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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.
...puts us in the new age of environmental consciousness.
Not only you can reuse the same parts of code on different platforms, but the Mozilla mailer is the first one to have separate folders for trash and junk.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Yeah, and those heat pockets on Mars? Great.
The comment form would be a lot more useful if it had a "submit" button, so that you could actually give them the comment.
Unless it's not showing up because my browser is broken. But in that case, I'd like to comment on that, since I'm using Galeon.
"Sssssoooo precioussssss, what do you want to knowwww about Galeonnnnn".
Ooops, wrong Galeon. Sorry.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Ray
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
that's odd, it shows on every browser I've tried.
yadda
...I hope RedHat takes something like Firebird for its browser. It's featureful and it wouldn't be difficult to whack an even simpler configuration interface on it. Plus, being descended from Mozilla, it would be immune to all of the GNOME/KDE infighting that's going on. It's really a shame that there's so much politics going on among all of the OSS organisations-cum-factions. That's why I prefer Mozilla based browsers; their developers don't get embroiled in "Konq sux! Galeon rulez!" flamewars. GNOME and KDE people who say that they're neutral soon show which side they're neutral on!
Bash script for FP whores
I haven't had stability problems with it, and I rather like it better than Mozilla itself. I know it could use some work, but I find it disappointing to know that my favorite browser is being dropped...
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
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.
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.
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).
I have used Galeon since the 0.x days however since 1.2 version I have had Galeon crash on me numerous times running under KDE. The problem is Galeon's interaction with KDE's aRTs (sound daemon). None of the crashes happen with e.g. Mozilla or Phoenix and Galeon people are unwilling/unable (?) to fix Galeon to play along with aRTs. There are numerous bugs filed in Bugzilla about the issue but the developers mark it "NOTABUG" ie. not a Galeon bug. Regardless of whose bug is it it is shame that Galeon people haven't been able to address the issue. I have thus moved on to Mozilla Firebird.
First you post a story about Reiser4 without any indication of what Reiser4 is. I read Slashdot regularly, but never heard of it. Then you post a story about Galleon, again without any hit to the reader about what it might be.
I admit I knew what the ReiserFS is and what Galeon is, but I think a link would have been helpful.
My biggest pet peeve of computer magazines (eg. PC Magazine) is that they feature new products in the index and don't say what they are. They review cameras, printers, scanners, computers, cpus, hard disks, displays, and so on and I'm supposed to know what a "Super DTA Zapmeister" is. Say what?
Look at this screen shot for the parent post with improved graphics ;)
Join the TWIT army now!
2) Galeon's primary raison d'etre is that Gecko is good but Mozilla is bloated. With the growing popularity of Firebird (and the eventual mainstreaming of FB into Moz), will there really be much of a need for Galeon?
/. Front page in the screenshot, first article:
:)
Posted by Hemos on 10:46 AM September 28th, 2001
Two years is an eternity in IT world, check out something bit more recent and you might be pleasantly surprised...
Those ancient screenshots sure aren't very good for PR, though
Or is this "interview" really not all that interesting? For someone, such as myself, who has not followed Galeon closely for the last year or so, it would help to provide some concrete background on the problems they've had. Instead, this so-called interview is basically comprised of two topics, rehashed over and over: libbonobo sucks, and Crispin 0wnz.
This interview sheds very little light on Galeon's past, present, or future. It seems mostly like a page full of bitching by the main developers, with little substance. Tell us about the recent history of Galeon, good and bad, the direction the project will hopefully take in the coming months, etc. "We need to get back to 1.2" is not very helpful, especially for people who don't follow Galeon closely.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
I like this item on their to do list...
polish! polish! polish!
It really great to see that open source developers are working a the linux desktops final flaw.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Yeah, cuz it's really hard to look it up:
SCO Group - 1.6%
> My guess it's closer to 25%
Where did you pull that arbitrary number from? Me thinks you are spreading FUD.
konqueror and safari are the new browser kings on *nix
So where can I get safari for AIX or konqueror for Solaris? Part of the reason Mozilla is so big is because of it's cross platform design.
What a great content free post.
PS...
Konqueror sucks and Safari is not 100% open source.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
that's odd, it shows on every browser I've tried.
Yeah, it's there now.
I would have complained to them directly, to get them to add the submit button; but . . . .
> the Galeon developers do not seem to be 100% behind GNOME's goals
The same can be said for the newsreader Pan: the author ripped all the GNOME stuff out a while back.
I wonder whether this might be the beginning of a trend, and kind of hope it is. IMO GNOME 2 has been a major step in the wrong direction.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I like Konqueror, but never manage to keep using it. Every time I try it, within a day or two I stumble upon a page that renders poorly or doesn't work at all in Konqueror--so I switch back to Mozilla, Firebird, Galeon, or whatever gecko-based browser I prefer at the time (currently Galeon) and it views the page fine.
