Changes in galeon 1.3 over mozilla compiled with gtk2

I'm building a new desktop box running gentoo Linux, and the stable ebuild
path just moved to gnome 2.4.  Getting galeon compiled and running involved
compiling mozilla with gtk2 support (in order to support epiphany), and
building galeon 1.3.9.  The latter is a masked package in gentoo (i.e.
unstable) but this is the only way to get galeon to compile against mozilla
with gtk2.

A few things are missing in galeon 1.3.9 which were present in galeon 1.2
and I don't know if they can or will be fixed, or if the place they need
fixing is in galeon, in mozilla or in the gtk2 toolkit.  In particular:

*  The "Clear location" toolbar widgit/button is gone.  This was an
   extremely convenient feature which allowed me to copy a URL from, say, an
   email or document, clear the location field (left mouse click) paste the
   URL (middle mouse click) and hit the 'go to' button (left mouse click),
   all with one hand without having to touch the keybaord.  One handed
   operation is very convenient when I'm researching something on the web
   and don't really need or want to use my keybaord.  Without this, I have
   to click in the location field and hold down the backspace or delete key
   and wait until the key repeat causes the field to be cleared - sometimes
   10 or more seconds if the URL has a lot of query or get data in it (e.g.
   mapquest).
   
*  The "Find entry" toolbar widgit/button is also gone, another small but
   one of my favorite galeon convenience features.  Several more mouse
   clicks in different places are now required to find text in a page.
   
*  Text entry fields in smart bookmarks aren't persistent and the fields 
   are cleared on each use cycle.  I much preferred them to retain text so
   that, for instance, I could use the google smart bookmark, to perform a
   series of related look-ups, even if I were browsing a referenced page
   rather than at a google results page.
   
*  I note that favicon.ico reading is strange.  I guess there's no
   'standard' on this, however I believe SOP is for a browser which supports
   them to request favicon.ico in the document root even if a URL is a 
   request for a page in a subdirectory.  galeon 1.2 worked as expected
   in this regard, however galeon 1.3 won't fetch favicon.ico from the 
   document root if the URL is a request for a page in a subdirectory.
   Galeon 1.3 (or possibly it's in the gekko rendering engine) also 
   appears considerably lest robust in handling the various favicon.ico 
   multiple image formats which galeon 1.2 handled OK.
   
In general, I've seen a lot of applications which seem to have lost lots of
bits and pieces of functionality in the move from gtk1.2 to gtk2.  Is this
because of the need for radical rewriting of code in the apps, because these
features are difficult to support in gtk2, or what?  Is this situation
expected to improve so that we can expect refinements lost in the migration
to be restored at some point?

-- 
Lindsay Haisley       | "Everything works    |     PGP public key
FMP Computer Services |       if you let it" |      available at
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