I've been using galeon (only in English, though) and in general am
quite happy with it, although it does drag in a fair bit of gnome
libs.

I had similar-sounding problems with Galeon and gconf, but managed to
solve them.  One issue is that the pkgsrc entry was broken in that it
was missing the gconf scheme entry.  In my case, having done 'make
install' worked, but doing 'pkg_add' on another machine did not.
So I copied over the files to the other machine, and told the pkgsrc
maintainer about this

Gconf (http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/, blurb at
http://developer.gnome.org/feature/archive/gconf/gconf.html) is the
gnome configuration tool, storing user preferences.  Values are stored
in ~/.gconf and in /usr/X11R6/etc/gconf.

The schema (default configuration and documentation about it)
belongs in two places, the source file
  /usr/X11R6/etc/gconf/schemas/galeon.schemas
and then broken out versions (automatically generated at schema
install time) in
/usr/X11R6/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults/schemas/apps/galeon/Advanced/Network/%gconf.xml 

An example is
      <schema>
        <key>/schemas/apps/galeon/Browsing/General/startpage</key>
        <applyto>/apps/galeon/Browsing/General/startpage</applyto>
        <owner>galeon</owner>
        <type>string</type>
        <default>http://www.gnome.org</default>
        <locale name="C">
        <short>Home page</short>
        <long>URL for the user's home page.  Displayed when Galeon starts up
        and when a new window or tab is created, as controlled by
        /apps/galeon/Browsing/General/startpage_type and
        /apps/galeon/Browsing/General/newpage_type</long>
        </locale>
      </schema>


Then configuration data pointing to the schema is in
/usr/X11R6/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults/apps/galeon/Advanced/Network/%gconf.xml
and
~/.gconf/apps/galeon/Advanced/Network/%gconf.xml

One of the points of gconf is to make preference changes occur
instantly in all running copies of a program, as well as to abstract
out the whole application preferences config file stuff.

As for security, I don't think having to install stuff in /usr/pkg is
worrisome; these files are part of the install of the program and
should have been put there by 'make install'.  Having to run fixup
scripts is a workaround for bugs in galeon or pkgsrc/www/galeon.
Looking at pkgsrc, I do see a line in PLIST for schema installation:

@exec env GCONF_CONFIG_SOURCE=xml::${X11PREFIX}/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults gconftool-1 --makefile-install-rule ${X11PREFIX}/etc/gconf/schemas/galeon.schemas

added August 4th.

    Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>