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In a shock development, I am not trying out the development (read: gtk2) version of Galeon, the Gnome Gecko-based browser. Of course, the rendering engine is virtually flawless, however, I remember using the stable flavour a while back and finding the interface rather lacking. Not having the two side-by-side I can’t exactly pinpoint the reason for this. I would expect anti-aliased fonts have something to do with it. Also I think the devs must have changed the way the tabs work, as I remember them annoying me in the way that they worked last time, but now they seem fine. They are much more similiar in workings to the Opera tabs, which of course endears me towards them.

I do like Galeon’s “just the browser” approch. Looking at the preferences panel, there is a distinct lack of options, but sometimes that is a good thing. Maybe I am fortunate in that the options they have chosen fit my browsing styles pretty well.

You may have also noticed Abiword in my desktop image. I like the interface and speed of this word processor. Though not up with OpenOffice in terms of functionality, in terms of speed and quality of user interface, Abiword blows OpenOffice out of the water, imo. I just love the sleak feeling of the interface and the way I only have to wait about two seconds for it to load, rather than around thirty plus. I would malign the export options, as the best seem to be XHtml and rtf. If a good Word export option was added, I think that OpenOffice would have a serious contender in many arenas. After all, most people would be very happy with Abiword’s feature set. An app I like and am going to keep my eye on. It’s also cross-platform, so go download and try it!