Galeon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Galeon

A screenshot of Galeon
Maintainer:	GNOME
Stable release:	2.0.2 (18 September 2006) _[+/-]
Preview release:	CVS (Current) _[+/-]
OS:	Unix-like operating systems
Use:	Web browser
License:	GPL
Website:	galeon.sourceforge.net

This article is about a web browser. For the type of sailing ship, see Galleon.

Galeon is a web browser for GNOME based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine. Galeon's developer's self-declared mission was to deliver "the web and only the web".

At the time of Galeon's creation, the most popular web browsers, including Netscape, Mozilla, and Internet Explorer, were large multi-functional programs. This made them slow to start and often impractical due to their high memory usage and processor requirements. Galeon was the first mainstream graphical web browser which specifically focused on the reduction of peripheral functionality. Galeon is also famous for introducing "Smart Bookmarks", bookmarks that take an argument and can be used as toolbar buttons with a text field used to enter the value for the argument.

Galeon's initial development team split in 2002 due to disagreements about the target audience. This split led to the creation of Epiphany, a fork of Galeon. Epiphany has since become the default browser of GNOME. On October 22, 2005, the Galeon developers announced plans to stop development of Galeon in its current form, saying "the current approach is unsustainable" in the resources required for maintenance. Instead, they hope to develop a set of extensions for Epiphany to provide similar functionality.

Other comparable browsers have appeared, including Mozilla's own Firefox browser, and the K-Meleon browser available for Microsoft Windows.