Galeon -- kind of a sleeper browser

[littleman]

It is powered by the Gecko engine, so it's rendering is very good. Well it is basically the same as Mozilla's, but it eats up less memory.
These are rough estimates of the browser memory usage at start up.
opera 4M
netscape 7M
konqueror (kde 2.2.1 but not in the kde desktop) 9M
galeon (0.12.1) 11M
mozilla (0.9.4) 13M

It feels a bit like Opera, and a bit like konqueror, and a bit like nether. I think it's looks aren't the best (ok, it boarders on ugly), but it's functionality is fantastic. Want to turn js on or off? Two fast clicks. Images? Same thing. It also has simple, but very functional tabs.

Speed! I tried loading pages in Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, Netscape, and Galeon. This little browser is fast. The only gui browser that loaded faster was old Netscape, but with that browser you might as well be using lynx. It also starts up very quickly, about a third of the time of Mozilla.

It requires Gnome libraries and Mozilla.

side:
I think it is fantastic that *nix users have such a variety of browsers to choose from. Three of the five mentioned are open source.

[Air]

Hey thanks LM, I'm going to go and try Galeon right now (well first I have to find and install it), I'll report back what I think.

[littleman]

Let me know what you think Air. I keep hearing myself say 'Bam!' as the pages load.

[Air]

Bam! is right, this thing smokes!! I'm using Ver 0.12.1 and it doesn't look too bad at all. There's so many config options in this thing you could spend all day just making it look the way you want, maybe a little too much, the font customizing is down right daunting.

But it looks to be a great browser, renders well, super fast, seems to support everything, and is open source. It deserves support.

It's almost like they built it to give it that Bam! quality, you click on a page and a strange thing happens, the page is suddenly there, honest to God I blinked and kept waiting for the next page to load, but it already had ... wow!

[littleman]

hehehe
That 'Bam!' is addicting, give it a day or two and you'll be hooked.

[Air]

Well now I know where the Bam! comes from, it doesn't just use disk cache it also uses memory cache, and the memory size to use is user chosen (default of 4096K), so the more memory you give it the faster it goes, especially when you have a high cache hit ratio.

[littleman]

Here's a very favorable review of Galeon:
[rubberturnip.org.uk...]

[littleman]

Okay, some useful tips for Galeon

Change UA
gconftool -s /apps/galeon/Advanced/Network/user_agent --type=string "new UA"

Reset default
gconftool -s /apps/galeon/Advanced/Network/user_agent --type=string default

RPM stuff
Getting the java plugin via rpm to work with Mozilla and Galeon
1:First download the jre rpm
2: ln -s /usr/java/jre1.3.1/plugin/i386/ns600/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so

Updating without compatibility problems:
Use the rpms from the official Mozilla releases, Galeon is built with the same library dependencies. I've had a few problems with dependency clashes between Galeon and distro binaries of Mozilla.

If you upgrade the Mozilla rpms be sure to upgrade mozilla-pms (SSL), mozilla-devel and mozilla-mail if you use it.

[David]

I think Galeon is going to win on my desktop. I keep tying to continue my love affair with Opera but Galeon is quicker and a broader range of web pages/sites look good with it.

I can get Opera to look great on some sites but not across the board. The Linux version just is not as clean as the windows. It's got something to do with the fonts but I haven't been able to get the right ones.