The Adventures of My Pet Hamster

Nov 29 2008

Project nostalgia: Galeon

Published by steve at 22:25 under Computing

Does anybody else remember Galeon? Galeon was a very light-weight web browser that appeared in 2000 and which I quickly adopted as my favorite browser. In contrast with the things available to linux at the time – Mozilla and Netscape – this was a dream. It was fast, delivered only web browsing, was easily themed, and integrated into the desktop nicely.

Like many other projects, it faded. At one point, I upgraded my linux distribution and Galeon was gone, supplanted by Epiphany. I didn’t know it at the time, but the development team of Galeon had split and Epiphany was the result of that. The last update appeared in late 2006, but by then I had adopted Firefox as my one and only browser (extensions, themes, fast – where were you when I needed you?). The project has since been abandoned in favor of a set of extensions to Epiphany to harken back to the days of Galeon.

I recalled all of this when I was cleaning out some very old configuration files on my desktop machine, and discovered a key binding in one of the files that launched Galeon. You can find the project homepage and some history of the project here: [1] [2].

Have a favorite application that’s no longer with us, at least in it’s original form? I’d love to hear about it. I’m a sucker for a tale of technology love lost.

[1] http://galeon.sourceforge.net/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galeon

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