Re: The future of Galeon

I just wanted to add a small bit of dissent from a longtime Galeon user.
Galeon, for me, has always been the best web browser, period (this
coming from a long-time Windows, Mac OS 9/X and Linux user).  Virtual
Folders for bookmarks, smart search boxes, add tabs as folders, a better
URL completer, better right-click menu, gestures, middle-click scroller,
and on and on.

Galeon starts faster than my other browsers, especially with galeon -s
on session startup, which keeps galeon in memory all the time (a minor
loss, I think, for this day in age where every _thought_ results in a
web/Wikipedia search).  I bind ALT+F1 in metacity to galeon, and no
matter what I'm doing, I'm one key press and 200 msecs away from a
Galeon window.

Galeon's downloader and tab system work as I expect them to.

In short, I think, and have always thought, that "Epiphany" should be
shifting focus to Galeon, or, better put perhaps, that Marco shouldn't
have forked the project.  I always thought that since the fork, people
have paid way too much attention to a lesser browser, starting with the
hype the fork received on /. and OSNews and GnomeFiles, up to this day
where it ships as the default browser on many GNOME desktops.  A default
browser which is less functional than even IE under Windows...

Epiphany was forked, developed, and hyped during the period of time when
the GNOME usability pendulum "swung too far in the other direction," as
I believe Nat Friedman once put it.  There was a focus on usability,
which resulted in GTK+ 2.0, the HIG, and other such great things, and
which made the GNOME desktop a serious contender for the general desktop
"marketshare."  But then this healthy amount of usability tuning turned
into a ZEAL about usability, to the point where people were designing
software not for real users, but for theoretical "baby" users who
weren't using Linux to begin with.

I switched to the Linux desktop for power.  Two applications speak that
power to me (and other users who I demo the software for) in ways I
haven't found on other desktop systems: Galeon, my web browser, and
Evolution, my e-mail client.  I am quite sad to see us embrace a less
powerful alternative for one of my primary two desktop applications.
This would be like Evolution deciding to halt development and implement
all its "extra" features as Balsa extensions.

That said, I know exactly why you guys are doing this: you're busy.  And
that's understandable.  I have wanted to, but never ended up writing a
line of code for Galeon.  Epiphany is actively developed, Galeon is
falling behind.  Plus, you guys rightly see it as wasteful that GNOME
has two competing browsers, when the actual number of GNOME users is so
small to begin with.  This combined with the fact that Firefox is
becoming the major choice among Linux users, over any desktop-specific
browser.

Nonetheless, I can't see this anything less than a tragedy.  I really
want to thank you guys for the development you put into Galeon thus far,
and for the work you'll continue to do in the future.  I really hope
Epiphany plus your extensions will get to the point Galeon was and is
today.  Until then, I'll keep using this great piece of software you
guys have developed in its native form.

-- 
Andrew J. Montalenti
http://www.pixelmonkey.org


On Sat, 2005-10-22 at 14:03 -0700, Philip Langdale wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Tommi, Crispin and I were all able to attend the GNOME summit last
> weekend, even though Crispin had to pay his own way :-) So, it was
> a good opportunity for us to sit down and discuss the future of Galeon.
> All of us are very much working fulltime which limits the extent to
> which we can hack on Galeon and the amount of activity you've observed
> speaks for itself.
> 
> As such, we've reached the conclusion that we have to change our
> approach if we're going to avoid Galeon getting stale or bit-rotting;
> which is important for all of us, as we all use Galeon because we
> still think it's the best thing out there :-)
> 
> So, what does changing our approach mean? It means considering Epiphany
> in a new light; Galeon still does a lot of things, small and large, that
> Epiphany either doesn't do or doesn't do as well, but at the same time,
> there are some areas where they've moved in front, and most importantly
> Epiphany has a bunch of active maintainers who are handling the things
> that we struggle to do for Galeon. But you say: Epiphany doesn't fit
> my needs or I'd be using it already! True, so our proposal is to bring
> Galeon to Epiphany.
> 
> Epiphany has a powerful extensions mechanism that exposes many of the
> core structures of the program and there is a general willingness to
> expose more as necessary. This means that many galeon features can be
> recast as extensions, and Crispin has already done this for a couple
> of things: the sidebar is now in epiphany-extensions and he's got a
> few more hidden away such as in-browser view-source. Also don't forget
> that some other features have been independently ported as extensions
> already, such as the javascript console.
> There are a few galeon features which are hard to implement as
> extensions and/or are of a class that makes them desirable within the
> base Epiphany package, and these should be directly ported. I've already
> made a couple of checkins to port back/forward history copying and
> middle-clicking on history entries.
> 
> Between these two approaches and the more pragmatic direction that
> epiphany is moving in these days (heirarchical bookmark support has
> just been checked in!), I believe that we can reach a point where
> Epiphany + a set of extensions will provide the same functionality that
> Galeon does today.
> 
> This seems an optimal solution for everyone; it allows us, the galeon
> developers, to avoid duplicating work with epiphany team, it will allow
> users to leverage the best from both browsers and most importantly, it
> puts galeon on a much firmer footing for the future that is not so much
> at the mercy of our ability to find time to hack on it.
> 
> I hope that this sounds like a good long term strategy to everyone, but
> if you do find yourself recoiling from it, do realise that the current
> approach is unsustainable and will almost certainly result in galeon
> becoming unmaintained or falling too far behind in some areas, meaning
> that you'll be struggling to keep using it anyway.
> 
> This process will probably take some time given our other commitments,
> so we intend to make a formal 2.0 galeon release (long overdue really)
> and keep that compiling against newer releases of mozilla, but our
> efforts will be directed towards this extension project.
> 
> Of course, anybody who wants to help out, either with the extensions
> or with maintaining the current galeon codebase, is more than welcome!
> 
> I've added a wiki page at: http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany_2fGaleonIssues
> which lists current stuff I can think of. I encourage anyone to add
> anything that I've missed, but if you want to list a Galeon 1.2 feature
> please categorise it separately :-)
> 
> --phil
> 
> 
> 
> 
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