Slouching Toward Galeon 1.0

By: Michael Hall
Friday, February 2, 2001 08:24:57 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/previews/2988/1/

GNOME at LinuxWorld Expo

Editor's note: with this column MIchael Hall launches a weekly look at what's new and noteworthy in the GNOME world.

This week I'm writing from New York, where LinuxWorld Expo wraps up today. At the last LWE, the big GNOME news was the establishment of the GNOME Foundation. Though there wasn't anything as earth-shattering (and flame inducing) as that this time around, GNOME was everywhere and lots of projects are closing in on major releases. Besides taking a look at GNOME around the Expo, I also grabbed Galeon 0.9pre3 and took a look, using it to check in on sites each night to get a feel for how the Gecko-based GNOME web browser is shaping up.

In addition to the GNOME project booth, Ximian and Eazel had their own spaces on the floor. Walking between each and talking to the developers and executives behind these companies, the real value of the GNOME Foundation became apparent: GNOME is bigger than a single group or company now, and this will reach fruition with the projected March 27 release of GNOME 1.4, which will draw in work from the mainline GNOME project, Ximian's Evolution, and Eazel's Nautilus (which just had its third and final preview release).

Nautilus, according to Eazel's Director of Client Engineering Don Melton (formerly of Netscape and the Mozilla Project), will be the first major component of the new GNOME release to be completed, reaching version 1.0 on March 5th. Melton played up the values Eazel has brough to bear on Nautilus, asserting that disciplined production schedules "don't kill creativity", and noting that Eazel has focused a lot of resources on quality control.

Though Ximian and the GNOME Project at large have clear and close ties, if the three entities can pull off a successful 1.4 release it will be a real testimony to the cohesiveness they've achieved, especially in light of the fact Evolution and Nautilus have at times been unable to coexist on the same machine during their development cycles (without some tweaking, anyhow) thanks to differing dependencies on key libraries like bonobo.

The proof will be in the 1.4 pudding, obviously, which makes too much gushing about the GNOME Foundation's triumph as a coordinating body premature. It was clear, though, after talking to nearly a dozen people involved in the assorted projects that everybody's communicating and aware of each others' status to the point that they're ready to help each other out across projects to ensure smooth integration.

Red Carpet Set to Roll Out, Evolution Getting Soupy

Ximian's booth took a turn from the staid look it had at COMDEX in November by providing faux zebra seats and (plush) monkeys hanging from a simulated jungle canopy. Within, the Ximian folks on hand were demonstrating the e-mail client/PIM Evolution (which recently began a daily release cycle) and Red Carpet, a package management and installation tool slated for its first public release on Monday. I spoke to Red Carpet developers Ian Peters, Joe Shaw, and Vladimir Vukicevic about what we should expect to see. I got a hands-on demonstration of the software, which adds some nice usability touches for end users, and if all goes well with Monday's release it will be featured here next week. It looks like it will be a good download bet, and I'm looking forward to trying it out.

Ximian is also gearing up for release 0.9 of Evolution, and daily builds were recently introduced. The last time I took a look it had come a long way but I wasn't quite ready to use it as my primary mail client, preferring to stick to tried-and-true Mutt. It's come even further since, and going into LinuxWorld I began to use it daily for mail, despite a few stability issues and some come-and-go features (like gnome-pilot integration).

There are a few tips you can use to begin to work Evolution into your e-mail regimen, especially if you aren't quite ready to begin the work of translating all the sweat equity you've built up in your existing client or labyrithine procmail setup.

For my own setup, which is built around procmail and imap, I added a simple recipe at the top of my first recipe file that looks like this:

:0c
evo-backup.spool

This is a simple "clone" recipe that puts a copy of each mail you receive into a backup mbox file. You can use this collection point to either keep all your mail safe from potential problems (though I've never lost a message to Evolution), or provide a single mail source for Evolution, in which case you can continue to use your old client as you begin the process of translating recipes to filters at your leisure.

Combined with procmail and imap, Evolution is nicely organized out of the box, too, since messages are pre-sorted into their folders and displayed under Evolution. My current setup is using this "hybrid approach", and Evolution's solid virtual folders (which allows for all sorts of organization of messages without moving them out of their original folders) provide added sorting tweaks. My own favorite is one that shows all the messages from my most-watched folders that arrived in the last 30 minutes.

Some have also expressed confusion over how to get rid of unwanted folders in Evolution, since the developers have left a "delete folder" option out for the moment. If you want to remove a folder and don't mind losing all the mail in it forever, visit ~/evolution/local, look for the directory named after the folder you want to remove, and delete it. Keep in mind that you'll lose all the mail in that folder, though, and that Evolution currently removes all mail from the source file or directory. In other words, don't delete anything thinking you can get it back from its source later on. You can't.

