Epiphany… STILL not there yet…
Erich Schubert commented earlier that he’s really happy about some of the new features in Epiphany. Personally, I’m one of the 952 (according to popcon) people out there that still relies on Galeon for day-to-day browsing.
Galeon hasn’t been actively worked on for over a year now, unfortunately, and there has been some discussion for a while about Galeon developers contributing to Epiphany to get it up to Galeon usability levels to allow all of us old Galeon die-hards to switch easily. But, as Erich’s comments show, it’s still a long way off…
For example, Erich is happy that he can now middle-click on the new tab button and get a new tab with the copied URL opened for you. Well, if I had a new tab button, I could probably do that… 
But as it is, I can hit Ctrl-T and middle click on the body of the page to paste in my link and have it automatically go there.
More importantly, I can middle-click the Back and Forward buttons to get a new tab opened with the appropriate page and, best of all, I can keep my history while doing it. Incredibly useful when digging through pages of Google results.
Add to that the Tabs menu, which to this day is by far the most robust menu of its kind out there. Some Firefox/Iceweasel plugins provide a similar menu, but usually with half of the features and (at least) twice as slow. (Developing your own widget toolkit isn’t always a good idea. Especially if you’re a browser whose non-free logo includes a crimson-colored member of the vulpini tribe… or if your green cousin terrorizes small Asian countries…)
And last, but most definitely not least, the sheer configurability of Galeon bookmarks. Other browsers have come close, but none are there yet. Every bookmark can be a smart bookmark. If I click a smart bookmark without giving it an argument, it defaults to the base URL of the bookmark. I can symlink bookmarks and even bookmark folders and have them appear in multiple places.
While I could certainly go on and on, I’m still kind of astounded that no other browser has really come close to the functionality that Galeon has had for YEARS. Though I have to admit that one MAJOR annoyance for me in Galeon is not being able to use Ctrl-Home and Ctrl-End to go to the first or last tab. When I have 46 tabs in one window (like I do as I type this) it’s a real pain to have to scroll all the way up.
But that’s enough of my rant… maybe I should add a “Rant” tag to scare people off from ranting posts… hmm…
p.s. And while I’m at it, is it just me or is there a general disinclination amongst Planet Debian members to allow comments on their blogs? The ones that I see that do have commenting enabled typically get fewer than a dozen comments at any given time, so I can’t imagine it’s due to traffic. Just shy?
