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."

Comments

They've had a lot of trouble.

[James A. A. Joyce]

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!

Re:They've had a lot of trouble.

[Xoro]

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.

Re:They've had a lot of trouble.

[ttk]

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.

Re:They've had a lot of trouble.

[readams]

As a metacity maintainer, I feel I have to respond to this.

First, HP (Havoc Pennington) isn't on an anti-feature craze. The point is to develop a desktop that works well for everyone without requiring you to go through dozens of preference dialogs to get something that will work correctly. KDE actually has a preference, off by default, to be not horribly broken on a xinerama setup.

But, aside from that, metacity does support an always on top keybinding (I commited this about a month ago) It's just not bound by default; you can edit it using gconf-editor though.

Also, there has been talk of changing the put on workspace menu. Perhaps if idiots like you could stop whining for two seconds on slashdot and perhaps join in a useful discussion on bugzilla, you can have a say in how that gets done eventually:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cg i?id=110904

Also, there is no new GTK file save dialog yet; this is a feature that won't appear until gnome 2.6, since gnome 2.4 is based on gtk 2.2. The dialog you may have seen is a ximian patch to GTK, and is certainly not the final incarnation of the GTK file save dialog.

contantly changing ui

[ChiChiCuervo]

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.

Galeon RIP

[grzebo]

It used to be my favourite browser, but fore some reason or other the developers have decided to destroy it. While Galeon 1.2.x was superb, version 1.3 is just slightly better than IE.

IMHO they got exactly what they worked so hard for - rejection from everyone.

A far-from-complete list of features they broke:

• Tab settings - how wide they are, if they should get shortened, etc.
• favicons on tabs - supposedly it's possible to turnt them on using some magical commands, but I haven't managed
• a button to erase the address bar - I don't want its content on my clipboard
• focus of newly opened tabs/windows - additional clicks necessary
• rocker style mouse gestures - just pressing RMB and then LMB used to go back
• stability
• saving sessions as groups of bookmarks
• setting individual handling programs for different extensions

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).

Defaults suck: make your own choices.

[jonadab]

> 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.