This Gnomedesktop posting

outlines the future of galeon. All it’s users (and maybe former users, too) should read it…

Basically: the main (current) galeon authors don’t have enough time to work on galeon (e.g. on the bookmarks editor, which has some issues).

Epiphany, which was forked off Galeon, has a much more active developer community, a more up-to-date codebase, including an extension system.

So the galeon authors decided to try to work galeon into epiphany extensions as far as possible (btw, epiphany is to get hierarchical bookmarks independently, so one of the big issues many people have with it is gone then) and maybe make a new Galeon based upon Epiphany to add these features which are not possible with Epiphanys’ extension system.

Neither Galeon nor Epiphany currently have an easy standing. For example Ubuntu prefers Firefox to Epiphany (albeit Epiphany is way better intergrated in the desktop). This is a pity, since IMHO firefox suffers from featurits.

Also I’m not a fan of extension systems like in epiphany and firefox. Especially with firefox, the code quality of extensions varies a lot. And even extensions that are really useful (e.g. the webdeveloper toolbar, albeit it offers little more than I do in Galeon with Bookmarklets) still suffer from some old bugs (e.g. the “show divs” menu item will still be checked after you changed the page) that are maybe just not fixeable in the extension.

At the same time, using extensions basically means that the application will be (and behave) different on the machines you work on, unless you spend a lot of time in installing the same extensions everywhere (and then in turn syncing their configurations as well etc.). Neither will the UI be consistent, themes won’t support the extensions etc.