Re: decline :(

On Sun, 22 May 2005 04:18, "Bobby D. Bryant" <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 05/21/05 10:28:22, Janek Kozicki wrote:
> > But decline in galeon usage from 18% in year 2003 to 3% in 2004 is
> > really sad!
>
> Probably a side effect of GNOME's "official application of the month"
> mentality, and of course the 1.3 feature evaporation.

There are several reasons, but a big one is that Galeon has not had a stable 
release in a few years. Having made the switch from 1.2 (stable) to 1.3 
(unstable) recently, I am quite happy despite the depreciated number of 
features. 1.3 is simply a better quality browser. It may do less than 1.2, 
but what it does do it does better. People are hesitant to use an 'unstable' 
version of a browser, but to use Galeon these days there is no choice (since 
the 1.2 branch is dead and not current with Mozilla releases).

The biggest reason, which can be seen on the graph, is the entry of Firefox 
into the Web browser arena. Two years ago, Galeon was probably the only good 
web browser on *nix. Konqueror was immature (and arguably still is) and 
Mozilla was bloated. Firefox has energised the entire Web, regardless of OS. 
It went from Zero to Hero in a very short period of time, perhaps to the 
detriment of other browsers.

So what can be done about this? Things like Firefox and GNOME are beyond the 
Galeon team's control, so IMHO they need to focus on making a stable release 
ASAP. 1.3 is nearing release quality, and all it needs are some bugfixes and 
polish. Getting a new release out the door will reinvigorate the project with 
new, interested users. As the graph demonstrates, not everybody (> 60%) is 
happy with Firefox. Yes, there will be some 1.2 users who are unhappy with 
the feature reduction (and until recently I was one of them), but those 
features can always be added later. If the software works, why hold it back 
based on some small features that aren't used much anyway?

Perhaps the Galeon dev team needs to create a shortlist of fixes/features that 
are requirements for a 2.0 release, and then focus on those?


-- 
Sridhar Dhanapalan  [Yama | http://www.pclinuxonline.com/]
  {GnuPG/OpenPGP: http://dhanapalan.webhop.net/yama.asc
   0x049D38B4 : A7A9 8A02 78CB AB1B FCE4 EEC6 2DD9 249B 049D 38B4}

"The use of quantity of money as a target has not been a success. I'm not sure 
that I would as of today push it as hard as I once did."
	-- Milton Friedman, Financial Times (UK), June 7, 2003

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