Galeon, A History
or, why Galeon is the way it is
Chris "Topher" DeRosia - 29 July 2003
This document is intended to provide a brief history of Galeon; where it's been, and how it got to its current status. Galeon's relation to Epiphany will be briefly described.
Once upon a time, Marco Pesenti Gritti decided to make a web browser. He liked the Mozilla project, but wanted something that integrated well with his system and that was fast enough to be usable. Marco wanted a good, solid, simple browser for The Average User, in the Gnome environment, and so around June of 2000, Galeon 0.6 was released.
Galeon was a very popular project, with heavy development. Many features were added, making it a powerful, versatile browser, used by techies and non-techies alike. Releases came as often as Mozilla releases, since the API usually changed slightly with each Mozilla release. And with each release came a few new features. And with each feature came a preference dialog for that feature. Some people considered this to be a good thing, since features provide flexibility, and control. Others felt this to be a bad thing, thinking that too many preference options caused confusion.
In November of 2001, the decision was made to release Galeon 1.0 before Mozilla 1.0 was released. This was based on the belief that while Mozilla was not 1.0 yet, the code and feature set in Galeon was 1.0 quality.