poster. Let me add one more: exactly what is 4.7 doing when it takes 2 seconds to turn off one of the toolbars?

      4.7 also has an unpredictable memory leak which used to cause it to expand inexorably until I was forced to killall netscape and restart. This happens less often since I upgraded to 64Mb RAM last month (don't laugh, it's way more than enough for all my other needs), but only because 4.7 normally crashes before it has time to consume this much memory. "Bus Error", anyone?

      So this week I gave Mozilla a try. Here's what I found:

      • It renders all pages correctly!
      • It takes up a substantial chunk of my 64Mb, but less than 4.7 does when it goes crazy. I could live with this. But:
      • It is so slow on a P166 as to be totally unusable. They're not joking when they recommend a 233MHz processor minimum. Don't even think of trying Mozilla on anything less.
      So now I'm back to 4.7 again. Next week I'll try Galeon, but I'm not hopeful. If Mozilla as a whole is slow, much of that must come from the Gecko renderer. I'll be surprised if any Gecko-based browser is usable on my machine, but I'll be damned if I have to buy a new computer just to browse the web in peace.
      • I wouldn't count on the bottleneck coming from the Gecko engine. In my experience, and from the reports of others, Gecko is fast and pretty complete. Its the UI that Gecko renders itself in Mozilla that can make it a bit sluggish, at least in Linux. I have found that if you use the classic ui without the shiny colors, things can speed up a bit. However, this is all predicated on having enough RAM. Mozilla (and Gecko) might work really fast with 256 mb of ram, but become numbingly slow when forced to work with 64 mb. This is probably more important than CPU speed.
      • If you want something that's fast, use Skipstone. It has less features than Galeon, but it's much faster. Particularly on startup.

        But you probably want to give Galeon a try anyway.

    • Re:I need this like I need colonic irrigation (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Galeon's home page uses DIV and SPAN tags everywhere.

      You probably don't realize this, but you can use Galeon without going to crappy webpages all the time.

    • Re:I need this like I need colonic irrigation (Score:4, Informative)

      by hackerhue ( 182083 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @11:42AM (#2606952) Homepage
      Galeon's home page uses DIV and SPAN tags everywhere. I get one column about an inch wide on the left with all text and images. My CPU sounds like it's about to puke. Turn JS off, and I get a 1994-style page with gray background. None of the web pages I create have this problem, but I'm not trying to awe people with my mastery of Dreamweaver. If it can't be done in Vi or Emacs, it's not worth doing.

      It's because of NS4's buggy CSS rendering. If you turn JS off in NS4, it also turns off CSS handling (silly Netscape).

      The Galeon page is nothing fancy. It's just using normal HTML -- no JavaScript required. If they did their HTML properly, the page was meant to degrade gracefully. That is, if you view it in a browser that correctly adheres to the standards that it claims to, it should be usable. Their HTML looks pretty simple, and I wouldn't be surprised if they did do it in vi or emacs.

      The problem that you have is that NS4 doesn't do CSS correctly, but it likes to pretend that it does. It's a problem that many web designers face, and often the decision is: "Screw Netscape" because NS4's CSS handling can be quite unpredictable.

      Why would people use CSS? Ironically, because it's supposed to allow them to create a nice-looking page that will be usable in older browsers. It's unfortunate that Netscape had to screw it up.

    • I know exactly how you feel... for a good example of "huge Flash/Java/DHTML/pop-up-enabled masturbatory" page, you should try http://www.fileplanet.com. Every browser (short of lynx) either crashes or completely gives up before rendering a thing.
    • I agree with your sentiments about wasteful web pages/software/bla bla. I used to use SGIs exclusively - nice machines for their time but come on... let the poor thing rest, put it out to stud, buy something from this century.

      And you might want to reconsider the colonic irrigation too. How do you know that colonic irrigation isn't just what you need.
      • You're missing part of my point, as is the AC who told me to "BUY A NEW FUCKING COMPUTER". I'm pissed because the bloat is useless, *and* because it slows down all web use no matter what. Why spend $2000(*) on a new PC so complex pages can suck only half as much? Even on the ones that render fine, I do not need animations and dynamic content to entice me. I find virtually all such embellishments to be useless distractions, and quite frequently they interfere with actual use of the page (e.g. pop-ups. whoever made the decision to allow disablement of pop-ups in Konqueror and Galeon are fuckin' gods. I love you guys, whoever you are).