Despite the stability hangups Evolution still faces, it should work well for most with simple to moderate needs, or even patient users with advanced setups. I'm happy to use it with a mail volume that approaches and sometimes exceeds 500 messages a day.

Galeon Closes in on 1.0

Galeon is also closing in on a 1.0 release, and it's also changed a lot since our last look. Downloading and installing is much easier, there are plenty of features that have either been added or improved, and it's more stable.

To recap, Galeon is a fairly simple web browser built around Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine and GNOME. The project is built around the proposition that the world has a place for a browser that does nothing more than, well, browse, and now that it's evolved past an early stage that seemed a hair too spartan, it's a real pleasure to use.

Getting Galeon

Galeon is available from the project download page. In addition to the binary packages (available in RPMs, and .deb's, which are each about 500k apiece), or the source tarball (under one meg), Galeon requires a Mozilla installation, also available from the download page. The Debian packages, provided for Woody and Potato, are apt-gettable by adding a line to /etc/apt/sources.list.

If Galeon doesn't happen to be available for a specific distribution (Slackware and Mandrake, for instance), it's a reasonably painless build as long as Mozilla is installed from one of the provided binaries or the Mozilla libraries are properly included from /etc/ld.so.conf.

It's a little ironic that the first metric we applied when we last checked Galeon out, how quickly the browser loaded as compared to Mozilla, seemed a little less impressive this time around. There's no denying Mozilla has improved a lot in six months, but those improvements don't invalidate Galeon: it still loads faster and it seems free of a nagging sense of latency in page rendering we still experience with Mozilla from time to time.

Last time around, Galeon was a spare piece of software. There were hints of a few features that hadn't been implemented, and it was incapable of visiting sites that required authentication or SSL. When used with a 0.7 release of Mozilla, that has changed, and Galeon handles these sites with no problems. Another major gap Galeon has filled since then is support for Java and Javascript. We didn't have any luck getting the automated Java plug-in download (which works like Mozilla's) to work from Galeon, but we visited a few pages of Javascript examples and detected no problems on cursory examination.

Galeon has introduced an optional tabbed interface which allows users to open new browser instances under a tab instead of a new window. This is nice for users who like to keep their desktops tidy and don't mind mousing between tabs (there doesn't appear to be a keyboard shortcut for this yet).

Galeon now has a "fullscreen" view, which takes Internet Explorer's variant on the notion to a greater extreme: not only is the entire desktop hidden underneath the browser, all buttons and menu bars are removed from view with the exception of any browser tabs and scrollbars that may be required. We're fond of fullscreen views, but the lack of any sort of navigation (except from the context menu, obtained by right-clicking on the browser window) took the matter a little too far for our tastes. This is a case where a keyboard shortcut or very small navigation buttons would be welcome.

Another new feature is the "My Portal" page, which is accessed by entering 'about:portal' in the location field or setting it as the homepage. The "My Portal" page presents the user's bookmarks on a single page with the Galeon logo. The presentation of "My Portal" can be modified by creating a style sheet Galeon applies to the page.

Outside basic user interface tools, Galeon has outstanding crash recovery tools built in. Though it didn't crash a single time during our nightly use, we did eventually

kill -9

Galeon has also become much more configurable than before. Two exceptionally nice touches involved placing the "use own fonts" and "use own colors" on a menu instead of in the configuration window, which makes Galeon great for rendering sites that have difficult or hard-to-read design (it's 2001, and for whatever reason, people still think blue text and black backgrounds are keen) and quickly switching back to respecting the decisions of more sane designers.

Within the configuration window, Galeon offers a wide variety of choices from the usual colors and font settings to things like which version of the HTTP protocol the browser utilizes (1.0, 1.1), and whether to allow proxy keepalive. These two options in conjunction enabled the use of the Junkbuster banner blocker, which hasn't yet been updated for HTTP 1.1.

Finally, Galeon has the option to close and save the current browsing session, which allowed it to restore all our windows/tabs on restart.

Wrapping Up

When we first encountered it, we really, really wanted to like Galeon but it was still a little shy of the sort of features that would make it usable for us on a daily basis. This latest release, though, makes it an excellent tool that combines the rendering speed of Gecko with a clean, fast GTK+-based interface. If the developers had called it quits at SSL, authentication, and Java support, we would have been happy. As it is, they've gone several steps beyond and provided a browser that "just browses" but with some outstanding usability features that make it a true pleasure. Galeon's great.