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Mozilla The Internet

Galeon Developers Interview 204

Posted by michael from the at-least-it-isn't-named-firebird dept.
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."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Galeon Developers Interview More

Galeon Developers Interview

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  • They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:5, Informative)

    by James A. A. Joyce ( 681634 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @02:47PM (#6540973) Journal
    People have been abandoning the project for imaginary problems or unimportant problems, all of which stem from, allegedly, "libbonobogui", which appears to be a graphical API for GNOME. This has been the cause of lots of kludges in versions 1.2 and 1.3 and they look forward to ceasing to use it. They've also been hit hard by being dropped by both Red Hat and Slackware! Fortunately, they're getting back on their feet now since some people have stuck with Galeon (which is a pretty fine browser, if not the prettiest) and so it's been gradually improving. I believe a new version was released just a few hours/days ago.

    Go download it! Show your support!

    • Re:They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:1, Troll)

      by Anonymous Coward

      They've been hit badly because the developer of Epiphany is a *major* ass kisser of Havoc Pennington (Red Hat) -- it's hugely embrassing really, watching the brownnoser politics at work. The Epiphany browser is dogshit... literally... it's is unusable for anything real like browsing, and yet Pennington feels the need to put it as a default in RedHat because the developer backs him up on his extremist "no features" jihad.

      Gnome is rapidly becoming a major clusterfuck these days. Which is a shame, because th

      • 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.

      • ...I hope RedHat takes something like Firebird for its browser. It's featureful and it wouldn't be difficult to whack an even simpler configuration interface on it. Plus, being descended from Mozilla, it would be immune to all of the GNOME/KDE infighting that's going on. It's really a shame that there's so much politics going on among all of the OSS organisations-cum-factions. That's why I prefer Mozilla based browsers; their developers don't get embroiled in "Konq sux! Galeon rulez!" flamewars. GNOME and K
        • Um. Galeon and Epiphany are Mozilla based browsers just as much as Firebird, in case you haven't noticed. They're just wrapped in native toolkit to fit in with themes etc.
      • What a load of rubbish. It's the default in Red Hat Rawhide because it's the default in the next version of Gnome, that was not a decision red hat made.

        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.

        • Since when RedHat has any obligation to follow Gnome defaults when deciding what software goes into THEIR distribution?

          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 goin
          • The Galeon developers basically do not wish to follow the Gnome HIG. This is certainly fine - and Galeon is a good browser - but I'd say it's pretty reasonable that an application that is so central to a desktop should also follow the common guidelines set up for the core apps.

            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 sa

            • Re:They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:5, Interesting)

              by ttk ( 161270 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @03:54PM (#6541280)
              The Galeon developers basically do not wish to follow the Gnome HIG. This is certainly fine - and Galeon is a good browser - but I'd say it's pretty reasonable that an application that is so central to a desktop should also follow the common guidelines set up for the core apps.

              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.

              • And that might be the reason.

                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.
          • Since when RedHat has any obligation to follow Gnome defaults when deciding what software goes into THEIR distribution?

            Since when have you had any obligation to follow RedHat defaults when deciding what software goes into YOUR computer?

        • Defaults suck: make your own choices. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by jonadab ( 583620 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @07:11PM (#6542157) Homepage Journal
          > As for the reasons why it is the default in Gnome

          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.
        • Hrm, no, Red Hat would have gone with Epiphany regardless of the GNOME Desktop choice. They had pretty much made up their minds before we even started discussing it. Although it would have been annoying for both Red Hat and GNOME if we'd chosen differently, their choice wasn't particularly important to ours, as evidenced by the discussion on d-d-l.

          FWIW, I'm still using Galeon. Epiphany hasn't sucked me in yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did at some stage in the future. :-)

      • Re:They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Xoro ( 201854 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @03:21PM (#6541151)

        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:

        • No float on top feature to Metacity? Too complicated?
        • Ugly list of useless "put on workspace" choices (also Metacity) because nested listing is "unintuitive"?
        • New GTK file-save box -- much-needed upgrade but no way to access .(dot)files? Sure, it's much cleaner when they're hidden, but it meant I had to type in a filename five levels deep just to point my program to it.
        • And you said it about Epiphany. I've seen more features on a kiosk.

