I've been trying various browsers over the past 6 weeks or so.  I've used Firefox for four years now, since it was named Phoenix, then later Firebird, then later Firefox.  I've enjoyed the run, but I was starting to desire a bit of a change.  Firefox doesn't look as good as the rest of my Gnome desktop, and trying to make it fit in was becoming difficult.  It also had begun to feel a bit slow.  Back when I had a slower computer, I was used to programs starting and running slow, but since I upgraded to a very capable machine, Firefox's performance seemed to stand out like a sore thumb on a Gnome desktop.

Flock

My first try was Flock.  Closely related to Firefox, it gains a lot of benefits from that relationship.  Like Firefox, it's certainly the most feature rich of the browser I tried out. 

As I mentioned previously, I was happy to be able to use all the Firefox plugins I like under Flock, including the Google Toolbar and Adblock.  Not every feature of every plugin worked perfectly, but there were no deal breakers.  I enjoyed the blog aggregator.  It was really nice.  The blog posting features were too buggy to trust, after I lost a post or two.  And the Flock theme is just excellent.

I didn't really care for Flock's single-depth catalog, tag-driven favorites.  The mixture of catalogs and tags is confusing to the user (real UI no-no here).  I didn't like that I couldn't replicate the Favorites toolbar the traditional way, enabling drop-down menus of my creation.  The favorites toolbar in Flock is sadly lacking, giving access to only about six favorites at a time.

But the real deal-breaker for Flock was Javascript performance.  I use Zimbra as my mail server (which I love, but that's another post for another time), which provides one of the most elaborate Ajax web interfaces in existence.   Flock would hang for 20 seconds or so every time Zimbra polled for email.  And it wouldn't just hang the current window, it would hang every Flock window.  Considering Firefox doesn't exhibit this behavior, I'm not sure what they've done to create this regression (since Flock is a fork).

So, a cool browser, but in the end I couldn't keep using it.

Epiphany

Next up, and an obvious choice, was Epiphany.  I say obvious because it is also known as "The Gnome Browser".  But I think this title is not very fitting.  It didn't last for a day on my desktop, because I just could not use it.  Call it the Gnome Browser if you want, but in reality, Firefox has become the Gnome browser.  After using it (or trying to), I'm not surprised.

First, the good.  One thing I really did like about Epiphany:  It does use tag-based favorites, but it still allows you to build multi-level bookmark trees.  And it does enable you to show these trees as toolbar dropdowns.  Further, it is GTK-based.  As a result, it fits perfectly into the look and feel of my Gnome desktop, and it is super-snappy.  It even seems to load web pages quite a bit faster than Firefox.  I didn't run tests, so that could just be perception, but after all my perception is really what is important to me, not the results of a timing test.

I also like some of Epiphany's unique features, such as the "Most Visited" bookmark folder, which is a feature I've never seen in another browser (which I find hard to believe, as it seems so obvious and useful).

Epiphany's primary goal seems to be presenting very few options to the user.  This goal is present throughout Gnome, seemingly bringing Epiphany inline with Gnome's goals.  But, in my opinion (and not everyone's opinion, famously including Linus Torvald's) Gnome has found a good middle ground by making the most important options available to the user.  Epiphany has not. 

I railed on Gnome 2.6 when it was released, because they did something similar.  They turned on spatial browsing in Nautilus and did not provide a means to turn it off without going into GConf-Editor.  Spatial browsing is nice in theory, but will drive a user nutty by requiring dozens of extra tedious actions as more and more windows are opened.  Sorry, my brain can handle the "browser" metaphor, but thanks for treating me like a stooge anyway.  Luckily, in short order (the next release, as I recall) Gnome enabled a simple checkbox in the options of Nautilus to enable or disable spatial browsing (never been so happy to see the return of a feature available in Windows 95).  I digress.

Back to Zimbra for a critical example.  Epiphany, in their glorious wisdom, disables custom Javascript right-click handling.  Zimbra, like many web applications, provides useful custom right-click context menus throughout the application, just like a desktop application would.  In Epiphany, you can't get to these menus.  Instead, you get Epiphany's right-click context menu.  But the most frustrating part is that there is no option to turn this "feature" off.

Another critical problem was that the Back and Forward buttons on my mouse don't work in Epiphany.  They work in every other browser.

This wasn't the only option I felt was hidden from me.  In the end, Epiphany and I had to part ways.  So, off I went to review my next option.

Galeon

I spoiled the conclusion of my article for the sake of having a semantically useful title.  Galeon was forked from Epiphany.

Update: Sorry, that was a mistake on my part.  As Heikki points out below, Epiphany was forked from Galeon, not the other way around).  

So, for the most part, the two browsers are very similar.  It appears it was forked because some of the developers also not in favor of dumbing down the browser.  And I'm glad they did.  I've heard talk of bringing the two browsers together, and if that means losing some of this sanity, then I say no, please no.

So, like Epiphany, Galeon is a GTK-based browser.  This similarly means that it starts up and runs very fast.  It also seems to load pages similarly snappy.

What Galeon doesn't do is hide sensible options from users.  It did turn right-click context off by default like Epiphany, which at first greatly dissapointed me.  But unlike Epiphany, there was an option to fix this.  I still think this "feature" shouldn't be on by default.  Most users wouldn't understand why right-click context menus don't work in web applications.  And with the ever-growing popularity of so-called Web 2.0 interfaces, this is going to become more and more an issue.

Galeon also uses a traditional bookmark model that most users are more familiar with.  I understand the tag trend and its merits, but it's a paradigm that is confusing to users.  I'm glad Galeon is sticking with what works. 

I like that I have more options, more right-click options, and a few more features than Epiphany.  I like Bookmarklets feature, a feature that puts scriptable actions into bookmarks (Scroll the page slowly, resize the browser window, etc.).  I like the Smart Bookmarks.  They are similar to Moz/Firefox's "Quick Searches", except that if you add them to your toolbar you get an text entry field to perform the search.

One unique feature I like about Galeon:  If you edit a form on a page, and then try to leave that page (which maybe you didn't even mean to do) or close the browser, it will prompt you to make sure you really want to discard the data you've changed.

There are some issues I notice here and there.  One very bad bug where occurs when I try to drag the current URL to the Bookmarks folder, by grabbing the favicon.  This activity not only hangs Galeon, but  rather totally hangs Gnome (though I can still CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE back to GDM).  Another minor annoyance - while it does support spell checking like Firefox 2, right clicking on on a mispelled word does not provide potential matches. 

Perhaps the biggest issues with Galeon are inconsistent tab settings.  For instance, if you tell it to open new windows in tabs, it will.  But if you tell it to focus the new tabs, it doesn't always.  It only focuses tabs you open from other apps, or by right clicking and selecting Open in New Tab, or by middle clicking.  It won't focus Javascript popups.  Often, I don't even realize they are there.  Further, if I manually click on the Galeon launcher in Gnome, it opens a new tab (I expect to see a new window, like Firefox).  My only option is to disable automatic opening in tabs,  which doesn't get me any closer to what I really want (which is the default Firefox activity).

For a while, I didn't know if I could use either Galeon or Epiphany because I get them as 64-bit apps on 64-bit Ubuntu, but Flash only comes as a 32-bit plugin.  But, I figured out how to fix that issue as I covered in a previous post.  I still can't get Java applets to work, but they are much less prevelent on the web today than Flash.  Now that I overcame that hurdle, I have no major problems with Galeon that I can't live with.

In a nutshell I've made Galeon my browser of choice because it is very speedy, integrates well with the Gnome desktop, and is not dumbed down.