Epiphany: The Web through the eyes of GNOME
Since the GNOME 2.12 feature freeze is in effect, it’s time to reflect on where Epiphany, GNOME’s default web browser, stands and where it’s going. Perhaps you want to contribute!
Epiphany aims to be as easy to use as possible. Examples include:- Enabling searching by typing search terms in the location bar
- Organizing bookmarks by category, instead of in a hierarchy
- Using GNOME programs when appropriate: view source launches GEdit, email links launch Evolution, and help launches Yelp.
Much has happened since Epiphany 1.0 became the default web browser on the GNOME desktop, which are already discussed in an previously previous article published on Footnotes (Epiphany celebrates its second birthday). After that article was published, Epiphany gradually improved, both on the architectural side with D-BUS support and Python extensions, and on the interface side, with an improved full-screen mode and customized error pages (error page screenshot). However, many ideas to make web surfing more pleasant and intuive are unimplemented.
Web browsing should be as easy as reading a newspaper, downloading files as simple as posting a note on the refrigerator door, and publishing your own content should be as natural as picking up a pen and writing a note. The pen’s brand and ink color are irrelevant. But alas, Epiphany has not reached that level yet. Possible improvements to Epiphany include:
General
- Better integration – share cookies with other applications like instant messengers, pass on FTP transfers to GNOME-vfs, make drag-and-drop with work seamlessly with Nautilus, store passwords with GNOME-keyring, and so on.
- Represent history graphically with thumbnails of webpages
- Re-design page zoom to be more like the Nautilus zoom widget
- Private browsing mode – forget all cookies and history after the browsing session
- Enhance the Ad blocking extension, add click-to-play for animations
- Support for spell checking and history in text forms
Bookmarks
- Separate the bookmarks backend into its own module
- Create a friendly UI for smart bookmarks and bookmark keywords
- Suggest bookmark topics automatically using text analysis techniques
Accessibility
- Improve accessibility, for instance by adding a screen reader emulator like Fangs
- Better support for bidirectional text input
These ideas and more are described on the Epiphany Wiki.
Because Epiphany depends on many external libraries ( Mozilla is the biggest single dependency), bugs in external libraries are often found and must be fixed by Epiphany’s maintainer. He does a good job of handling these bugs and often provides patches for them, but this considerably slows new feature development. Although many people contribute, there is a shortage of developers because most contributors help with extension development, documentation or QA.
If you think it would be cool for Epiphany to add one of the features mentioned above, or have your own vision of how to improve GNOME web browsing, please consider joining the team! Familiarity with C and C++ helps, but extension contributions (written in Python) are also warmly welcomed.
Epiphany Links
This article was produced by collaboration between Reinout Van Schouwen and Joseph S. Huang.