Galeon zips while Mozilla slips

Software libre browser reaches milestone

By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this author

Posted in Software, 26th November 2001 15:24 GMT

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The software libre web browser Galeon reached a milestone on Friday, reaching 1.0 status after eighteen months in public beta development.

We've found Galeon to be horribly addictive for a while now, and it's the only Linux application we truly miss when away from the OS. (There are lots of UI features we miss away from a non-*nix box, but this is probably the only app).

Galeon pulls the Gecko rendering engine out of the Mozilla wreckage, and builds a lightweight, but very fully featured browser around it, using Gtk and Gnome code. One killer feature of Galeon that you can be sure will be adopted elsewhere is the tabbed browser feature (now adopted by Mozilla itself, since 0.96). Allied to clever bookmarks, it can deliver your selection of favourite sites in one go, neatly in one window.

Other Galeon addicts swear by the fine-grained font scaling, others are partial to the cookie management. And unlike Netscape, it loads the same day. But it's the tabs that keep us coming back to Galeon, even though KDE's file manager Konqueror is a first class browser in itself.

It isn't the only browser to build on Gecko - there's the Linux-based Skipstone, which isn't updated as frequently - for Windows there's the K-Meleon project. We'd like to mention the Q.BATi project for Mac OS X, but it doesn't seem to have had any new code posted since March. ®