Galeon rant rant

Ah, another Galeon 1.3 sucks rant (see also Erich’s comments). At first I thought to make a point by point reply, but I quickly realized I would’ve been mostly repeating myself. So I’ll just skip the points which are coming straight from GNOME 2.x and gtk+ 2.x, there’s no point in whining about Galeon working the way gtk+ does. And as it is a rewrite, things don’t suddenly just appear unless someone does the work and writes the code. So far no one has bothered to do so (just as no one has bothered porting the apparently “perfect” Galeon 1.2 to GNOME 2.x either.)

So let’s see the few points which we actually decided to make work the way they do.

Pressing Ctrl-U in the address line or any smart bookmark opens the source code of the current tab instead of just clearing the input field (without copying its content to the clipboard).

This is rather funny, actually, as Galeon is trying very hard to support Emacs-keybinding and in general trying to make some sense between actions with shortcuts in menus and actions built into widgets. The order in which keyboard events are handled in gtk+ is peculiar, but basically the ugly hacks in Galeon should ensure most Emacs keybindings (which conflict with HIG bindings) should just work. Of course this needs a setting similar to gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs" in your ~/.gtkrc-2.0

If you click the “New” button for opening a new tab, it always opens at the end of the tab list instead of directly after the current tab. So I always have to move that tab back to where it should be. This sucks in Firefox, too. In Galeon 1.2.x there was a switch for this behaviour (as well there is in Opera), so both behaviours were possible: “Insert new tabs after current tabs”.

The way tabs work in Galeon is that related tabs are kept together while unrelated tabs are opened at the end. A link on a page opened in a new tab is considered related, opening a new (blank) tab from menu or command line is not.

The bookmark editor in Galeon 1.3.x just sucks:

Ok, here at least I agree. I think there's only one person who really understands how the, IMHO over-engineered, bookmarks code really works and he hasn't been around for quite a while. The rest of us are just scared of that code, or something. Favicons work for me, though.

Not all configuration options can be changed using Galeon’s configuration interface nor using the GNOME Control Center. Which user knows that he can change even more options by using gconf-editor or opening the URL about:config by typing it into the address field?!? A big minus in ergonomy for GNOME 2.x and Galeon 1.3.x.

Have you ever actually looked at the number of options in about:config? I seriously hope you're not seriously suggesting moving them all in the UI. I think even Mozilla left out some options from distracting the user.

The basic principle with the preferences is rather simple, really. The defaults should just work. If most users are likely to want or need to tweak some preference it's in the UI. For niche uses there's gconf-editor an about:config.

I can't help it but the overall impression I got from the rant was basically Galeon 1.3 is different from Galeon 1.2... Well, duh!

The whole Galeon team will be in the GNOME Developer's Summit in Boston next weekend. You might want to bribe us with few beers to fix your Galeon pet peeves 🙂