Mon, 24 Oct 2005
Time for a new browser
I've been using Galeon as my web browser of choice for some years now. Is it time for a change now?
I remember the times when the Galeon development team forked, with main developer starting up a new project called Epiphany, a browser aimed to be minimal feature-wise, with full GNOME integration. At that time Epiphany was really minimal, and unusable for me (for example, it did not allow the user to set the Accept-Language header). Galeon development has slowed down since then, but they were able to do few releases, and Galeon has been a stable browser with many nice features.
Now it seems that Galeon developers have realized that they are unable to maintain the whole Galeon codebase, and they decided to write Galeon-like extensions to Epiphany instead. Apparently in the meantime, Epiphany got a powerful plug-in interface, and even Epiphany developers are willing to modify it to suit new plug-in needs. There is also a GNOME wiki page about issues which have to be solved in order to bring all Galeon features to Epiphany.
From the first few looks, it seems Epiphany lacks the following features I use:
- Better cookies/privacy manager.
- Configurable tabs position. I use tabs on the right side - I don't need another row of widgets to occupy another part of horizontal space of my screen.
- New tabs preserve history in Galeon. You can open the link in the new tab (using the middle mouse button), and hit the "Back" button in the newly opened tab in Galeon, and it works as expected.
- The URL entry box provides file name completion for file:/// URIs.
So it seems I will soon have to change my browser. I think I would use Epiphany, if they manage to fix the above issues. Or anything else? I don't want to use a KDE-based browser (as I use GNOME as my desktop). Maybe I should give a try to Kazehakase. Even though it is not GNOME-based, it at least uses GTK+, and it has a cool japanese name (it means Doctor Wind, or something like that).