Ship epiphany, make it the "default" browser?

[Scott Balneaves]

On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 09:50:57AM -0800, Jordan Erickson wrote:
> Just a few things from my experience,
> 
> 1) Epiphany is a good browser over-all.. it's fast, I've been using it
> as my main browser on my eeepc 701 and it's good for the most part.

Yeah, as part of my "experiment" I've switched myself over to it.

> 2) I had one of the schools I work with test out Epiphany since Firefox
> was giving us some grief... I didn't get into too much detail, but I'll
> note that the teacher told us Ephiphany performed even worse than
> Firefox. So in any case we'll want to do some testing with a recent
> version (I'm still on 8.04 atm) and a moderately sized LTSP lab.

Hmmm, interesting.  On my home ltsp "lab" (two thin clients), it was
"noticeably" peppier, for completely subjective values of "noticeably".  Like I
say, I think I really need to sit down and come up with some objective
measurements opposite speed, memory usage, etc.  As well, the ephy you'd have
been running on would have been gecko based, same renderer as in FF, with all
it's associated goodness/badness.  9.10's ephy's switched over to webkit, which
seems (to me) to haul donkey/horse admixtures way faster.

> 3) We're going to want to extensively test all of the plugins for
> Epiphany (which I haven't done yet myself).. Flash, Java being the most
> noteable ones.

Flash I know works, Java I haven't tested yet.

> All of the people I've worked with with Linux/LTSP seem
> to really show that the plugins are the most important thing since so
> many sites use them so much. I just installed epiphany-browser on my Ubu
> 9.10 AMD64 machine at home and Java doesn't work ootb. Not really sure
> how to get it going right now actually. Last I heard Webkit and Java
> weren't very good friends.

Agreed, we need to test/fix the snot out of that sort of thing.  Fortunately,
I'm Gnome Upstream now, so, as I've done with Sabayon, so may I do with ephy.

> 4) 100% agree on gconf == good. I've always envied Epiphany because of
> what you can do with it in gconf, and the lack of support Firefox has
> for it.

Well, that's the HUGEST advantage I see.  If we get "ldap everywhere", and a
connector from some of the lockdown/homepage functions in gconf to ldap, it'd
be saweeet to be able to, at account creation time, set things like homepage,
proxy for DG or whathaveyou, etc.

> All in all I'm for testing and making it a goal.. I'm not really happy
> with the direction Firefox is going in, anyway. If Epiphany can smooth
> out the rough edges I think we'd have a good candidate for a replacement
> default browser.

Agreed.  That's why I'm setting a 12.04 goal for looking at this.  That gives
us two solid years to get it to where we want.

Cheers,
Scott


-- 
Scott L. Balneaves | I don't have any solution,
Systems Department | but I certainly admire the problem.
Legal Aid Manitoba |     -- Ashleigh Brilliant