Other projects under development

Galeon

The people who regularly use Galeon are quite enamored of it. As soon as you get past the rather difficult process of installation, there is a lot to like about it. However, I have noticed that every higher release number of Galeon requires you to update other packages that it depends on. Since I value my time and really like to get work done, one of the things that tends to turn me off is dependency problems with applications. It took me a while to iron these out and actually get Galeon running, but I finally did. Was it worth the effort? Well, in the words of Sam Goldwyn, "I'll give you a definite 'maybe'".

Galeon is one of the browsers that uses the Mozilla's Gecko engine. That means that this browser is essentially Mozilla with some added features that the developers of Galeon decided to add to it. When I first tried Galeon, I found it easier to customize its look - changing the buttons and applying different skins. Mozilla is getting better on this as its version numbers become higher, so the option to use Galeon over pure Mozilla for look and feel is becoming less convincing. There are a few technical features that can't be found in Mozilla yet. Galeon has better tabbed page control. It also has mouse gesturing, like Opera. You can enable this by going to 'preferences'. If you want to learn how to use this system, just look in the help pages for the red arrows that look like 'Slippery when Wet' signs

If you're keen on having a good selection of browsers available, you may want to install this. If you don't, I don't see any compelling reason to do it (and possibly fight with dependency issues).

Dillo

Dillo is a new web browser project. You can find it at http://dillo.cipsga.org.br Let me point out first that this is software in the alpha stage. But it is an alpha that works extremely well. I have been watching this for the last few months, installing a new version whenever they release one. It's extremely fast and the compiled program is rather small (under 300Kb). Downloading and compiling it is trivial as well - just unzip the tarball and type configure, make and make install Unlike my experience with Galeon, I have not faced any dependency problems with any of the versions I have tried.

HTML rendering is really good for being in such an early development stage. I would use it for my everyday reading of the news and other sites of interest except that it can't process my log-in to the NY Times website yet. As soon as it is able, I will be using it a lot more frequently. It's a little early to talk about its strengths and weaknesses, but to me it's exciting project that seems to have a lot of promise. The future, of course, depends on funding. They have a page - http://dillo.cipsga.org.br/funding that you can visit and find out about contributing. It would be great if some company with deep pockets took this project under its wing.

The future of browsers in Linux

If browser choice is any indication, the future of Linux looks bright. Mozilla, primarily a Linux project, is getting a lot of press these days as the browser to base all others on. Well established browsers like Opera will continue to improve and Netscape will always be there to lend its name recognition to Linux and help our favorite operating system in its quest for desktop acceptance. As I pointed out, Linux has come a long way since the days when there was just Netscape and text based Lynx. The increasing choice of browsers and the functionality they offer is a good sign that developers are betting on that bright future that Linux has.

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