Epiphany celebrates its second birthday!

by Reinout van Schouwen

Epiphany's inception

On December 25, 2002, Marco Pesenti Gritti announced the first release of his brainchild, the Epiphany browser, to the world. The name Epiphany ("intuitive grasp of reality through something usually simple and striking") was chosen for a reason. Partly based on code from Galeon, that Marco had been project lead of until shortly before, Epiphany's design was minimalistic, yet innovative and aimed for maximum usability. To that end, Epiphany featured a unique non-hierarchical, topic based bookmarks system and a smart location bar entry that offered suggestions retrieved from bookmarks as well as the browser history.

In the two years that have passed since then, a lot has happened. The project quickly attracted a small number of developers and user interface enthusiasts. The most important event undoubtedly was the decision to include Epiphany in the core GNOME desktop. This didn't happen without some controversy, because at the time many people liked Galeon better and Epiphany wasn't quite ready for prime time yet. However, since Epiphany's goals seemed more in line with the newfound "keep it simple" approach of GNOME, it happened that GNOME 2.4.0 was released with the 1.0 release of the Epiphany browser.

The user interface concepts Epiphany brought to the table weren't always greeted enthusiastically by everyone. One person made the particularly nice remark that "Epiphany removed every useful feature any browser ever had" - well, you can't always please everyone. ;-)

Despite these criticisms, the inclusion with GNOME worked out well. Epiphany has gained exposure and developed a user base, and quite a few lines of code and user interface improvements (such as the GtkUIManager, formerly EggMenuMerge) that pioneered in Epiphany, are now part of the GNOME platform.

Where we are

GNOME users aren't the only people in need of a lean and mean browser. The development of Mozilla Firefox therefore was a godsend, especially to the millions of Windows users for whom the full Mozilla suite wasn't polished and attractive enough. Firefox enjoys massive popularity among GNU/Linux users too, so much even that some distro vendors have opted to have Firefox as the default browser on their GNOME desktop. Of course we aren't too excited about this, but it's even more incentive to make Epiphany totally rock, so we can give these vendors a reason to reconsider. To those questioning the usefulness of continuing development of Epiphany next to Firefox, let us say this: there are many good reasons to do so, but the most important one is that we have a vision of what a GNOME web browser should be, and we will keep scratching that itch until we get there, contributing to the Mozilla codebase along the way. Needless to say we keep a close eye on the developments in the Firefox camp, but we aren't trying to compete on features, nor are we marketing the browser as a standalone project. Our goals are simply different.

The composition of the development team has changed a bit over time. Most notably, Christian has been the Epiphany maintainer for the last two GNOME releases, and Marco spends most of his time doing other exciting things now that he has accepted a job at Red Hat. It should also be mentioned that the Epiphany and Galeon developers enjoy a good working relationship; lots of patches to the Epiphany codebase have been contributed by Crispin & co.

Another exiting development is the fully-developed extensions (i.e. plugins) system of Epiphany. Epiphany Extensions contains features that more experienced users expect, like gestures, an extension to add a "Page Properties" dialogue, switch between style sheets, group newly opened tabs, off-line HTML validation etc. It also works as a testbed for functionality slated to be included in Epiphany at a later stage, like the Certificate extension. In the future, Epiphany will also support extensions written in Python, or even Mono/C#. It is already possible to dynamically load/unload extensions at runtime.

Upcoming releases

We have set ambitious goals for the next stable release, Epiphany 1.6, that will coincide with GNOME 2.10. To whet your appetite a little: if all goes according to plan, the Bookmarks menu in 1.6 will be able to dynamically show topic submenus and subdivisions, based on the topics the bookmarks belong to. We are soliciting the help of interested coders, designers, documentation writers, bug triagers and translators from the community to help us get there. The 1.6 roadmap shows the plans and indicates their progress.
In particular, we are looking for assistance on the following features:

• Accessibility. Epiphany's accessibility is not quite up to par with the rest of GNOME. We need input from users about what they need, what doesn't work right etc., so that disabled users will not have to resort to special Mozilla builds any longer.
• Integration with GNOME-Keyring. With the availability of GNOME-keyring, we don't need to store our passwords in a separate database any more, but moving from Mozilla code to GNOME-keyring is trickier than expected.
• Integration with Nautilus and Gnome-vfs. Currently, transferring files over a network can be performed both by Nautilus and Epiphany, yet in completely different ways. We aim to unify these methods, but this won't happen without somebody who can take care of the Nautilus side of things.

Of course you're welcome to drop by on the #epiphany channel or send your suggestions, patches, contributions etc. to epiphany-list at gnome-dot-org.