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Galeon At A Glance

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the looking-under-the-hood dept.

gatha wrote to us about Galeon, how it actually works and some of its feature set. I've been playing with Galeon now and again - but I've still found that except for a small issue with handling preformatted text, Konqueror has taken over as my web browser of choice.

12 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Galeon is getting it right... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4
    > My only wish: that there was a Windows port of Galeon

    Maybe you're looking for K-Meleon, which call itself "the Windows answer to galeon"?

  2. Re:Galeon by Micah · · Score: 3

    I don't understand why people keep saying that the other browsers on Linux are still not "quite ready to take over for Netscape 4.77".

    I dumped NS4.7 as my primary browser months ago, and mainly use a combination of Mozilla and Konqueror. I can get to anything on the Web I want. Moz and Konq are both great, and have a somewhat different set of bugs. If a site is unusable on one I go to the other and it generally works great. In general I find Moz to be a bit more stable than Konq, but I like Konq's speed better.

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  3. Give mozilla a chance. :) by Craig+Maloney · · Score: 4
    I've been downloading the latest nightlies, and I must say (yes, I know it's beensaid here may times, many ways), that Mozilla has become my browser of choice. It feels like it's getting faster every iteration of the way, and bugs I've reported have been fixed. I've been using it for the past month, and I must say I'm very satisfied with it. I'm finding myself firing up Netscape less and less, and finding myself disappointed every time I have to. No, I'm not a troll, nor am I looking for flamebait. I'm just a satisfied user.

    However, I am glad that there are browsers like Konqueror and Galeon out there. Why? Choice! We're getting some pretty kick-ass projects out of some very dedicated individuals, and they're making it harder for people to choose which one to use based on merits. They're ALL good! :) I commend everyone working on thes projects for giving back so much of their time, and giving us choices in the browser market. You developers deserve more thanks than you or your projects get in this kind of forum.

    Kudos to you!

  4. Why Galeon Rocks... by Skeezix · · Score: 3
    It's fast. Gecko (especially recent builds) renders beautifully and does it very fast. You can also start galeon with the -s option (server). This will cause it to behave kind of like IE, initializing things without actually popping up a window. I have this saved in my Gnome session so it starts up as a server every time I log into Gnome. Then I just start galeon with -w for new window in existing process and it's there instantly.

    Tabbed Browsing rocks. I don't know how to live without this now. Nor more multiple windows for me. I just middle click links and they start in a new tab. All annoying popups go there too, where I can ignore them.

    --
    Celebrate the finer things in life
  5. Konqueror's HTML rendering: too good to be truth? by Rushuru · · Score: 3

    I often see comments like "I don't care if mozilla / netscape dies because we have Konqueror now" or "Mozilla is bloatware / gecko /galeon sucks" on /. or irc.

    And I admit that the way Konqueror renders HTML pages is really impressive for such a small project (I read somewhere that there's only one full time konq developper).

    It seems almost to good to be truth: one small team of KDE developper made a browser that is on par with that of a huge organization with many developpers like Netscape / AOL / Mozilla community?

    It seems to good to be truth!
    So I always wondered whether the Konqueror team has not re-used some code from Mozilla / Gecko.

    If not, then congrats to the KDE guys. Too bad there have been duplicate efforts to develop these 2 terrific web browsers
    If they did reuse some code (I'm not 100% sure that the mozilla licence permits that though), then I hope that Konqueror fans will stop bashing mozilla and galeon.

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    !
    ^_^
  6. Konqueror is good but it has its share of issues by Rushuru · · Score: 5

    Konqueror is great, and web pages look terrific with anti aliasing is turned on. Galeon / moz can't do it as far as I know (may be with GTK 2?)

    However Konqueror has a number of issues, and I find myself using mozilla more than konqueror although I use KDE as my desktop environment

    - First Konqui can't display several charsets on a page. So, for example the bottom of the page on www.debian.org (where you have the lists of available language for the page written in the native languagem like "ú-{OEê for japanese etc.) does not display correctly. Mozilla and even Netscape 4.7 have absolutely nop problem with this. This issue is fixed with qt 3.0, and new releases of KDE (after 2.2) may switch to qt3, hence clearing this bug.

    - Some pages do not display correctly (they're 10 times too wide with many blank spaces for example), even when faking the user agent to that of moz or netscape (with which the page works) (but this is very rare, most pages display correctly).