        My point is that a new PC will not vastly increase my enjoyment or use of online content. I do not need Flash, ever, but many sites feel their content is not good enough to stand on its own without some $200/hour consultant's animated excrescence bursting from the screen. And either Netscape's plugin handling sucks worse than I thought or these people don't know what HTML is, because I *always* get little popups saying "This site requires the plugin blah blah blah."

        The real problem with the SGI (Indigo 2, by the way, and a very decent 256MB of memory) is that that Netscape 4.7 for IRIX is the single worst piece of software I have ever encountered, surpassing even Windows Me. It is a truly embarassing piece of work. I would point out that on my 300Mhz Pentium II laptop (128MB of memory) the Web is almost as awful; Netscape tends to freeze altogether rather than crash on Linux, most of the time. On the Athlon at work, at least it loads decently. Still, even on the Athlon the bloat of the Web is noticable and obnoxious.

        (*) I say $2000 because for a new computer to be worthwhile, it'd have to totally kick the shit out of the current ones. I want to make a real investment. The SGI was $200, plus a $100 memory upgrade. Like I said, it does almost everything I need. A new computer would need 1GB of memory, SCSI, GeForce2 or better, 15" TFT, etc. Otherwise, what's the point? Anyone who thinks I should upgrade my computer to be able to handle Flash and Java plugins is out of their mind.

        • I don't know how your IRIX box translates to Intel Iron. But some comments on computing sufficiency.

          I've been using a PPro 180MHz box as my principle desktop since 1997. It's largely sufficed. Within the past year, the inadequacies are starting to show, largely in more complex GUI apps, browsers and office suites in particular.

          From a friend comes a remaindered 233 MHz system which I've set up over the past week. This system is fully adequate for Galeon (it's what I'm using now), and could possibly be clocked up another third to 333 MHz. So, for those saddled with older hardware, realize that some only slightly less old hardware may support your needs adequately.

          And Galeon is so much more superior, in every possible way, to NS 4.x, it's not even funny.

  • Gecko's home page doesn't render on NS4! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by evbergen ( 31483 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @07:58AM (#2606542) Homepage
    It seems these people are trying to make damn sure you'll become painfully aware of the need for a browser that does all those playful CSS/DHMTL things.

    Using NS4, their pages come out *completely* garbled.

    But I won't switch anywhere soon. Why not? Because I don't *want* an application that's supposed to be simply a client for *simple, transaction based UIs*, that is bigger than my unix kernel and X together.

    I think this situation is a damn shame, and proves to me the failure of the whole HTML concept. "Logical/structural document layout" instead of physical layout may be nice in theory, but a. what's the use if it can't even auto-generate tables of contents or anything that'd make structural markup actually *useful*, and b. the idea that every type of UI can follow a document model, and that every document can follow some hierarchical content model was an rare case of hybris, if you ask me.

    It's probably OK for scientific papers, which all have *very* similar structure. But you need a *ridiculous* amount of complexity to try and squeeze every application UI in the same model. And it shows.

    I think we should do something else; create a UI description language that's NOT a document markup (HTML), not a pre-downloaded 'interactive' animation script (Flash), not a general-purpose programming language (Java), and not a rigid, low-level protocol like X; rather a network-transported language in which you can describe widgets and simple interactions between them in terms of lower-level widgets and UI elements. Think 'interactive' postscript (but with infix notation). Or *something*.

    Then we can finally push the UI, *only* the UI, but as much of it as possible to the client, and have clients keep an open (tcp) connection to the application that can be as stateful as it likes. Whatever.

    But it should be possible to finally find a good middle ground between X and HTTP+HTML. There's *got* to be a way.

    Any thoughts? Does anybody know of such a project?
    • Well actually a lot of people are finding it easier to design interfaces in HTML than it is to try adding widget after widget in a programming language. That's why a lot of projects are starting to embed small html widgets and have their interface as HTML. It's very easy to make nice designs using it. Such a program that comes to mind is Ximian's Red Carpet.