        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.

        • I used to use GNOME, then switched to Fluxbox, then back to GNOME (v.2, with Epiphany). I think the HIG decisions make it clean (like Fluxbox and co.) but featureful like KDE (which, I agree, is way too cartoon-like).

          I don't understand all the whining about Epiphany -- it'll save the session if it crashes, and the session saving on GNOME exit will work when it's stable. I use Epiphany for all my web browsing, including "mission-critical" stuff like paying my bills.

        • Re:They've had a lot of trouble. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by readams ( 35355 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @09:13PM (#6542583)
          As a metacity maintainer, I feel I have to respond to this.

          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.cg i?id=110904

          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:2, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward
            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.

            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?

          • The point is to develop a desktop that works well for everyone

            ...which is a recipe for disaster. I've never used metacity (because sawfish kicks every other wm's ass in every possible way...), but to think that you can design something that works well for every user is beyond stupid.

            ...without requiring you to go through dozens of preference dialogs to get something that will work correctly....

            But, aside from that, metacity does support an always on top keybinding (I commited this about a month ag

            • Well, since you've never used metacity, you obviously don't have any idea what you're talking about. The window manager is supposed to be unobtrusive. The window manager really needs to just work without requiring you to configure everything. That's what metacity does.

              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 configu

              • Well, since you've never used metacity, you obviously don't have any idea what you're talking about. The window manager is supposed to be unobtrusive. The window manager really needs to just work without requiring you to configure everything. That's what metacity does.

                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 saw

              • two desktops renowned for good user interfaces

                better to reign in hell than serve in heaven

        • Couldn't agree more about HP's destructive anti-feature craze.

          I agree. I still use the core red hat distro for my desktops, but i rip out metacity and most of the gnome features (gnome-panel, menus, nautilus, etc) and use IceWM [icewm.org] for that stuff.

          No float on top feature to Metacity? Too complicated?

          no kidding. how about the minimization window animation? Did anyone else follow that endless, idiotic jerk-off fest trying to get a pref in Metacity to TURN OFF ANIMATIONS?!! He simply would not put it in t

        • To file a bookmark, go down to the folder where you want to file it, and right-click. There you go: "Add Bookmark Here". "File Bookmark" was always confusing. Not having it is an improvement.

          In general, do a bit of exploration with the right mouse button. You'll discover all kinds of good things (besides a few remaining bugs).


      • > his extremist "no features" jihad

        This is about to drive me away from GNOME, which I've used since pre-1.0 days (0.4, IIRC).

        Too bad I don't have time to fork a Havoc-free version for power users; I keep hoping someone else will.

      • 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.

        *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.
    • Can anyone elaborate on what bonobogui is, esp vs the EggToolBar? (And why it sucks, how long it's sucked, etc.?) thx.

  • Galeon - use it! (Score:2, Informative)

    by kwenda ( 644349 )
    This used to be the default in the Slackware distro of X/KDE. Now they've switched to Konqueror... Galeon works better though, I recommend it.
    • I second this, Galeon is an excellent browser.

      It also has something innovative I've yet to find in another browser: the homepage - 'myprofile:' - which is basically a html version of your bookmarks. It's ingenius!

      You have all your bookmarks well laid out and all visible at once. Since it's your home page, you just pop up a new tab and then you can find and load your intended bookmarks without the fuss of navigating through a menu.

      If only all areas of the OSS world were endowed with such excellent choic

  • The gecko family of browsers... (Score:5, Funny)

    by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @02:48PM (#6540981) Homepage Journal
    ...puts us in the new age of environmental consciousness.
    Not only you can reuse the same parts of code on different platforms, but the Mozilla mailer is the first one to have separate folders for trash and junk.

  • The comment form: broken? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bootsy Collins ( 549938 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @02:54PM (#6541007)

    The comment form would be a lot more useful if it had a "submit" button, so that you could actually give them the comment.

    Unless it's not showing up because my browser is broken. But in that case, I'd like to comment on that, since I'm using Galeon.