    - IIRC Konqueror does not have separate options for http and https proxies

    - And I also have that very annoying bug with AA turneed on: if a web page does not specify to use a given font, then konqueror uses the first font in the list. In my case, it's a fantasy font, which makes reading pages like http://lists.debian.org a real nightmare. There's a default font option in my KDE 2.2 post alpha 2 build, but it doesn't seem to work.

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    !
    ^_^
  7. Galeon is getting it right... by TheLocustNMI · · Score: 3
    Frankly, i LOVE Galeon. I can't get enough of it. It's almost like someone actually PAID ATTENTION TO THE USER FOR ONCE. We don't need these all-in-one bloatfests (Where's my StarOffice CD?), we need applications that do one thing, do it well, and have features relevant to the application.

    My only wish: that there was a Windows port of Galeon i could use at work on my NT box (nudge,nudge).

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    thelocust[dot]org
  8. Geez, I thought that post was about Galeon! by coupland · · Score: 5

    "A new version of Mozilla has been posted on their site, but I only use Konqueror."

    "Here's a site with some great info on Galeon, which doesn't happen to be Konqueror, the world's greatest web browser."

    "John Carmack has been interviewed on Blue's News. John's neighbour owns an Apple iMac. Apple is run by Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs once used Netscape which isn't Konqueror!"

    Please, please cut it out Hemos. We don't care how horny Konqueror makes you, it doesn't have to be mentioned in every single post.


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  9. Bagh humbug by angry+old+man · · Score: 5
    Galeon represents what a browser should stand for! It doesn't have none of these fancy schmancy bells-and-whistles bloat that you young whipsnappers come to expect from each and every application. Shortly after Emacs came out, I knew that we were headed down the road to disaster.

    If you young kids repected your elders, then you would have kept with the Unix philosophy of using small dedicated tools for specific tasks. Read email? You'd use mail. Browse web? Use Lynx. Look at images? Use xv. Use talk for an instant messager

    Nowadays you need fancy schmancy browsers that do everything. Galeon is a step back in the right direction. Although I don't agree that bookmarks should be part of a browser (I used to have to remember the IP addresses in my head), galeon provides an efficient specific web browsing experience. Maybe all you programmers could take some notes from the guy who gave us Galeon!

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    -vax computer, vi, lynx. 'nuf said
  10. Antialiasing fonts by orbman · · Score: 3

    Konqueror is great, and web pages look terrific with anti aliasing is turned on. Galeon / moz can't do it as far as I know (may be with GTK 2?)

    If you recompile Mozilla with Xlib or QT backend instead of GTK backend (see ./configure) then Mozilla can do AA fonts.

    The AA fonts will be in Mozilla 1.0 even with GTK+-1.2.x - you can have AA fonts in GTK apps but you must use Xrender explicitely. (look at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/) and search "anti alias" strings.

    JFYI - Opera (http://www.opera.com/) can use AA fonts too, when being run under KDE with AA turned on.

    Mozilla 0.9.x is getting better everyday, it's getting faster also ... I think we will have a very good browser when M1.0 will be out.

    (personally, I like Konq. but the thing with preformatted text, square chars withou line breaks annoys me (I often use bugzilla etc.) ... I've been told by KDE developpers they're fixing this)

  11. Re:stopped using KDE by m08593 · · Score: 3
    If they had, they'd have missed a lot of functionality that needed links into the rendering engine to properly work. Now, Gecko, the main engine, is so flexible it can do anything Mozilla throws at it, as well as just about anything else anyone would want in a browser.

    I think you can give the Mozilla developers a little more credit. These people are experienced programmers that have not only done an HTML rendering engine before, but they are also familiar with rich text rendering in a number of toolkits. They don't need to implement a mail reader to know what kinds of hooks a mail reader needs.

  12. stopped using KDE by m08593 · · Score: 4
    I was using KDE mainly because of Konqueror: Mozilla and Netscape just didn't cut it. KDE has some other nice features, but I found it to be a pretty heavy-weight and intrusive desktop, and it has a bunch of annoying bugs. (Yes, I know, you can run Konqueror under other desktops, but it still starts up other KDE services in the background, and it doesn't feel entirely happy.)

    After using Galeon for a couple of days, I think that it's an excellent browser. It doesn't start up lots of oddball support programs, it just browses the web. It also seems more reliable and render more accurately than Konqueror. So, I can finally switch back to a more lightweight desktop.

    I think that if the Mozilla team had concentrated on bringing out this kind of browser, just the browser, they could have been done much earlier and captured so much more market share.