» Ephy and extensions.
I’ve recently moved to Epiphany, GNOME’s official web browser. I used to use Mozilla Firefox, but I never really liked it, and always fought with it, especially when used on Linux. However, since the whole “waa waa” scandal made by Mozilla about the usage (or lack) of the official Firefox icon, since it was trademarked and not included in many distros, I politically decided to switch to a browser which in the end resulted in being even better than my old one, one over which Diego had nagged me over the last few months. After a couple of hours of small problems while my brain was adjusting, I got out with a better browsing experience than the one I had when using Firefox.
Features
Epiphany, or Ephy, uses the Gecko engine to render pages, so it has the same accuracy than Mozilla or Firefox, provided it is a version which uses the Gecko 1.8 engine. However, it is especifically developed for the GNOME environment, and does not suffer from windowsitis. There is no need to use specific themes for the browser, as it automatically adapts to the one used in GNOME, to provide with cohesion, which many times other browsers do not provide. Also, as expected, Ephy has tabs, and even the ability to drag and drop tags wherever needed in order to rearrange them, something Firefox only recently got, or had to be provided by extensions.
Epiphany also has a very innovative way to work with bookmarks. Instead of placing them into folders, it tags them, like Gmail does. So, instead of having to decide if an nVidia Linux kernel thread goes in graphics or in kernel, it can be tagged in to graphics and kernel, so it shows up in a search for any of those two terms. It also has smart bookmarks, which allow creating one for the debian package search and just easily typing clex, selecting the correct entry on the address bar, pressing enter and voilá, instant package search. It has many smart bookmarks by default, such as Dictionary, Wikipedia or Google.
Ephy is very integrated with the desktop. You can easily subscribe to a desktop reader like Liferea when getting an RSS feed, and complete integration with the GNOME Deskbar, allowing it to index the history and bookmarks for easy searching using it. Raphaël Slinckx, the dude with the weird hackergotchi on his site and also a developer of the Deskbar applet explains more about it.
Extensions
The browser does not have a centralised repository for extensions, and there is no way to easily install them but downloading the epiphany-extensions package or download them from the web and put them into the .gnome2/epiphany/extensions directory. However, while I can’t get a GoogleTabs extension, or show the time in Timbuctu, I can get extensions which do what I need, such as run Greasemonkey scripts, block ads, allow me to browse using gestures. As Epiphany is very basic by default, there are also many extensions which help configure the browsing environment, such as selecting which tab to focus after closing one, or to make the tab border smaller. This are all very small extensions, and only have 379 lines altogether, counting all the extensions I downloaded and activated. Furthermore, writing extensions is extremely easy, as in a few lines of python, an extension is ready to run.
Super Tab Extra
Basing myself on the Only One Close Button, I created Super Tab Extra, an extension which resized the width of the tabs when there are too many. The name comes from Tab Mix Plus, a very famous Firefox extension which deals with tabs. Well, without further ado, here it is, Super Tab Extra. I hated the way that tabs were managed first, as “due to a GTK bug”, the tabs would not resize. However, apparently Firefox is going to use it too.
. That means that the patch is 80% a workaround and 20% a hint to solve the real problem, or at least that’s what I think.
!. That’s all for now.
