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Galeon Developers Interview
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."
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!
Bash script for FP whores
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.
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.
Galeon Developer Interview, July 2003
:-)
:)
;) I hope we can get someone who's both willing an
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 right now but we've gained a lot more focus recently and Crispin has been a great help. Having the whole gnome farce behind us is also a relief. ximian deciding to ship galeon as their primary browser is a big boost, especially given redhat has thrown us out (no surprises) and slackware too *sniff*. We still have problems dealing with the bad image we have of 1.3 as a featureless POS; most people don't realise how far we've come since October 2002. But we're getting there, slowly but steadily. Galeon isn't going away.
yaneti
Pretty healthy all things considered. Not being "the official GNOME browser". Excluded from Red Hat rawhide. Dissed for all the wrong reasons by uninformed people. - Yet people still seem to be interested and most importantly "external" patches seem to have picked up recently, which is just great. Many thanks.
tko
We're progressing nicely, if a bit slowly. We've come a long way after hitting rock-bottom and more people are starting to realize that, so the bad image we got last year should be a thing in the past.
In an interesting twist of events, the Epiphany team has started developing an extension system, and the first extension is mouse gestures - the sort of feature the whole disagreement that eventually lead to Epiphany's birth was all about. After a fashion they're sharing our view on the 'advanced' features after all, and I'm guessing by GNOME 2.6 it'll get where we are now. I only wonder why we couldn't start that last October when I was suggesting it, and skip all the fla^Wfriendly discussions. Oh well...
ric
It is surprisingly healthy if you think that it has not had a stable[1] release in a lot of time and that it no longer considered "the" gnome browser. I think that there is an important niche for galeon as the usable and *useful* gnome browser.
[1] even if the released versions are only development versions and not officially stable, they are quite stable actually. I use CVS builds always and it does not crash easily. discussions. Oh well...
How much work is left before Galeon 1.3 becomes Galeon 2.0?
philipl:
I've just updated the TODO list.
Mainly, we want to:
* Dump the albatross called bonoboui
* Reorganise the prefs dialog to actually be useful.
* Make the bookmark editor not suck big fat rocks
* get the stylesheet chooser back. that is really missed.
* polish! polish! polish!
Unfortunately this means we do have a big architectural step left which is exorcising bonoboui and switching to the egg library. The other stuff is comparatively straightforward.
yaneti
Thats a kind of managerial question which would be best left to philip. I count whats left by looking at the number of bugs on the 2.0 milestone, which might be entirely bogus because its only me who puts them there
tko
A fair amount. While we have a good set of features and a few more coming, they're not presented well to users. For example, mouse gestures have been implemented since last September, but still people keep asking about them. We need to go through the preferences and decide which ones to show in the dialog, which ones to keep semi-hidden in GConf only, and which ones to remove.
Another large task to do is to update the documentation, although I'm not sure anyone reads it anyway
Bash script for FP whores
IMHO they got exactly what they worked so hard for - rejection from everyone.
A far-from-complete list of features they broke:
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).
Aren't the popup menus on XFCE's panel similar to Gnome's panel drawers? I never cared much for Gnome's drawers, but FWIC, you click an icon on the panel, it expands to show several launchers. XFCE has that.
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).