Former Galeon Maintainer Starts New Epiphany Browser ProjectWednesday February 19th, 2003The former maintainer of Galeon, Marco Pesenti Gritti, recently started a new project to develop a Mozilla-based GNOME browser called Epiphany. The project's goal is to build an end-user browser that is simple, standards-compliant, follows the GNOME HIG 1.0 and integrates tightly with the GNOME desktop environment. WriteTheWeb's Edd Dumbill has a review of Epiphany in its current developmental state and GnomeDesktop.org has an article about the browser with more information, including a screenshot. Thanks to spark for the news and links. Update! CNET News.com has a story about the upstart browser. How will this be different from Galeon? I've always planned on using Galeon when I switched to Linux. Why is he leaving Galeon and starting a new browser that to me looks like the same thing? I think it comes down to Marco's strong feelings about usibility. I don't follow Galeon development, but I bet he made some attempts to apply his UI philosophy (which happens to coincide with the new Gnome UI philosophy) and got a lot of push back from other developers. He needed to fork so he could be the UI-dictator. Hmm. That sounds bad - in fact I think he's got the right approach. UI design is an area where consensus probably isn't the right approach - you end up with a zillion features. I'm definitely curious about this new browser. It looks good, though so does Galeon. I would be using Galeon now, but I can't get it to work properly with any xft enabled version of Mozilla. I got it pretty much working once and it looked beautiful and ran fine. Then it suddenly started throwing up an infinite number of windows on startup. Back to using Mozilla. BTW, I'm currently using RedHat 8.0. What I'm wondering here is why Galeon doesn't statically link in the Mozilla libraries (like Phoenix and K-Meleon) and whether Epiphany will dynamically link in the Mozilla libraries. I know it is nice for memory consumption to use shared libraries, but since Mozilla isn't exactly stable (as in still changing) and the browser is pretty finicky about which Moz version is installed (at least Galeon is), it just doesn't seem prudent. I'm somewhat of a Linux newbie. Is this not possible to do under Linux? Is there a reason why statically linking in the Mozilla libs is bad? Just a note that the 0.4.2-2 RPM of epiphany available at http://people.ecsc.co.uk/~matt/downloads/apt/redhat-8.0-i386/RPMS.extras/epiphany-0.4.2-2.i386.rpm (found by following the Red Hat 8 RPMs link at the bottom of Edd Dumbill's review) has not only a dependency on Mozilla 1.3a or 1.3b, but also on nautilus, which is one component I tend to immediately "rpm -e" from my system because of its bloat and general "annoyingness" :-) Whilst that nautilus dependency remains, it's highly unlikely I'll be looking at epiphany and I can accuse Macro of dragging in nautilus's bloat while I'm at it :-) If you're going to make a mean, lean grilling machine of a browser under Gnome, please don't make it dependent on nautilus ! then you can bitch about what libraries are used in an app. aparently you dont understand what "components" are... using one component from nautilus does not mean you are loading all of nautilus. It seems like we are having something of a Golden Age of Browsers, mostly thanks to the Mozilla Project (and dislike of MS). All theses Gecko-based browsers (and others) can only improve the Internet experience for everyone. More standards compliance, more choice, more interesting ideas and features is definitely a good thing. I say "the more the merrier". Just a thought. MIchael |
