unity-design team mailing list archive

[Krzysztof Klimonda <kklimonda@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2010-05-17 at 10:24 -0600, Jeremy Nickurak wrote:
(...)
Hey, 
> Epiphany provides a web browser experience that's much more consistent
> with the rest of the gtk/gnome desktop environment. It has a few rough
> edges, but the 2.30.x branch has made some HUGE leaps in terms of
> usability and website compatability, via the webkit-gtk project.
Although I agree that Epiphany is a better choice for a GNOME browser as
it integrates well with the platform (for example using gnome-keyring
for storing passwords) its rough edges make it hard to use it and there
are few other things we should think about.
My biggest issue with Epiphany is the way it handles tabs - they were
the most important selling point of the Firefox, Google has done a lot
of work on their implementation to make sure it's great but Epiphany
uses a default toolkit tabs which simply do not cut it - I can open only
8 tabs on my laptop without them being hidden and useless button popping
out. I can open 14 tabs on Firefox before I get those "scrolling
buttons" (and I always access a list of all opened tab in a form of
dropdown menu) and even more on Chromium.
While I agree that unexperienced users don't really care about tabs, I
must say that for all the others the ability to manage a lot of tabs is
important.

Another issue related to tabs and opening new window is that the url bar
isn't focused - I have to press ctrl+l/F6 every time to start typing
url.

Both Firefox and Chromium provide way of installing 3rd-party plugins
(or add-ons) for your browser directly from web pages.

> 
> Epiphany also might yield better results than other browsers like
> Firefox and Chrome, which use relatively heavyweight custom toolkits
> and widgets. I get the impression that integrating Epiphany into newer
> ubuntu design goals (global menu, windicator, etc) would be
> substantially less work.
Probably. It uses GTK+ and Firefox uses XUL so Epiphany does look like
an easier target to at least implement global menu (it should just
work).

> 
> As someone who's successfully switched to using epiphany for about 99%
> of my browsing, my experience can't help but ask if epiphany is the
> best route going forward. Is it getting much attention from Ayatana?
What about other 1%? :)

I like Epiphany and I believe that Ubuntu needs a browser that is
visually and technically integrated with the rest of the desktop. I
don't believe that Epiphany is there yet, though. The cost of switching
for many users would be just too big and the gain from switching isn't
obvious for most of them. I think that working on getting Firefox (or
even better Chromium) more integrated with GNOME may be an easier and
safer route.

Best Regards,
-- 
Krzysztof Klimonda <kklimonda@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

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