I’ve decided to give Galeon a try while I use Gnome at work. In case you’re lazy and don’t want to follow the link, Galeon is a Gnome-based web browser based on Gecko, the Mozilla rendering engine. Galeon actually requires that Mozilla be installed on the machine (which is sorta odd), but I got over that pretty quickly.

So what does it have? Everything that Firebird has…tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, prompt page loading, low memory usage. What else, you ask, to make me leave my beloved Firebird? A full Google toolbar, better intergration with the overall Gnome theme, and the ability to use my mouse scroll wheel button as a back button. Firebird can do that on a Windoze machine, but not with Linux. And it restores your session should it happen to crash (which it just recently did for me).

Complaints? None, really. The page rendering is just a little bit slower than Firebird, and there’s screen repainting funkiness when I drag a smaller window across it, but otherwise, I really like it so far….

Posted on 11 July 2003