Re: The future of Galeon

On Sun, 2005-10-23 at 12:35 +0000, Mişu Moldovan wrote:
> Lately I have to use Windows at work, so I'm trying to make Firefox  
> work as Galeon using the available extensions. But I don't think it is  
> 100% possible... Persistent zooming is one of the things that seems  
> impossible to configure. And no extension seems to be capable of  
> configuring Firefox's behavior in regards to tabbing exactly as I had  
> Galeon configured. My guess is that Epyphany won't be capable of this  
> either, even with Galeon's developers help, unfortunately.

Epiphany already has persistent zooming (I think Galeon copied that
feature from Epiphany). As for tabbing: I think it would be rather easy
to write an extension to mimic Galeon's tabbing behavior (including
putting-tabs-on-sides, that's just 1 line of Python code). At the moment
there's the "tab-groups" extension which orders tabs in a way that *I*
like, but I don't know exactly how Galeon does it.

> But in the end, it's obvious there are not enough resources for two  
> competing GNOME browsers nowadays, with Firefox growing very strong.  
> However, I think there is a need for a non-GNOME GTK+-based browser in  
> the free software world.

Then you'll have to find developers who can make that happen. In the
meantime, you may want to try out Skipstone at
<http://www.muhri.net/skipstone/>.

> I was also hoping for a Galeon  
> without Mozilla dependencies based on Gtk+ WebCore. This was proved  
> possible and will attract even more interest from the free software  
> community and beyond.

This is just as possible for Epiphany as it is for Galeon. (Somebody
actually wrote a working prototype, in fact.)

> What bothered me most with Epyphany was that when using dark themes  
> (inverted colors) it insisted on using the theme background when no  
> background color was set in an HTML page. But sometimes the HTML page  
> has a predefined color for the text and no predefined color for the  
> background. Or the other way around. This usually results in  
> unreadeable pages...

There could be an option in Epiphany to disable this. As a web user I'd
like to request that you email the authors of said pages and plead with
them to fix their pages. The fix is trivial, and the error is 100%
theirs.

> While testing this in Epiphany 1.6.5 I've also notice another thing  
> which I use frequently and doesn't seem to be configurable in Epiphany:  
> loading links from the clipboard by middle-clicking in a page.

Yes, Epiphany supports this but doesn't display an option. Just run the
following from the command-line:

gconftool-2 --set /apps/epiphany/general/middle_click_open_url --type
bool true

-- 
Adam Hooper <[email protected]>

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