> the Galeon developers do not seem to be 100% behind GNOME's goals
Yeah, there's something vaguely creepy about the above quoted sentence... It smacks way to much of petty corporate (or academic!) politics.
I really doubt everybody in the Gnome project is in such unanimous agreement about every single one of their goals -- and that's good, because some degree of dissension is healthy!
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Does anybody remember "The web and only the web"? No true Unix user wants a browser that does it all. For mail, use a mailer, for IRC use a client like "BitchX" and so on. For 90% of my browsing Galleon is just fine and just about any sort of 'extra functionality' for the web can be hacked in. I surely would like to see features used in the past like the 'zoom indicator' brought back. Only the newest of the newbies uses a full page browser and therefore that new feature is disapointing. (Fullscreen) It is also disappointing that 'helper applications' are not easy to set and are not automatic, seemingly a 'nobrainer'.
Sometimes it is necessary to use Mozilla, mostly for proper Javascript functionality, something that one would think Galeon would inherit. Absolutely no browser can keep up with Apache and the web. This goes for the super bloated and slow
IExplorer too. Opera is fast but 'links' looks like the fastest graphical browser of them all and by many times. There is also the issue of some organisations allowing Windows or Mac browsers to protect their streams. This is the most absurd excuse of them all as it is trivial to intercept and store any 'protected' media.
Lets get some good features back into Galeon. It would be nice if it could completely spoof Mac or Windows for services that require that. (and save the streams at the request of the user) Any serious browser maker would team up with Apache or atleast use their modules if necessary. It is ironic that the 'most popular' browser is slow, insecure and made by a minor player in the server market. I'm sticking with Galeon for the moment. If it gets anymore 'user friendly' (and administrator hostile) I will end up using some other browser that may not even exist today.
Ha ha ha ha. If KHTML could render half of the sites I view properly, then maybe I'd agree with you. As it is, they've made a good start and have a solid foundation on which to build a decent browser. But there are a lot of bugs to fix, and a long way to go before they're usable for everyday browsing...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I haven't heard much GNOME/KDE infighting lately. What I hear is people bitching about the HIG, exemplified by the galeon/ephy situation. And sorry to be blunt, Mr. Joyce, but from what I've seen in this thread, you are nothing but a pontificating troll.
The problem with that is, a lot of the "bloat" is the code that lets Mozilla render the last 10% of the web that Konqueror chokes on.
0 1 - just my two bits
Just compile KDE. Good luck :)
I am they. That would make a great sig, eh?
yadda
> As for the reasons why it is the default in Gnome
Presumably same reason metacity is default in Gnome: the defaults
in Gnome are being deliberately shoved toward featureless, on the
theory that it's somehow cleaner, or something like that.
*shrug* People who care about features don't have to live with the
defaults, though. It's not to hard to install whatever browser you
want, whatever wm you want (I like sawfish...), and so forth.
Defaults are just that: what happens to you if you default on your
options. So, if you don't want that to happen to you, don't default:
when you install, set up all the options however you want them and
be happy.
Hey, when it really comes down to it, the default computer setup is
currently Windows XP. Feel free to live with the default if you
want, but don't complain when it sucks, because you had your choice.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> So where can I get safari for AIX or konqueror for Solaris?
KDE runs on both platforms, and as such, khtml browsers such as Konqueror also do.
> Konqueror sucks and Safari is not 100% open source.
It's subjective but I much perfer the rendering of Safari to the rendering firebird/mozilla/Camino.
I think a lot more Linux/UNIX users will also start to prefer Konqueror once all the Safari changes are rolled in.
KHTML is wicked fast, and I've noticed perhaps 3 pages since I made Safari my only-primary browser in May. I was pretty happy with Camino before that.
Hah... he doesn't know the Super DTA Zapmeister.
What's this world coming to...
The Super DTA Zapmeister, my friend, is the solution to all your problems. It could make your life so much easier, giving you all luxury and comfort you deserve. There isn't anything quite like it on the market; and although you might expect such a miracle to sell for a high price, you might be pleasantly surprised to know that we will give you a 50% reduction if you buy now, and, on top of that, an option to upgrade to the Ultra WOW Blastomatic!
Super DTA Zapmeister... what would you do without 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.
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.
