A change in direction for Epiphany? Let me preface this by saying that I like using Epiphany. It's been my primary browser for at least a year now, so please take the following as an attempt at constructive criticism and not a whiny complaint by an ignorant user.
It seems to me that Epiphany is at a bit purposeless at the moment. It's mission to be a simple and easy to use browser for Gnome is a noble one, and Epiphany achieves this goal quite well. The problem is that the browser is not getting much use because since the creation of Epiphany a new powerhouse browser emerged, Firefox. Firefox has its own failings, but by and large it has succeeded well at being a simple and easy to user browser for Gnome. I still think that Epiphany does a better job at this, both in the simpler part and in the Gnome part, but by and large Firefox does the job "well enough" for most users. Because of its name recognition in Windows and official Mozilla branding (and probably other reasons), Firefox has managed to become the default browser on most Linux desktop distributions that use Gnome. Since the users already have a simple browser for Gnome, few have much reason to install Epiphany, and certainly the users most targeted by Epiphany (the most inexperienced) would never discover it. This has resulted in Epiphany having a very small share of the browser market. Having a small share in the market is not the end of the world by any means -- I'm sure the developers do what they do for Epiphany out of love and not some arbitrary goal like being the most successful browser. But at the same time, having less users means a smaller base of testers, and probably less potential contributors as well. So while the sky is not falling, it's certainly not the best situation for Epiphany right now, it has seemingly lost much of its purpose. What Epiphany may need in order to increase the size of the userbase is to give a stronger and more compelling reason to use it instead of Firefox. The extensions and especially the python extensions go partway to this goal, and this will build over time as more developers contribute useful extensions now that they are so easy to write. But I do not think this will be quite enough to get a significant change to Epiphany. I suggest that the drastic change for Epiphany be the adoption of Apple's webcore as a replacement for Gecko as the rendering engine for Epiphany. The highly publicized announcement of Nokia's work in adopting webcore for the maemo platform means that they have already undertaken a significant porting effort, and that despite the seeming lack of activity on gtk-webcore.sf.net Nokia's efforts in this area have not stalled. If Epiphany were to adopt Webcore, it would suddenly have a clear differentiation from Firefox. Users seeking an alternative rendering engine to the one provided by the Gnome distributions would now have a reason to discover, download, and ultimately enjoy using Epiphany. Webcore and KHTML have a reputation for being smaller and lighter than Gecko, though I am admittedly not qualified to comment on this matter myself, but if true it could add to the already good Epiphany user experience. At the same time, having a choice (either compile-time or user choice) between two rendering engines might encourage some healthy competition to the rendering engine developers. I've personally been cc'd on a bug that has existed since 2003-02-04 and has many many duplicates and cc's on it. It seems to be a giant catchall for a wide variety of "mozilla interaction doesn't play nice with focus" bugs, some of which seriously interfere with regular browsing, but it seems stalled waiting for someone to take charge of this upstream. Perhaps if Epiphany had the option of using different rendering engines, this would increase the visibility of upstream developers with serious longstanding problems like this. I am not suggesting that this would be an easy project to undertake -- I realize that this would be very difficult on many fronts, as the gtk-webcore project is still immature, and also that changing rendering engines would not be a simple task at all. In fact, for all I know as an outsider this may even be so difficult as to be impossible for all intents and purposes. So, you tell me: is this feasible? While I am not a C coder of any merit and am unable to provide any programming help toward this project, I am willing to put up $200 USD as a bounty on this -- hopefully others are interested enough to increase that number to make it more worthwhile for the amount of effort that would have to be done to accomplish it. If the Epiphany developers don't respond to the gist of my suggestion with bile and hatred, I'll flesh that out a bit -- I just want to know that I'm serious about this and not just another whiner wanting other people to do work for me for free. Cheers, -Ryan Thiessen- _______________________________________________ epiphany-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/epiphany-list
