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Galeon Web Browser: The Best Of Mozilla?
Motor writes: "The very excellent weekly newsletter NTK (Need To Know) tipped me off about galeon - a desperately needed attempt to build a mere browser (as opposed to an entire operating system/xterm/game console) using the best bit of the Mozilla project: gecko." I wondered how long before someone did this. Very excellent looking.
While you're at it, add some features.
/dev/null. I might use ones for yahoo mail and slashdot to keep the logins, but really I don't need 500 set by MSNBC, sheesh.
1) do something about those crappy ads, a filter, perhaps like the orbs list would especially be nice. Another nice feature would be a "wipe out" option, where if I find a banner too annoying I could just click on it and get rid of it.
2) do something about those cookies, especially for the sites that don't even need one cookie, but flash you 5000000 before you can see the content. (ps I like the feature on lynx that requests once and allows the option of never accepting from that site again during the session). I really want better and easier control of my cookies other than having to manually edit the file or relink it to
3) give me easier and better font controll, i am sick and tired of sites fonting me to death with every immaginable size and shape, and color, of fonts accept for the type that are easy to read. It would sure be nice if I could highlight sections, and change the font on the fly.
4) give me some more "crap" controll. Have you ever been to a home page and waited for 50000000TB of useless "pretties" to download before you can even so much as click on a link. It would sure be nice if there was a skip-crap button that would just fill in the pretties with asthetically pleasing "blanks" and grab all the juicy content first.
5) take off the bullshit buttons. I don't know who else has netscape, but I don't need a special button on my browser telling me where to shop, or any of the other netscape propaganda - thankyou
6) give me a password and login reminder list. After having 500billion logins and passwords for every immaginable website, it would really be nice to have some simple (encrypted??) id storage file that could show me (or prompt me) for my password and login when I click a button, and even better not half to rely on those damn cookies. (if authentication methods were more standardized, you could even have it login automatically per my pre-settings - but nowdays that would probably be asking too much.
7) allow me a selective delete or select. Have you ever been to a site where you have 50 pages of refferal links and other crap before you get to the one paragraph or so of content that you were really after. It would sure be nice if I could highlight that and click on something that wipes the other crap off the page (if I find i need it later i'll bush the back button).
8) make it so I can get arround easier using the keyboard. I mean, cmon guys. I got TunnelCarpal, if I get 500 field form I don't want to half to click in each field, or continually half to move the focus from the scroll bar to the main page and back.
9) I want better screen/context controll. Have you ever had 20 or so windows open on the same page, and sorta wished they were all consolidated into one screen. or have you ever wanted to click on a link and not wipe out the page you were on (well you can do that, but it would be nice if it was more intuitive. On the same note, i just absolutely hate it when I visit a site and it shoves half a dozen useless piece of shit popups down my throat, please do something about that too. Thankyou, since I know noone's gonna listen anyhow, please feel free to moderate this down to negative infinity.
David
Since all the stupid shopping and search for shopping buttons are not there, that leaves room for some real buttons. There are a lot of options buried in the preferences dialog that I think of as dynamic, not static. Load images automatically, accept cookies, accept javascript, font, etc. I like to run pretty small and stripped down, but some pages are hard to read that way, so it would be nice to turn these features on and off quickly, and get a visual reminder of what mode it was in, because I forget while browsing.
- Ability to disable ALL html/javascript/etc features, per site/wildcard/regexp, through a blocklist.
- Persistence.
- Keyboard control.
- Useful, configurable, toolbar.
- Custom interface to select websites (esp. searches).
- I don't want themes, I don't want a built-in irc client, I don't want an email client, I don't want a newsreader, I don't want a window manager, I don't want a high-availability database server, or whatever other crap AOL is putting in Mozilla.
Well, that's *my* list. I don't mean to bark demands or complain -- they're just my personal preferences. Anyone else agree with any of that? Anyone have any other ideas I couldn't think of?I don't want images on Slashdot, except for the one slashdot.org logo, I don't want Javascript popups to work on geocities. I don't want Java anywhere, except for two specific sites. I want all font size and color information to be ignored on all sites, except for three specific sites. Etc.
This is direly needed feature for an unstable web browser. If you can't have stability -- and you probably can't with any modern graphical browser -- HAVE PERSISTENCE. When Mozilla crashes -- and it will -- it should start back up exactly how it was last. Every new window or changed URL or text box should be logged whenever it is changed. When Mozilla crashes in the middle of a 450+ word slashdot post (such as this), I want to start it back up with that 450 word post exactly where it was at the crash (or perhaps 5 seconds out of date). And of course all the windows should start up with all the URLs I was at. I have 8 NS windows up right now, and I won't be able to remember all those urls if NS crashes. It'd be a hassle to open them all again even if I could remember.
I want to be able to bind keys to whichever functions I want, and I want functions available that are valuable. Numbered links would be nice, like in lynx. Mouse should be entirely optional for all functionality.
I want to be able to add buttons to the toolbar and bind them to whatever I can bind keys to. Like [add current URL to javascript blocklist] or [disable javascript in this window].
I want to be able to be able to bind a key to pop up a window for a google.com search, another for raging.com search, dmoz.org search, etc, that pop up a window instead of loading the page (fast as they may be, there is no need to load them) and I want Mozilla to convert the information to a format it understands and display it in whatever format I like.
Is there an easy way to convert ext2 to Reizer FS? I think I might have to finally get a tape drive.....
