By Marco Pesenti Gritti
We consider Galeon close to feature complete for the 1.0 release. Our plan is to do our own 1.0 release just after the Mozilla team do their 1.0 release, this should give you a Galeon 1.0 somewhere between September and October. Stability is pretty good at this time, but we plan to improve it further with a feature freeze closer to our the 1.0 release. As far as wee can see all basic functionality a web browser require are implemented by now and works well. Our use of the Mozilla rendering engine gives Galeon the ability to browse the widest range of web sites, the market share of Mozilla based browsers should minimize the times you have problems accessing some weird pages. Galeon provides all the power of Mozilla rendering engine, with a fast, GNOME friendly user interface. In addition it provides a lot of features intended to speed up and make browsing more pleasant: tabbed browsing, smart bookmarks, history and bookmarks docks, cookies and password manager, hierarchical and searchable history, session management and a lot more. Lately we have worked a lot to improve integration with GNOME, but we have also had to spend time working on dealing with API changes between the Mozilla releases. All in all I think we have gotten very good results from this work. We integrated mime handling for downloads and application launch (both GTM and Mozilla internal downloader are available) and protocol handling. We implemented our own GNOME dialogs instead of the XUL Mozilla dialogs. We developed the most powerful interface possible through Mozilla embedding, and currently we are using all the functionality it provides. We are working with the Mozilla developers to get the interfaces as clean as possible, not only for our own sake, but also for it to be available for use by other GNOME applications. The Galeon user interface is powerful and very customizable (we recently added a nice toolbar editor). Usability is very good, but we plan to put even more work into it.
So which areas do we want to polish more before 1.0 ?
- Stability and bugfixes.
- Usability
- Finish GConf port, we need to resolve all problems user are seeing most related to packaging issues.
- Mantain Mozilla compatibility until Mozilla 1.0 when the gtkembed API will be frozen.
- start working on the port as early as possible
- provide enanched integration with the new desktop, possibly using the new technologies it features
- maintain the speed and the stability we are aiming for with the first release.
What we need from the GNOME community ? Just keep up with the great support (from coders and user alike) you have given us during our first year of development !