      I agree with you that mozilla is bigger than it needs to be, and hopefully some smart individuals will go through and find areas where they can have huge improvements.

      But I like web pages now. I like all the cool nifty features and graphics a lot of them have. People can overdo it, but most just look nice. Pages that just offer factual information often are very bare and just text, which is fine. Then pages that are more about media and stuff usually have more going on for the interface, which I think is just fine.

      Opera is suppose to be very lightweight while still supporting a lot of the newer HTML/CSS/DOM stuff. You should probably check that out. And obviously you don't have a problem with non-open projects since you are talking bout using older versions of netscape.
  • I'm not totally up on all the news with Galeon (I tried it for a while about a year ago) but I recall that rpm binary installs also required a full Mozilla install because there was some issue about the Gecko libraries. IIRC, apparently at the time the licensing issue was resolved and there was talk that binary rpms would be available with just the needed Gecko libraries included. However, a year later it looks like the full Mozilla is still needed for Galeon. Not a flame, I'm just curious why... is there still a licensing issue where the key Gecko components can't be distributed separately with a Galeon rpm binary?

    (otherwise... Kudos to the Galeon team for the great work!)

  • The Problems with Galeon (Score:3, Informative)

    by StarHeart ( 27290 ) on Saturday November 24, 2001 @09:56AM (#2606711)
    1. It's lack/bad hack of a security console.
    You have to open something like the javascript console which yets Mozilla's interface bleed through to then use Mozilla's security interface. I would really think if you were going to release 1.0, you would have the basic functionality of a security console finished.

    2. The current sites certificate is unavaiable for examination.
    Go to random website that you are about to dish your CC number out to and you want to look at their website certificate to see if they used a CA or their certificate got replaced by crackers, or whatever, you can't.

    3. Not easy to turn on encryption for passwords.
    You have to go dig through the mailing list and find the prefs.js setting to turn it on. When you do have it on the dialog for it I think comes from Mozilla instead of Galeon and is functional but looks bad. I will say that Mozilla requires you to do the same thing for certain features, but then they state the offically supported ones like pop-up prevention on the release notes page.

    4. Lack of a Socks proxy line in the Proxy section.
    Many people use Socks proxies for a number of reasons. Mozilla has a line for Socks, and Galeon's proxy section seems to have the same layout as Mozilla's, except it is missing Socks.

    Galeon adds it own features that are very nice, but I would think they would want to make sure to have all the basic functionality of Mozilla, but with their goal of a simple interface before they start adding new features. Which they seem to not have to done.
  • I really enjoy Galeon. I liked Opera so much that I actually purchased it; Now, I use galeon and opera about 50/50. The ability to open windows in tabs istead of whole other application windows puts galeon and opera way above IE and Konqueror, to me. It really simplifies my browsing because I open lots of links in a new window.
    However, Galeon starting exhibiting this bug when I try to open the main page ofslashdot (!):
    CPromptService::Select: NOT IMPLEMENTED
    And thenn it segfaults. Hmm, I didn't change anything and it started doing that. I can't get it to stop by deleting my config files. The only thing I find when i search for CPromptSelect is some old mozilla dev list stuff. Argh! I hope they fixed this problem! Surely galeon developers go to slashdot, right?
    Anyhow, I love this browser! Good Job, everyone on the Galeon and Mozilla Teams!
    • I noted that the version of galeon prodcing this segfault is a bit old, 0.12.1! Oops. Might as well try upgrading some day.
      Why exactly do version numbers go from 0.12.1-10 to 1.0, again?

  • Mad (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Kryptolus ( 238444 )
    I'm not happy at all that Galeon jumped to 1.0
    1.0 is supposed to signify a well-tested final product.
    There's no way that Galeon can be at 1.0 before Mozilla is at 1.0
    When a newer version of mozilla is out and some embed API are changed, galeon 1.0 will not work. Something you would not want.
    I think the decision to go to 1.0 was way too rash.
  • It's a waste of my harddrive space for me to use .gz instead of .bz2! Just about everyone has a copy of bzip2 and a bz2-equipped version of tar...

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