Is it just me, or almost all the high-profile OSS projects feature-laden, MS-type, bloatware? The only major project that isn't overly bloated seems to be the kernel itself. Even X doesn't suffer from feature-craze, it is bloated for other reasons. I continually beat my head against a wall thinking about how my RAM is disappearing down the toilet. Not only does my average desktop load dozens of libraries when one or two would suffice (compat libc and libc++ for Netscape, KDE 1 and 2 libraries, Qt 1 and 2, GTK, GNOME, etc) but they keep adding more stuff to it. FOr example, Mozilla has a great rendering engine (Gecko) with a cruddy piece of bloatware wrapped around it (everything else in Mozilla.) Who cares about total customizability through XUL, who cares that everything is tied to a java script. Aren't scripts slow anyway? People bash MS for making active desktop, but this is even worse. Do you really want your programs interpreting XML to do your user interface? This is carried to GNOME (and KDE to a slightly lesser extent) too. One one hand, MS is using the selvte COM, realizing that if people really need network-transparency they can use DCOM or use a custom CORBA extension. However, GNOME is using CORBA for local components! Are they crazy? MS is famous for introducing bloatware. They put in features 99% of people never use, which impacts perfomance very heavily. However, they have to keep selling more versions. OSS stuff doesn't have to do that. They have the freedom to make software that is nice and light with just enough features to please 99% of the people. Why don't they?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Quite frankly, I think the Mozilla programmers are out of control.
The world could really use a nice, standards-compliant browser that actually works (and Netscape is far from that). What really annoys me is that so little effort is going into this supposed "best part of Mozilla", namely Gecko. Watching Mozilla used by a friend of mine was a painful experience. There were so many rendering errors that I personally found it unusable.
Call me crazy, but I would think that the HTML renderer would be the most critical part of the browser to get right. But why isn't anyone fixing these obvious problems? Don't the developers actually use their own browser?
Hopefully having developers focusing on a browser rather than a full-blown development environment (that is butt-ugly, BTW) will give some sorely-needed attention to basic functionality.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
To all the people who complain about open source/free software by pointing at Mozilla, here is something to point back.
:). And if this were a commercial product, it just wouldn't happen.
It's a fork but not a fork (uses the same code base) and solves problems people have (big web browsers, ugly Netcenter skin on Mozilla
Contrary to some other posts here and some ambiguous text on galeon's website, you do not need to use M16 for galeon to work. The nightly builds work just fine. All I had to do to install was install the mozilla-devel rpms and the galeon rpm. I also moved my nightly build from ~ to /usr/local/mozilla, but I'm not sure whether that's necessary.
There are only two big caveats: it doesn't store cookies (meaning no slashdot login) and it doesn't have any right-click menus for page elements (yet), meaning no saving images or 'copy link location,' etc. These things will probably be added later on.
-JD
In my .mozconfig, I have: ac_add_options --enable-toolkit=gtk
It builds mozilla based on gtk, as well as a seperate bare bones browser even more streamlined than galeon.
It's also possible to build mozilla based on Qt.
This galeon project isn't anything new, there have been a few other similar projects that have existed(gzilla, qfce), but this seems to be the first independant one based on a usable version of the mozilla embedding widget.
mk_add_options MOZ_CVS_FLAGS="-q -z 9"
ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --enable-optimize
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --enable-strip-libs
ac_add_options --disable-mailnews
How to build it:
cd ~: /cvsroot
mkdir mozilla
cd mozilla
export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org
cvs co mozilla/client.mk
cd mozilla
make -f client.mk pull_and_build_all
So, was this project REALLY necessary?
While I applaud the efforts behind the Galleon web browser, and indeed any "open source" project, I cannot help but wonder if the effort might have been better spent on improving the Mozzila source code, and eliminating bugs, since we cannot compete with Internet Exploder unless the open source product is equally as good.
This isn't really a code fork from the Mozilla tree, but rather a very fundamentally different approach to the web browser.
Mozilla provides a very heavy-weight, cross-platform user interface which is highly extensible, works on a huge number of different architectures, is skinnable, uses loads of XML and snazzy technologies, and stuff like that. This user-interface is built on top of the core Gecko and Seamonkey modules.
Unfortunately, it's pig slow.
By providing a really lightweight, platform specific user interface just for GNOME, this project is going to deliver a simple, clean web browser which renders out webpages. Only on one platform, and without too many features, but it'll do it well.
I sincerely hope similar projects start off for Windows as well, to make the full use of that platform. Mozilla's UI has a bright future, but for the mid to short term, the shining star in the middle is their rendering engine, and it would be a real pity if people were put off Mozilla simply because the UI around that engine was unstable and slow.
Do you have any idea just what a monster Mozilla is?
Mozilla is not just the next version of Netscape. It is completely different beast altogether.
Have you ever noticed that Mozilla looks decidedly different than any other app on your desktop? That's because it doesn't use any standard widget library (in the case of X), or the native OS widgets (in the case of Windows, BeOS, etc.) It's built its own set of widgets, with the goal of making them completely cross platform. Though it looks different than any other app on your desktop, a screenshot from the Windows version and the X version will look basically identical, with the obvious exception of the window decorations. That way people can easily write cross-platform web apps, with the assurance that they will look identical on any platform.
Yes, you heard me right, Mozilla is a complete framework for writing applications. You can write user interfaces in XUL (a language for describing widget layout in XML), change their appearance in CSS and code in JavaScript.
In fact, that's what the core browser interface is written in. Yep, everytime you hit the "back" button, Mozilla executes JavaScript to act on your request. Don't believe me? Go read all the *.js files in chrome/packages/core/navigator/content. If you feel like screwing with someone, take 2 minutes and switch the forward and back buttons, or make the stop button navigate to a porn site or something.
Don't get me wrong, the Mozilla project has ambitious goals, and what they're doing is exciting. But it would be nice to have a native, bare-bones browser too.