Part of the long term plan for this site is to assign permalinks to every thought I ever have, and layer a non-discrete category system over them, with the aim of gaining some insight into AI, or at the very least build a functional long term memory. Right now though, it’s just a blog, and therefore I subject anyone who might be reading to the horrors of my humble opinions on the merits of switching web browsers.

I’ve been using Galeon 1.2.6 since it came out. That’s nearly a year - a long time in the world of browser development (althought not as long as it used to be, unfortunately). I’ve had no reason to change, since it’s nearly perfect in every way, but with the release of Gentoo 1.4 coming up, it’s time to see what I’ll have to use in Gnome 2. It’s probably going to be Firebird, since Galeon 2 currently seems to be lying in pieces on the garage floor, while Mozilla Firebird has the momentum of the mozilla foundation behind it (that’s meant to be a good thing…). Here’s what I noticed when I installed Firebird 0.6.1.

• Installation is totally painless if you want it in your $HOME:
  
  

  $ tar zxfv MozillaFirebird-0.6.1-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz
  $ cd MozillaFirebird
  $ ./MozillaFirebird

  There’s no need to be root at all, since plugins can be installed into your home directory.

• Extensions are also great. One click install, and there are hundreds of them.
• Installing Java is still nasty, but that’s Sun’s fault. Idiots.
• You Know Flash Is Rubbish When: one of the most popular extensions is to turn every bit of flash into “flash [[Click to play]]”.
• Gecko is still amazing. Best rendering engine out there.
• By default, tabbed browsing is inferior to Galeon. With the Tabbrowser Extensions extension, there are certainly a lot of features, but the stability of the advanced ones is questionable.
• I know this is a 0.x release, but there are still a few glitches here and there, especially with third party extensions, most of which are also in the 0.x stage.
• The search box is no match for Galeon’s Smart Bookmarks
• The default theme is OK. I haven’t found any particularly gripping themes yet.
• XUL is slow… not too slow, but when you’re used to instantaneous, even 0.1 seconds is forever.
• However, startup is fast. Pretty much the same as Galeon.
• Galeon’s bookmark management is better.
• Bookmarks must be exported from Galeon in Mozilla HTML format in order to be importable by Firebird. I hope future versions of Firebird support XBEL, as it feels like taking a step backwards to use the old HTML format.
• It’s important to add user_pref("middlemouse.contentLoadURL", false); to a file named user.js in the mozilla directory, otherwise middle clicking anywhere on the canvas tries to load whatever was in the clipboard as a URL.
• CTRL-L and CTRL-K are the best keyboard shortcuts, for moving to the address bar, and the search box, respectively. There doesn’t appear to be a shortcut for moving the focus back to the canvas again. Shame. Galeon is the same.
• Find As You Type really is the best navigation innovation since, ooh, well, it’s better than tabs, so… since the back button?

Conclusions? It’s mostly good. In case you don’t know, both Galeon and Firebird are ten thousand times better than IE. The little bugs and nitpicks will be fixed. The only thing I’m concerned about is the speed of XUL versus that of GTK. I’ll compile my own version when I move to Gnome 2, and if it doesn’t get any faster, it’s probably back to Galeon. As soon as they sort out their move to Gnome 2.