October 25, 2005

Galeon To Become Epiphany + Extensions

The Galeon project has announced that they and Epiphany are now close enough that the extra features that Galeon provides can be implemented as Epiphany extensions, and so plan to move forward in that direction. They feel that this way would mean much less duplication of effort.

It's not an easy thing to make such a decision - pride often keeps "my pet project" going for much longer than it should - and so I applaud the Galeon developers, and hope that the resulting browser(s) become better than the sum of the parts.

Posted by gerv at October 25, 2005 1:09 PM
Comments

Epiphany might also be default browser in the next Ubuntu release due to Firefox's poor support for Linux and Gnome. Might want to improve that. :-/

Posted by: Tv at October 25, 2005 3:16 PM

Tv: what evidence do you have that this idea is being seriously considered? And where's the list of bugs Ubuntu want Firefox to fix?

Posted by: Gerv at October 25, 2005 5:15 PM

As far as I know, there's no official plan for Ubuntu to switch from Firefox to Epiphany but there's been discussions about it.

See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EpiphanyDefaultBrowser for a wiki discussion and http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=75502 for a (recent) forum discussion. There was also a mailing list discussion (first message at http://lists.ubuntulinux.org/archives/ubuntu-devel/2004-September/000068.html) about a year ago.

Posted by: Alex Bishop at October 25, 2005 6:50 PM

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=75502 and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EpiphanyDefaultBrowser. On my computer (I don't even run Gnome) Epiphany starts about twice as fast. I still use firefox though because I have some extentions I love that Epiphany doesn't support..

Posted by: Alan Trick at October 26, 2005 12:49 AM

I think he's talking about the following forum thread by no one in particular:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=75502

And this wiki page by some (probably many) of the same no ones in particular:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EpiphanyDefaultBrowser#preview

The end user-oriented complaints can be summarized in the following: no GNOME-integrated session saving, doesn't follow some specific GNOME theming stuff (like icon/text setting), doesn't respect GNOME global options like proxy settings, and (stretching slightly on "end user-oriented") doesn't follow HIG as well as Epiphany. The page is obviously set up by Epiphanyites who prefer it to Firefox; I went and did some small reorganization to emphasize that some of the Epiphany points weren't all that relevant to end users, to provide a little counter-bias. :-) In all honesty, however, I don't see the thoughts on this page actually leading anywhere substantial in the near future, so it's not really worth worrying about. (I do happen to think making session saving work at least enough that the warning dialog doesn't display would be useful, but it's definitely not something that should be implemented just because of this wiki page containing a few Firefox cons.)

Posted by: Jeff Walden at October 26, 2005 7:14 AM

Gerv, out of fear that this might happen I did some research, and found this Ubuntu wiki article. Apparently, during Breezy Badger development, there were talks of bumping Firefox off of Ubuntu's blessed list of packages installed by default. It didn't happen for that release, but there was signifigant support for it to happen. Apparently, the debate lives on today.

Posted by: Simplex at October 27, 2005 7:49 PM