  • come closer (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @02:55PM (#6541013) Journal
    "Sssssoooo precioussssss, what do you want to knowwww about Galeonnnnn".

    Ooops, wrong Galeon. Sorry.

  • Galeon is unbloated without XUL interface (Score:4, Informative)

    by zymano ( 581466 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @02:56PM (#6541018)
    From the Manifest-

    MANIFESTO 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 are 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 messaging or coffee making. The UNIX philosophy is to design small tools that do one thing, and do it well. Galeon also addresses 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 achieved 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. Standards compliance: The introduction of non-standard features in browsers could make it difficult or impossible to use alternative products like Galeon if developers embrace them. Alternative (standards complying) browsers could not be able to fully access web sites making use of these features. The success of non-standard features can ultimately lead to forcing one browser, on one platform to dominate the market. Standards compliance ensures the freedom of choice. Galeon aims to achieve this.

    • Re:Galeon is unbloated without XUL interface (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This is lovely.

      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 bo
  • Galeon Developer Interview, July 2003

    Due to his own curiosity and the apparent curiosity (or vocal ignorance) of folks around the net, Topher The Web Guy asked some of the Galeon developers a few questions. If your curiosity is not satiated, there'll be a form at the bottom to ask your own questions.

    ric: Ricardo Fernández Pascual
    yaneti: Yanko Kaneti
    philipl: Philip Langdale
    tko: Tommi Komulainen

    How "healthy" is the galeon project?

    philipl:
    Stable but serious. :-)

    We're operating at a fairly low level

  • as a galeon user who doesn't use gnome... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by intermodal ( 534361 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @03:12PM (#6541103) Homepage Journal
    I haven't had stability problems with it, and I rather like it better than Mozilla itself. I know it could use some work, but I find it disappointing to know that my favorite browser is being dropped...
    • It isn't being dropped. It has the same status it's always had. Until now, Gnome has never had an "official" browser, and, well, while Galeon isn't the "official" one now, it never was before either. 1.2 is/was a great browser, and the upcoming version is likely just as good if not better. Just continue to use it and enjoy it!
      • I didn't phrase my post very well. Basically, since I'm a Gentoo user, it just makes it even less likely that I'll ever pay much attention to those distros, since not only am I happy where I am, but they don't make it any more difficult than any other program to install it.

  • contantly changing ui (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ChiChiCuervo ( 2445 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @03:17PM (#6541122) Homepage
    I think people wouldn't be dropping galeon if they core team were vigilant with maintaining the UI from version to version.

    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.
    • In the new Galeon you need to use gconf-editor to set up "advanced" settings such as where the tabs are located etc etc. Sorry for my horrible grammar.
    • 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.

      I disagree with you on the usefulness of this feature. Actually I was close to writing a bug report asking them to remove it. In the Galeon version of Redhat 8.0 the feature is assigned to middle click. The problem is that I activate this feature by mistake several times a day, and even with the nice Galeon tabs, it takes a while to delete 20 tabs.

      I


      • > I wish that the developers of Galeon will find strength in this slashdot debate to keep up the good work.

        Meetoo, but they need to go back to 1.2 and start improving from there, rather than redesigning it to take away all the features and customizability. The upgrade from GTK1 to GTK2 needn't have involved anywhere near so many changes as it has.

    • There are a lot of hidden prefs (in keeping with the style of GNOME 2) which control behaiour that cannot be set by a preference dialog (some of these were in a pref dialog in Galeon 1). See the tab location [gnome.org] part of the ExtraPrefs document [gnome.org] on how to change it.

  • Galeon RIP (Score:5, Informative)

    by grzebo ( 692746 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @03:32PM (#6541199)
    It used to be my favourite browser, but fore some reason or other the developers have decided to destroy it. While Galeon 1.2.x was superb, version 1.3 is just slightly better than IE.

    IMHO they got exactly what they worked so hard for - rejection from everyone.

