It`s not every day that an open source project reaches version 1.0. In fact, a substantial portion of the open source software in use today is still in public beta, many of which one doubts will ever reach a full and official release. And so it was with a certain amount of fanfare that Galeon 1.0 was released on the Internet earlier this week.
With browsers such as Galeon sailing into the open source waters, long-running projects like Mozilla ought to take heed.
Alastair Otter, Journalist, ITWeb
Galeon is an open source browser based on Mozilla`s Gheko rendering engine. The Mozilla browser, also an open source project, has recently come under increasing criticism for being overly heavy and bloated. At the same time, however, the rendering engine included with Mozilla is widely regarded as one of the best around. Using the Gheko engine, Galeon offers the best of Mozilla without the overheads.
Over the past 18 months of its development, Galeon has won over a number of Linux users with its surprisingly comprehensive feature set. At the top of this list has to be the "tabs" feature which makes it possible to open multiple Web sites in one window and simply tab through the sites at will. If you`re a heavy Internet user and rely on having multiple sites running at once, the tab feature is an absolute winner.
Addictive
The other feature that users quickly become addicted to is the cookie features that make managing cookies - and blocking certain sites for setting cookies - as easy as possible.
Of course, being an open source application closely aligned to the Gnome desktop, Galeon includes all the standard capabilities users have become used to. The ability to construct practically any interface and menu system you want and the ability act as a file browser are just two of these.
On the downside, because Galeon uses the Mozilla rendering engine, you will have to have a copy of Mozilla handy. Also, so far as I can tell from the manual, Galeon doesn`t yet include the system functions that browsers such as Konqueror feature - things such as the ability to issue shell commands in a browser window - but it does include the ability to read "man" pages with the "man:" command.
With browsers such as Galeon sailing into the open source waters, long-running projects like Mozilla ought to take heed. By the time Mozilla is released as version 1.0, users could well have moved on to simpler and faster alternatives such as Galeon or Konqueror. Even more so because the new alternatives are packed with a host of useful features without the overheads usually associated with browsers.
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