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Galeon Developers Interview

Posted by michael on from the at-least-it-isn't-named-firebird dept.

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."

7 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Re:They've had a lot of trouble. by owenb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Gnome is rapidly becoming a major clusterfuck these days. Which is a shame, because the only other real option is selling yourself to SCO (aka... Trolltech's owner), and subjecting yourself to the full GPL just to write desktop apps, or paying SCO $3000 for every developer.

    Enough with this FUD. SCO own less than 2% of Trolltech. Trolltech put out an extremely high quality GPL'd product, and you complain? Write a better one, fix the problems in Gnome, or shut up.

  2. contantly changing ui by ChiChiCuervo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think people wouldn't be dropping galeon if they core team were vigilant with maintaining the UI from version to version.

    For instance, I used to be able to have my tabs on the bottom, then i couldn't, then i could, and now i can't again. I vastly prefer galeon's tabs to mozilla's, being one of those features that keeps me with galeon even now, but i'm sick of this on again , off again feature.

    Another on again, off again feature I like was the ability to right click on the handle of one of my custom toolbars and opening the entire folder in tabs. They recently re-added this feature in the bookmarks menu, but I really miss it on the toolbar itself.

    Frankly, if there were another browser that had a similar level of control of bookmarks and custom toolbars, I'd switch to it in a second. Nothing else comes quite that close to galeon's level of customizibility.

    I just wish Galeon wasn't so flighty in it's feature set.

  3. Re:Oh yeah by sremick · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Not sure if this is really flamebait or not, but for argument's sake, I wanted to post a screenshot of MY Galeon, showing the fonts are just fine:

    http://vtbsd.net/galeon_shot.png

    This is Galeon 1.3.7 on FreeBSD 5.1, with all ports kept up-to-date.

  4. Re:They've had a lot of trouble. by Xoro · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Couldn't agree more about HP's destructive anti-feature craze. It's even hurt Galeon. Where did "Save Session" go? Where did "File Bookmark" go? I use Gnome because I find KDE too circus (cirKus?) -like, but man, they've got to leave *some* features in.

    Some other silliness:

    • No float on top feature to Metacity? Too complicated?
    • Ugly list of useless "put on workspace" choices (also Metacity) because nested listing is "unintuitive"?
    • New GTK file-save box -- much-needed upgrade but no way to access .(dot)files? Sure, it's much cleaner when they're hidden, but it meant I had to type in a filename five levels deep just to point my program to it.
    • And you said it about Epiphany. I've seen more features on a kiosk.

    I hope the galeon people take getting dropped as a liberation rather than a punishment. Let them get back to making a great browser rather than trying to conform to someone's warped interpretation of monkey-computer interface guidelines.

    --
    Kill, Tux, kill!
  5. Why Galeon is not included in GNOME by Alethes · · Score: 4, Interesting
    From Final Modules List for the GNOME 2.4 Desktop Release:
    There was a lot of vocal support for Epiphany on the mailing list, but little for Galeon. So, the consensus points to Epiphany. That was due to a number of factors: The Epiphany project goals seem to be better aligned with GNOME's goals, the Galeon developers do not seem to be 100% behind GNOME's goals; Epiphany has had regular releases for GNOME 2.3.x; the Epiphany hackers are working within the project to define standards and code for toolbar editing and other functionality, etc. While there are a lot of reservations about offending the Galeon hackers, and great disappointment that the two projects have not been able to cooperate, Epiphany does seem to have the consensus, and make the most technical sense. That is not to say that Epiphany is without faults, or that Galeon is not excellent software -> we do need to make a choice at some stage: Right now there is strong support to add a browser to the Desktop release, and strong support for that browser to be Epiphany.
  6. Re:They've had a lot of trouble. by ttk · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The Galeon developers basically do not wish to follow the Gnome HIG. This is certainly fine - and Galeon is a good browser - but I'd say it's pretty reasonable that an application that is so central to a desktop should also follow the common guidelines set up for the core apps.

    This is simply not true. We are trying to follow the HIG as much as we can, but when it comes to a choice between blindly following the HIG or a feature we feel is essential, we'll probably always be choosing the feature.

    It's Human Interface Guidelines, we are still allowed to think for ourselves.

  7. Almost Perfect by Markus+Registrada · · Score: 3, Interesting
    It's funny -- of the "top 3 bugs" each developer lists, I have encountered only a couple. Of the top unimplemented features they list, I don't want any of them. To me, the only really critical bug was crashing within a few minutes every time I turned on Javascript, but they might have licked that in the 14 July snapshot I run. After that, being able to right-click on an image and get a menu reliably (not just after the third try) would help. The only "new" feature that would make much difference for me is honoring the Gnome emacs key-binding preference. (ctrl-A, E, N, P, B, F, K, particularly.) That worked fine in the 1.2 series, and is the only feature I miss from it.

    I have to admit that I'd like to see the per-site preference behavior of cookies extended to Javascript, image loading and animation, font forcing, color forcing, zoom, etc. Probably the most valuable improvement would be a way to use a different text editor entirely, in another window if necessary. But, mainly, it now has almost exactly the feature set I need in a browser, and hardly anything else. I wish it would stay that way.

    I've been using 1.3 since the beginning, and it was pretty sucky for a while, but I'm glad they did what they did. The version I'm using now is so much nicer, all around, than Epiphany, that it is clearly only politics that made Gnome switch to the latter. I'll never switch, because the Epiphany developers are a bunch of ideologues who have announced they will never add the features that make the browser useful and usable for me.