    A far-from-complete list of features they broke:
    • Tab settings - how wide they are, if they should get shortened, etc.
    • favicons on tabs - supposedly it's possible to turnt them on using some magical commands, but I haven't managed
    • a button to erase the address bar - I don't want its content on my clipboard
    • focus of newly opened tabs/windows - additional clicks necessary
    • rocker style mouse gestures - just pressing RMB and then LMB used to go back
    • stability
    • saving sessions as groups of bookmarks
    • setting individual handling programs for different extensions


    Galeon used to be an example of how an Open Source Product can be better than proprietary one (i.e. Opera). Now it's just pathetic. One more reason to dislike anyting GNOME-related (and I used to run Galeon from KDE).

    • Re:Galeon RIP (Score:2, Insightful)

      by multi io ( 640409 )
      Galeon used to be an example of how an Open Source Product can be better than proprietary one (i.e. Opera). Now it's just pathetic. One more reason to dislike anyting GNOME-related (and I used to run Galeon from KDE).

      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...

    • I'll second this - a lot of great features just seemed to disappear from 1.2x to 1.3x. The GTK2 is awesome, but dropping all those features was killer.

    • > It used to be my favourite browser, but fore some reason or other the developers have decided to destroy it. While Galeon 1.2.x was superb, version 1.3 is just slightly better than IE. IMHO they got exactly what they worked so hard for - rejection from everyone. A far-from-complete list of features they broke [...]

      Are those deliberate breaks, or just signs that 1.3 is still transitional?

      I agree that 1.3 sux; I've built a couple of releases, found a massive lack of functionality, and returned to 1.

    • Re:Galeon RIP (Score:3, Insightful)

      by uhmmmm ( 512629 )
      I just installed galeon 1.3.7 to give it another try after switching to phoenix .. err .. firebird. here's my take on some of these complaints:

      * 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 mo
      • * focus of newly opened tabs/windows - additional clicks necessary
        Edit->Preferences->User Interface->Jump to new tabs Automatically

        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 /. and skimming the comments in a story).

        * stability
        Haven't had any crashes yet ...

        • Re: Galeon RIP (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Black Parrot ( 19622 )

          > 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

    • Couldn't the select-clipboard be disabled altogether for the location bar somehow?

      Still, I don't want a button for that on my browser even if it's not possible to disable, seems clumsy. I usually just ctrl-l there and hit backspace to clear. That way the clipboard doesn't get replaced.

      I've been using Galeon as part of XD2 and while I do like Firebird more, I don't think they've done a bad job. The integration (filetypes, default browser) to the GNOME desktop is the major selling point. I wonder why Mozill
    • So let me get this straight. Rather than try the latest version, 2.0, you are trying an older version? There is this thing, it's called upgrading. It exists for a reason.

  • Galeon is unstable under KDE (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have used Galeon since the 0.x days however since 1.2 version I have had Galeon crash on me numerous times running under KDE. The problem is Galeon's interaction with KDE's aRTs (sound daemon). None of the crashes happen with e.g. Mozilla or Phoenix and Galeon people are unwilling/unable (?) to fix Galeon to play along with aRTs. There are numerous bugs filed in Bugzilla about the issue but the developers mark it "NOTABUG" ie. not a Galeon bug. Regardless of whose bug is it it is shame that Galeon people

  • Why Galeon is not included in GNOME (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Alethes ( 533985 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @03:52PM (#6541273)
    From Final Modules List for the GNOME 2.4 Desktop Release [gnomedesktop.org]:
    There was a lot of vocal support for Epiphany on the mailing list, but little for Galeon. So, the consensus points to Epiphany. That was due to a number of factors: The Epiphany project goals seem to be better aligned with GNOME's goals, the Galeon developers do not seem to be 100% behind GNOME's goals; Epiphany has had regular releases for GNOME 2.3.x; the Epiphany hackers are working within the project to define standards and code for toolbar editing and other functionality, etc. While there are a lot of reservations about offending the Galeon hackers, and great disappointment that the two projects have not been able to cooperate, Epiphany does seem to have the consensus, and make the most technical sense. That is not to say that Epiphany is without faults, or that Galeon is not excellent software -> we do need to make a choice at some stage: Right now there is strong support to add a browser to the Desktop release, and strong support for that browser to be Epiphany.


    • > 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.

      • > the Galeon developers do not seem to be 100% behind GNOME's goals

        Yeah, there's something vaguely creepy about the above quoted sentence... It smacks way to much of petty corporate (or academic!) politics.

