Ship epiphany, make it the "default" browser?

[Jordan Erickson]

Scott Balneaves wrote:
> 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.

For sure. At first tinkering w/9.10 Epiphany, it is pretty awesome, even
compared to 9.04. They've done a good job with asthetics (I really liked
the progress meter in address-bar thingie :) )


>> 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.

I did a quick Google on it when I saw it didn't come up - I verified my
sun-java6-plugin was installed, but still no go for Epiphany.


>> 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.

If you're a Gnome upstream dev, I will be bugging you a lot. ;)


>> 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.

Oh man... =) If we could do some fancy footwork with homepages, that
would make my year.


>> 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.

Well let me know what I can do. I'll start using Ephy as my only browser
at home on my 9.10 box and take notes and relay them here.

Who else is in on this adventure?


- Jordan