Galeon, A History

"Why take a needlessly black-and-white way of looking at things"

I agree completely. I think a lot of the problem has to do with a misunderstanding of the intent of the HIG. Epiphany developers have chosen to make Epiphany an extremely simple, yes dumbed down, browser for idiot first time web users. That does not say that those are the goals of gnome or the hig in general. Unfortunately, the split between Epiphany and Galeon caused galeon development to stall for long enough for Epiphany to weasel their way into "The" Gnome web browser slot even though Galeon is still the more popular and mature browser.

I think another reason this issue keeps falling to the black and white extremes instead of seeing the right solution is that making a browser of extremes requires little imagination, planning or intelligence. For Epiphany, even though they claim to carefully negotiate each feature, it basically boils down to "if you can't 100% convince me it should be there, rip it out". For Galeon, the decisions are usually just a simple, if you want it, and you provide a nice patch, it is in. I am not saying that either epiphany or galeon developers are idiots are have no imagination. This is an organizational problem. In a comercial project (ideally) there is a management hierarchy that enforces strict design methodology. Do you think I am full of crap? Where are the mockups for the cool ui features? Where are the papers describing/arguing the powerful/empowering/beautiful ui metaphors that underly all ui/feature decisions? Right. They don't exist. Development is ad-hoc. The closest thing to planning is an occasional list of proposed new features for the next major release. That level of planning will never yield anything great. All that level of planning can ever yield is a rip off of other browsers with maybe more maybe less features. Sure IE and Netscape 4.x are outdated but the really powerful browsing memes were all pioneered there (or maybe earlier). Mozilla has some cool new ideas like extensions but they have not been well thought out. Pheonix is doing a better job. Epihpany and Galeon however clearly have no high level direction or vision beyond "simple" or "power user".

GNOME in general has this same problem. People rushed past finishing up the important desktop metaphors and went straight to the implementation. Eazel had a great start on this with nautilus but unfortunately they could not execute the implementation. Now, the browsing and desktop metaphors they began to put in place are in shambles and are largely not thought about at all. Has anyone every really thought about a powerful panel/dock metaphor? There has to be a better way. What about nautilus views? How are they supposed to work anyway? Look at XP, their "views" metaphors are at least consistent. When I enter a folder with all images, um, what is nautilus supposed to do with gthumb? What about media? CVS? In the end what we have is a rip off of windows that is superficially prettier but is architecturally far inferior. Some of the specific features may be different but all the underlying metaphors are perfect copies of windows. Honestly, when eazel died it seems like all that kind of work on gnome died as well. (vfs excluded here: yay for vfs, too bad it has never seen its potential either. Browsing through archives, right. smb? doesn't work except on the simplest of networks. If you have to do a domain login, it will not work even though smbclient has no problem).

That's all I have to say about that.

(ps - the other reason that people always want to operate at the extremes is that in our a-moral, spiritually bankrupt western culture, being a zealot about anything makes people feel like what they are doing is meaningful.)