Galeon: It's like Firefox for Spartans

Filed under: Linux, Open Source, Browser Tips

Galeon: It's like Firefox for Spartans

by Brad Linder May 19th 2008

A few weeks ago we looked at K-Meleon, a light-weight browser for Windows that uses the same rendering engine as Firefox 2. The result is a browser that loads any page you can open in Firefox, which uses significantly less RAM than Firefox. There's also no support for add-ons or many of the other bells and whistles that make Firefox tick.

Galeon pretty much the same thing, except it runs on Linux, not Windows. In our tests, the browser eats about half the RAM of Firefox 3, and renders pages using the same engine as Firefox 2, which means that some pages that look funny in Firefox 3 look better in Galeon, making the browser excellent companion piece of software.

Like K-Meleon, Galeon does not support add-ons, or Greasemonkey scripts. And it doesn't have some of the more useful features you can find in Firefox 3 like full page zoom.

There's no shortage of light weight web browser for Linux. But since Galeon can render any web page Firefox can, the browser is far more useful than other browsers such as Dillo or Konqueror.

Tags: dillo, firefox, galeon, gecko, k-meleon, konqueror

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Paul Tan said 12:44PM on 5-19-2008

Wasn't this posted here?

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/04/29/k-melon-its-like-firefox-without-the-bloat/

Brad Linder said 12:45PM on 5-19-2008

That post looks at K-Meleon, while the goal of this article was to take a closer look at Galeon. If you look, you'll see that I included a link to the older article in this one.

RP said 5:27PM on 5-19-2008

I'm confused too -- what is the difference? One is for Linux, one is for Windows?

So basically 2 names for the same thing, a Linux name and a Windows name? Um, OK.

Brad Linder said 5:28PM on 5-19-2008

No, they're two different programs that serve a similar purpose. Each uses the Firefox 2 rendering engine. But one program was built for Linux while the other was built for Windows. I'm not sure why that's confusing.

Paul Tan said 10:38AM on 5-20-2008

Oh, that's right... think I misread.

alienvenom said 5:17PM on 5-19-2008

Galeon + webkitgtk would be an awesome pair.

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