Joey pointed out to me that Gnome is "not the world" The reason why I brought up ion as an example is that it targets a very different audience than Gnome. Ion is for people willing to learn lots of keyboard shortcuts and spend a lot of time configuring their stuff. Gnome does the very opposite - it's approach is basically to choose defaults most people will not need to change. Of course it's nice to be able to run Gnome programs outside of Gnome, and KDE programs outside of KDE, but it will still be a Gnome program, and not become an ion program.

Galeon was written for Gnome, and it's goal is not to provide as many features as possible. So if you want that, you are just using the wrong program. Even if it used to have some features you were missing in the alternatives, that just means the alternatives are worse. That there is no (well, there is kazekahase now apparently) web browser designed for the ion audience.

This is almost like if a Gnome user were complaining that lynx doesn't have graphics support! (okay, lynx never had graphics support, galeon 1.2 did have more features)

Although mostly I was annoyed by claims like the Galeon developers ignoring their users. This is a very arrogant claim - the developers should probably know "their users" better than we do. And even if they misjudged the majority of their users - if they decide to write their application the Gnome way, that is their choice. Anyone could have ported Galeon 1.2 as-is to GTK2 if he liked it better. I don't know of such a project, "Galeon for ion users".

I myself am happy with the Gnome direction. Although I did miss some functions when I switched to Gnome2, I quickly noticed that I don't really need them. At the same time, I basically stopped touching any configuration. By now I consider any application where I need to make customizations bad software. Partially because when I look at the amount of time I used to spend on configuring and customizing applications: very few customizations can really make up for that time lost there.

There is space for Gnome panels and for xterms in my desktop life. Most of the time I'm working in my terminals, and X is a mere terminal multiplexer for me. I don't think I could be happy with ion - too many shortcuts to learn for too little gain, and four full-size terminals won't fit onto my screen with it either - Gnome with openbox does the job already really well for me (basically all my apps except the xterms are fullscreen, switchable with my page-left and -right keys of my keyboard). I don't see anything I could gain by switching to ion, actually (why use tabs when I have virtual desktops?).

But every now and then I need to e.g. open a stupid .ppt file. So I would need to remember what the application I could use to open it. Last time I failed miserably with that in the shell: I tried "ooimpress", but I had upgraded to openoffice2. ooimpress2 - no success either. Then I just selected it from my Gnome panel. Sometimes it's more efficient to use Gnome, too.