[geeks] galeon Doesn't Suck that much....

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Friday, April 12, 2002 at 14:54:01 (-0500), Jonathan C. Patschke wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] Web Browsers that Don't Suck
>
> On Fri, 12 Apr 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> 
> > Have you looked at amaya?  It is from the w3c.  Some say it is fast.  Haven't
> 
> Dowloading it now.
> 
> > tried it myself.  Also, have you tried galleon on irix?
> 
> That requires GNOME, which requires approximately half of the source code
> available on the world-wide-web.  Galleon is nice, but GNOME is quite
> evil.

I honestly don't know how much effort it would be to gather up all the
required parts and build them (I've only build galeon with NetBSD
pkgsrc, where everything "just works" :-), but I do think you're
exaggerating far beyond all reason.

For one, GNOME is far from evil -- it's much better written than
anything in KDE, and much smaller too.  Casual observation suggests
GNOME+GTK is one of the best free GUI application development
environments around on any system these days.

The graphics/x11 part, GTK, on i386:

text    data    bss     dec     hex     filename
1090532 28052   1732    1120316 11183c  /usr/pkg/lib/libgtk.so
198730  2656    372     201758  3141e   /usr/pkg/lib/libgdk.so
63871   10376   8       74255   1220f   /usr/pkg/lib/libgdk_pixbuf.so
97883   10304   56      108243  1a6d3   /usr/pkg/lib/libgdk_pixbuf_xlib.so

The GNOME libraries are reasonable sized too:

text    data    bss     dec     hex     filename
50672   424     0       51096   c798    /usr/pkg/lib/libart_lgpl.so
78253   1860    580     80693   13b35   /usr/pkg/lib/libgnome.so
8959    544     4       9507    2523    /usr/pkg/lib/libgnomecanvaspixbuf.so
14610   488     28      15126   3b16    /usr/pkg/lib/libgnomesupport.so
766975  19152   536     786663  c00e7   /usr/pkg/lib/libgnomeui.so
37806   2028    8       39842   9ba2    /usr/pkg/lib/libgnorba.so
18263   1428    8       19699   4cf3    /usr/pkg/lib/libgnorbagtk.so
329208  6424    13088   348720  55230   /usr/pkg/lib/libgtkxmhtml.so
64893   2300    336     67529   107c9   /usr/pkg/lib/libzvt.so



Galeon, even with mozilla's rendering engine in it, is much smaller than
konqueror.

Konqueror also requires Qt, which is a horribly poorly implemented huge
mess of graphics crap in C++:

text    data    bss     dec     hex     filename
7081259 169000  18448   7268707 6ee963  /usr/X11R6/qt2/lib/libqt.so.2

Here, why don't we go head to head (with minor cosmetic edits to line up
the columns):

	$ size -t $(ldd konqueror | awk '{print $3}') | tail -1
	18676032  481732  161180  19318944 (TOTALS)

	$ size -t $(ldd galeon-bin | awk '{print $3}') | tail -1
	 7482362  246900   83176   7812438  (TOTALS)


So galeon apparently starts out at less than half the size of knonqueror....


Though probably all the KDE code is better bundled than that needed for
galeon, there's one heck of a lot more to build than for all of galeon
(including the Mozilla parts), and it takes a lot more grinding to build
than galeon (including all the Mozilla parts and underlying libraries)
even for just the minimum necessary to run konqueror.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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