GEEKY FUN: Galeon Web Browser.

It might be hard to believe, but there are more than two browsers for GNU/Linux. When I think about web browsers, I always think of Firefox and Konqueror. In actuality, the party is a little bigger than that.

Enter Galeon. Galeon is a Gnome-based web browser built off the Mozilla engine. Don’t let the Gnome-based thing throw you, I’m running it on KDE without a problem. There are a few ‘other’ browsers out there, but I think they’re all based on the Mozilla engine since it’s open source.

I seem to recall that Kelly and I rated Galeon in one of our GNU/Linux User Show podcasts, and we weren’t all that impressed at the time. However, things change, requirements change, attitudes change and right now Galeon is looking pretty good.

The things that I really like about it are:

• Out of the box Flash support. I didn’t have to muck around, the Flash plugin that I need to use my Vonage account “just worked”(tm)
• Out of the box Java support. Again, no mucking about. I immediately went to DSL reports to run a speed test with their Java-based system and it “just worked”(tm)
• GMail works. I expected this since Galeon is based on Mozilla, but it’s still nice to see

Galeon also supports bookmarklets.The default bookmarklets installed out of the box in Galeon are pretty interesting. Bookmarklets are little applets that do things for you. Galeon comes with bookmarklets that scroll the page for me, identify and zoom in on the first image of a given page, display the cookie information for a given site, and some other interesting, if not useful, things.

The important thing isn’t what it comes with, but that the fact that it comes with bookmarklets means that it supports the addition of my own. Like my Furl bookmarklet.

I also find Galeon quite zippy which is one of the main areas where Firefox falls down for me. FF is clunky to launch and seems to ‘pause’ now and again while it thinks. That’s a major annoying factor for me. It seems that this speed is built into Galeon on purpose because the slogan for the browser is ‘The web, only the web”.

I’m not saying that Galeon will make your hair grow back, or make that angel girl/guy fall in love with you, but it might make your browsing experience a little nicer.

Galeon homepage.