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Galeon 1.0 Released
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."
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
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):
Also, they added a few new themes (Azundris & Glass66 & Glass75) and some new spinners (I believe Netscape used to call these "throbbers").
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
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.
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!
Shame of Slashdot
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?
All generalizations are false, including this one. (Mark Twain)
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.
--
Violators will be prosecuted and prosecutors will be violated.