On 6/22/05, Reinout van Schouwen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Undeniably, Firefox has gained a large following. But that Epiphany is > "not getting much use" is contradicted by the fact that there is a > steady stream of bugreports and people finding their way to this > mailinglist.
Certainly there is a difference between "getting much use" and getting any use at all. I'm not suggesting at all that nobody uses Epiphany, just that web statistics indicate that very few users are currently out there. Anecdotal evidence from my Gnome-using friends, distribution preferences, and screenshots posted by Gnome developers on planet.gnome.org confirm this. I realize this is not necessarily a crisis, so long as there are enough developers such as yourself willing to keep working on the program out of love, but my point still stands. > Let's face it, Firefox is as much a simple browser for GNOME as it is > for any other desktop. Yes, it makes a halfhearted attempt at imitating > the GTK theme, but that's about all integration you get. Oh, and the > file chooser widget. Epiphany gives *real* GNOME integration, but I > admit it's hard to recognize the value of this until you've worked with > GNOME for some time. I think this is understating the degree to which Firefox is working to becoming more of a Gnome browser. For example, I have read that they are planning to even tweak the preferences dialogs to make them more Gnome HIG compliant. Of course, they are just mimicking GTK but this is "good enough" for the vast majority of users -- at least enough so to make few people willing to make the switch to Epiphany. Many of the really cool ways that Epiphany integrates with Gnome are subtle and easy to miss, none have a significant "wow" factor on their own. > If Epiphany seems to have lost much of its purpose, then how about > Galeon? Yet Galeon too has an active user base. I suspect you are > painting things more negative than they really are. You are certainly correct, my concerns are even more poignant for Galeon. But I'm not a Galeon user, and I'm not writing to the Galeon mailing list. I am concerned about the long-term success of the Epiphany browser, which I prefer over the alternatives available. I just see the status quo of the embedded mozilla widget bugs (both security and annoyance level) stagnating for another couple of years because all of the gecko developers are concerned primarily with Firefox. Unless something changes to make this no longer the case with the embedded gecko widget, I can't see a lot of future with Epiphany. Is this overly negative or just realistic? > Although your analysis is mostly correct, your solution seems wrong. It > is centered around the idea that adopting a new rendering engine would > cause users to suddenly flock to Epiphany; however there is no reason to > assume that Epiphany's primary target group, that you already mentioned, > even care about what a rendering engine is. This is again a good point. The target group will not switch, but by the same token they will not use the browser at all if distribution managers and power users don't provide Epiphany as the default browser. My suggestion was to differentiate Epiphany from Firefox in a highly visible way, something to get these power users and distribution managers to take notice. Perhaps some of them will decide that there is indeed a compelling reason to include Epiphany as the default browser for the desktops they provide to our primary target group. So in the end I agree with you -- moving to webcore is not necessarily the best solution in the world to the problems facing Epiphany at this time. But what it would do is address some of the security and usability bugs that currently trouble the browser, and give Epiphany a very clear and distinct differentiation from Firefox, giving power users a solid reason to install it even if the distribution provides Firefox by default and they find this simple enough for their purposes. But if you can think of another development that could kickstart interest in using Epiphany as a default browser, I'm not tied to my own suggestion. As I suggested earlier, the python extensions are a good start to providing a "wow" feature, and mono extensions might get some of Mono people excited about it as well. I just have a feeling that this will not be enough, and it will fall further from the public eye. In the meantime I'll keep using and enjoying Epiphany -- thanks for all your hard work. -- Cheers, -Ryan Thiessen- _______________________________________________ epiphany-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/epiphany-list