        I really doubt everybody in the Gnome project is in such unanimous agreement about every single one of their goals -- and that's good, because some degree of dissension is healthy!
        • You're right. There are lots of differing views in the GNOME community.

          For instance, between the eight people on GNOME's release team, we have all sorts of disagreements. Trying to decide between Galeon and Epiphany, and trying to analyse the wishes of the community were particularly difficult. Incredibly, the following points of view were held amongst the eight members of the release team:

          We shouldn't ship a browser with the Desktop release at all

          We shouldn't ship Galeon or Epiphany until they're ready

  • my 2 cents (Score:5, Insightful)

    by snilloc ( 470200 ) <`moc.liamtoh' `ta' `snilloclj'> on Saturday July 26, 2003 @03:53PM (#6541274) Homepage
    1) "File bookmark" is a great feature. More browsers should have it.

    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?

  • Is it just me... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by .com b4 .storm ( 581701 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @04:26PM (#6541446)

    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.

    • ... libbonobo sucks, and Crispin 0wnz.

      You forgot: "Epiphany is coded by a bunch of assholes."

      Which is funny, because it was forked by Galeon's original author....

  • I like this item on their to do list...

    polish! polish! polish!

    It really great to see that open source developers are working a the linux desktops final flaw.
  • Does anybody remember "The web and only the web"? No true Unix user wants a browser that does it all. For mail, use a mailer, for IRC use a client like "BitchX" and so on. For 90% of my browsing Galleon is just fine and just about any sort of 'extra functionality' for the web can be hacked in. I surely would like to see features used in the past like the 'zoom indicator' brought back. Only the newest of the newbies uses a full page browser and therefore that new feature is disapointing. (Fullscreen) It is a

  • Almost Perfect (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Markus Registrada ( 642224 ) on Saturday July 26, 2003 @09:29PM (#6542635)
    It's funny -- of the "top 3 bugs" each developer lists, I have encountered only a couple. Of the top unimplemented features they list, I don't want any of them. To me, the only really critical bug was crashing within a few minutes every time I turned on Javascript, but they might have licked that in the 14 July snapshot I run. After that, being able to right-click on an image and get a menu reliably (not just after the third try) would help. The only "new" feature that would make much difference for me is honoring the Gnome emacs key-binding preference. (ctrl-A, E, N, P, B, F, K, particularly.) That worked fine in the 1.2 series, and is the only feature I miss from it.

    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.

    • Please read a little background info [gnomedesktop.org] to learn what's really behind the "politics" you mention.

      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.

      The Epiphany developers have a vision on what a browser should and what it shouldn't be. However I can't recall an announcement "We, the Epiphany developers, will never add the features that make the browser useful and usable for Markus Registrada." Do you? Perhap

  • C-a should go to the beginning of the line, NOT "select all." Look, I don't give a fuck if you want to make "select all" the default: just give me a freakin' dialog box somewhere in which I can change it!

    I'm sick and tired of waiting for the Gnome2 guys to actually have a keyboard bindings control panel that does something, and this one little feature has made me consider downgrading to 1.2 on several occasions.

  • I'm a big Galeon fan, have been since early days, but am currently running 1.2.5, so I haven't seen the 1.3 problems. I also keep a fairly popular Nix Browser Reviews [iwethey.org] page.

    I'm not much of a GNOME fan, and note the extensive GNOME deps as a misfeature of Galeon -- recently rediscovered as it turns out that some user.js prefs are ignored and need to be set through gconf instead (user-agent [iwethey.org]). Though I can see some benefits in principle, the results of GNOME in terms of the actual desktop are not to my pers

  • I'm surprised no one else has mentioned some of the cool stuff, especially crapware-blocking stuff, that has gone away in 1.3.
    • "always use these fonts/colors" top level menu items
    • "block all images from this site" context menu
    • middle-clicking in the history to open in a new window, or even right clicking and getting the standard link context menu
    • for that matter, being able to sort by "Last Visited" and "First Visited" in the history
    • the ability to make my toolbar buttons icons-only, or text-on-the-side
    • th

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