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The future of Galeon (GnomeDesktop)

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FootNotes is carrying a report from the GNOME summit on the future of the Galeon browser. The Galeon developers have decided to join up with Epiphany, implementing Galeon's special features as Epiphany extensions. "This seems an optimal solution for everyone; it allows us, the galeon developers, to avoid duplicating work with epiphany team, it will allow users to leverage the best from both browsers and most importantly, it puts galeon on a much firmer footing for the future that is not so much at the mercy of our ability to find time to hack on it."
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Not again

Posted Oct 24, 2005 1:32 UTC (Mon) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

They have finally got Galeon 1.3 just about right, and crash-free.

Maybe they should add Epiphany's plug-in interface to Galeon, and then abandon Epiphany.

Not again

Posted Oct 24, 2005 3:55 UTC (Mon) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

That would be backwards. Epiphany is a "lightweight GNOME browser" by design. Lightweightness cannot be added by a plugin.

Not again

Posted Oct 24, 2005 5:25 UTC (Mon) by peschmae (guest, #32292) [Link]

Galeon isn't actually heavyweight imo.

The future of Galeon (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Oct 24, 2005 4:55 UTC (Mon) by dilinger (subscriber, #2867) [Link]

This is downright depressing. Epiphany has had a bug with CTRL-U (hitting it while typing in a text input area brings up a view-source window instead of clearing the line) ever since it was first released; that alone makes it unusable for me. I have gtk/gnome set to respect Emacs bindings, and every other app (including Galeon) handles CTRL-U properly. Epiphany does not.

I'm told I should direct my anger towards Havoc, as it's actually a gtk "feature" that Galeon works around. Grumble.

The future of Galeon (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Oct 24, 2005 5:50 UTC (Mon) by DG (subscriber, #16978) [Link]

That ctrl+u 'feature' is also present in Firefox; I just had to learn to do ctrl+backspace instead.

It was annoying for the keybinding to change, however I suppose it has been done to match that of the other Operating System.

David.

The future of Galeon (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Oct 24, 2005 7:31 UTC (Mon) by dilinger (subscriber, #2867) [Link]

Firefox's ctrl-u behaves properly for me. I suspect it depends on how it's been configured or something, if it's not working properly for you and you have Emacs bindings set for gtk.

The future of Galeon (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Oct 24, 2005 8:08 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

It's not a bug. It's a design choice.. not all application designers will choose the same key combo choices. Personally I never used emacs or anything like that and having the choice to hit ctrl-u to delete a line seems completely alien concept to me.. To me ctrl-u means to 'undo' and I use that keyboard combo in a wide veriety of Linux applications. :P

If it's only one or a few hotkeys that are annoying it's easy enough to change them in epiphany. The designers make allowances for this sort of thing, at least for epiphany.

What you need to do is to open up gconf-editor, goto desktop --> gnome --> inteface and checkmark 'can_change_accels'.

Now you can open up epiphany, goto view menu, highlight 'page source', which should now show the offending 'ctrl-u' combo. Then hit a key combo to replace it, or hit backspace to remove the bindings.

Now you can use the epiphany browser without the ctrl-u bug offending you.

When making this change to the gnome config, it's a good idea to go and disable it after your finished, a couple times I accedently bound a function to just 'i' or whatnot, which sucks.

To bad it's not consistant for all applications.. there are some things that gnome needs to work on when it comes to theme-ing.

The future of Galeon (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Oct 24, 2005 12:16 UTC (Mon) by pjdc (guest, #6906) [Link]

^U to delete the line is not an Emacs keystroke anyway - it's an old-time Unix one.

The future of Galeon (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Oct 25, 2005 16:03 UTC (Tue) by cross (subscriber, #13601) [Link]

> Personally I never used emacs or anything like that and having the choice
> to hit ctrl-u to delete a line seems completely alien concept to me.. To
> me ctrl-u means to 'undo' and I use that keyboard combo in a wide veriety
> of Linux applications. :P

I'm not an emacs user either but it's the normal unix "delete the whole line" command, and it meant the same my previous machines right back to the BBC Micro in the early 1980s. So with over 20 years of ingrained muscle memory it still annoys me no-end that Firefox uniquely amongst the applications on my systems does something different with this key-shortcut.

The future of Galeon (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Oct 24, 2005 11:19 UTC (Mon) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

"Ctrl-U" to "delete left" isn't an Emacs key binding; it's from the Bourne shell tradition. FWIW, I've got used to "ctrl-A ctrl-K", which isn't precisely the same thing, but seems more portable. I've had to give up "ctrl-W" to delete words, because it has an unfortunate (and infuriating!) effect in too many places.

The future of Galeon (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Oct 24, 2005 12:14 UTC (Mon) by dmm (subscriber, #9815) [Link]

"Kill line" (typically invoked with ctrl-U) is implemented in a terminal driver for the canonical mode. The shell gets the line once it's ready, i.e when user enters CR. A very long time ago people used @ to kill lines. Maybe some still do (you can change the code using the stty program). I guess that at the time either email was not popular or the bang notation prevailed.

The future of Galeon (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Oct 24, 2005 14:12 UTC (Mon) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

Why are you going to blame me? I don't even know anything about it.

The future of Galeon (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Oct 24, 2005 11:00 UTC (Mon) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

I recently switched back to galeon from firefox (after trying epiphany). The deciding factor was that
I can script galeon to open new tabs and load chosen URLs in them from bash. I have some bash
scripts that do this a lot.

The other important feature is that galeon offers to reopen all of your URLs that were open last time
it ran. This is valuable in case of a crash.

That is, such a thing as an operating system reboot. In fact, galeon has not been crashing,
although I think epiphany was when I tried it.

The future of Galeon (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Oct 24, 2005 12:22 UTC (Mon) by pjdc (guest, #6906) [Link]

firefox -remote "openURL($URL,new-tab)". Mozilla and Netscape Navigator also supported this in some form - new-tab is obviously a more recent addition!

There's something called Session Saver for firefox - never used it though.

The future of Galeon (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Oct 24, 2005 12:32 UTC (Mon) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

Thanks for the help. I remember now why I didn't use firefox or epiphany for this -- I couldn't
make them stay in the background when I did this remote new-tab script. Instead, they would pop
to front each time. This was completely unusable for my use. I did spend an hour or so trying to
configure one or the other of them to do what I wanted, but couldn't figure out how to do it without
changing their source code and compiling my own version.

galeon has an option --no-raise that solves this for me.

The future of Galeon (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Oct 24, 2005 12:39 UTC (Mon) by jeroen (subscriber, #12372) [Link]

You can open new tabs with firefox using "firefox -remote 'openURL(http://lwn.net,new-tab)'".

To save your sessions, either with a crash or when you just close your browser normally, you can use the sessionsaver extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=436

The future of Galeon (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Oct 24, 2005 23:32 UTC (Mon) by gold (subscriber, #3971) [Link]

epiphany -n <URL> will open a URL in a new tab. Epiphany also supports crash recovery, giving you
the option to open pages you had open at the time of the crash. However, as far as I know, it
doesn't support explicit session saving, which is something I miss from Galeon. (In a pinch you can
simulate it with 'kill' from a shell.)

Good news

Posted Oct 24, 2005 23:56 UTC (Mon) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

From my perspective, this is good news. Galeon had a few nice things that Epiphany left out in order to keep things simple. By merging those nice things into Epiphany extensions, things will get better for everyone. Folks that want simple stuff still get it. Folks that want more features get that too.

And the best bit is that the development effort isn't going to be duplicated any more.

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