LOL! Just in case this wasn't a troll, you can get Konqueror for AIX here , and it comes with Solaris on an extras CD, at least in Solaris 8. Also, you can run Konqueror on your PDA. Try that with Mozilla.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
I wouldn't want to try running that on my PDA. It's an older iPAQ, and that thing would take up over half the Flash RAM by itself! And 32 MB of runtime memory consumption wouldn't leave room for anything else to run, like the OS. I'll stick with Konqueror/Embedded, thanks.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
C-a should go to the beginning of the line, NOT "select all." Look, I don't give a fuck if you want to make "select all" the default: just give me a freakin' dialog box somewhere in which I can change it!
I'm sick and tired of waiting for the Gnome2 guys to actually have a keyboard bindings control panel that does something, and this one little feature has made me consider downgrading to 1.2 on several occasions.
[ home ]
two desktops renowned for good user interfaces
better to reign in hell than serve in heaven
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
For instance, between the eight people on GNOME's release team, we have all sorts of disagreements. Trying to decide between Galeon and Epiphany, and trying to analyse the wishes of the community were particularly difficult. Incredibly, the following points of view were held amongst the eight members of the release team:
We shouldn't ship a browser with the Desktop release at all
We shouldn't ship Galeon or Epiphany until they're ready
We should ship Epiphany
We should ship Galeon
:-) You're vaguely right, I suppose. It was worded that way because we had to be very diplomatic about our rationale; it was a fairly heated issue.
:-)
So, it also turns out that I wrote the sentence you referred to as "petty corporate or academic politics".
Without the thickened diplomacy, it means that the current Galeon developers didn't seem to care about GNOME. They've viciously criticised the direction of the project, and did not get involved on the mailing lists when we were discussing the module selection process (so, in a way, they forfeited). Given these issues, it would not have made sense for the project to commit to Galeon.
Before you flame...! I wasn't convinced that we should have chosen a browser at all for the 2.4 Desktop release, because I don't think they're "ready" (qualitatively and philosophically). I use Galeon, and haven't enjoyed using Epiphany so far, yet my choice has nothing to do with "features" or "options"!
But, as you can see, there are more important factors that we have to deal with than random personal opinions - even those of the release team!
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).
There are a lot of hidden prefs (in keeping with the style of GNOME 2) which control behaiour that cannot be set by a preference dialog (some of these were in a pref dialog in Galeon 1). See the tab location part of the ExtraPrefs document on how to change it.
... because there is not guarantee that the GNOME settings will be there. You don't have to have GNOME installed to use Mozilla (you could be running KDE, Window Maker etc.) but you do have to have the fundamental parts of GNOME installed in order to run Galeon.
I'm a big Galeon fan, have been since early days, but am currently running 1.2.5, so I haven't seen the 1.3 problems. I also keep a fairly popular Nix Browser Reviews page.
I'm not much of a GNOME fan, and note the extensive GNOME deps as a misfeature of Galeon -- recently rediscovered as it turns out that some user.js prefs are ignored and need to be set through gconf instead (user-agent). Though I can see some benefits in principle, the results of GNOME in terms of the actual desktop are not to my personal liking. Fortunately, this doesn't get in the way of running WindowMaker instead.
There's a lot of assumed knowledge about the 1.3 issues in the interview. Could someone point to where this has been discussed?
Pitching my own $0.02: I've got lightweight browsers. I'm not looking for that in the niche Galeon currently fills. I'm also not looking for the fscking kitchen sink (browser, mail, news, composer...). A browser, but a solid browser, with user-friendly preferences, giving solid user control over presentation, privacy, security, with stability and decent performance. But wait, I already covered that rant....
If Galeon's seriously fscked up (and its slavish devotion to GNOME has always been more a detraction than a benefit), I'll be happy to move on. Pity losing a few years of accomodation, configuration, and utility.
Strongly recommend the core team listen to its users.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
probably
The unofficial
And in return, about the only real advance I can see is that my fonts are all antialiased now like they've been in Mozilla and Konqueror for about a year already. Maybe if I ran Gnome I'd find something to be impressed with, but I don't, and I haven't.
Overall, I don't think I've ever seen a minor version release of a program that took away so much functionality. I know it's due to the conversion to Gtk2/Gnome2 and there are still speed bumps to be worked out, but it's actually left me with a bad taste in my mouth for Gnome apps in general, which is pretty weird for me as a former avid Gnome user. If I end up switching to Firebird, as seems likely, I actually won't be running any more Gnome apps at all.
Maybe the thing to do is find out if Galeon has a bugzilla and see if all these have been filed already, but honestly, don't you think it'll be less effort to switch to Firebird? It would mean I would be running no Gnome apps at all anymore, which would be weird, but maybe the way Galeon's existence caused the Mozilla guys to build a browser like Firebird means it's fulfilled its purpose and there's no need to feel loyal to it for whatever reason.