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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."
"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 afaik is the Gtk+ web browser and does not depend on any Gnome lib.
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. The compatibility argument here is spurious. Because all of these browsers use the same rendering engine (Gecko), web pages will look the same between all of them. Essentially, they're just UI distinctions which web designers by and large don't need to worry about.
2. The security argument is interesting, but bear in mind that unified platforms are like unified gene pools--a single virus or other agent can target them all. More diverse systems are more difficult to target; a galeon-specific virus won't affect mozilla or k-meleon. Of course, a generic Gecko virus is possible but that doesn't increase vulnerability over a mozilla-only world. And because Galeon is designed to be small, there's much less code to audit.
Choice is good.
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
... 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.
So it comes down to Mozilla, a lightweight browser on each of Windows and Unix, and some other programs that can use Gecko. How many Windows programs embed IE? Lots.
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
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 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.
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
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Havoc Penington, the bane of my Linux desktop.
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.
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.
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.
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
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.
No not really. Mozilla has an embedding distribution already. It wouldn't take much for the Galeon folks to use or tweak that, stuff it in an RPM and ship it with Galeon. In fact if anything, it's easier to maintain because they control exactly what goes in it rather than relying on the mozilla 0.9.6 distribution.
You say:
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 or Tomalak's Realm 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.
Actually, I would say that bandwidth savings would still be a biggie.. Not everyone has so much bandwidth that the difference in size would be trivial. Also, "the [processor] savings inn't that big a deal in these days of standard-issue "Gigahertz processors". If you are getting 40-CB drives, doubtless you also have a decently fast processor, right? On my 400-MHz, the extract time between bz2 and gz is negligible, only compression seems to be that much slower in bz2...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
When I first tried out tabbed interface MDI in a web browser, instantly recognized how much better it was. Not like you're forced into it, by default it will act non-MDI, just like IE. With this, you save screen space, it's much easier to keep organized. Only down side is when you decide you need information from two tabs at once. Hopefully you recognize this well in advance and used windows, but still, it would be nice to instantly "detach" a tab into a new window, and attach again once you finish, preserving all the state info, but still, galeon's my favorite,. Mozilla has tabs, but the interface to them still sucks..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Thanks for your insightful comments shit for brains, but since I'm an active Mozilla developer I've already done plenty for the Galeon folks.
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.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?