A few months ago, I tried out Epiphany for 60 days after a particularily nasty Firefox crash caused me to lose a lot of content I was working on in a wiki page. At the end of the 60 days, I was pretty happy with Epiphany, and impressed with the developers in how they integrated Epiphany in to the GNOME desktop.
However, a few things had me coming back to Firefox:
- I have to use WindowsXP at work, and I use Firefox there. I love the Google Sync extension for sharing my history, cookies and bookmarks between my work computer and my two home computers.
- Extensions: I love the Gmail Manger and del.icio.us extensions. By far, the most useful two extensions I”ve come across.
- Epiphany’s default behavior for opening a new tab drives me crazy, as it opens Google, and the cursor sits in the Google search box instead of the URL field to type a new webpage address in to.
- And this is very minor, but Mugshot was opening in Firefox by default.
- Epiphany would always open in a new window, not a new tab.
After I switched back to Firefox a few weeks ago, it was just eating up too much memory and CPU cycles. Firefox then began pausing while using it when the CPU / memory use would spike, which drove me crazy, so I went back to Epiphany’s waiting arms one more time.
Since I have switched back, I have also invested some time in customizing Epiphany:
- Changing the default home page to blank fixes the focus issue I had on the URI line, since Google is no longer the home page, it doesn’t default to the Google search box. This plugin does a similar thing as well.
- Based on the screenshot below, you can see I’ve added an extra toolbar. Within that toolbar, I’ve added the “Post to del.icio.us” link since the Epilicious plugin is currently broken, which you can get from the del.icio.us home page. I’ve also added 3 search boxes:
- Google: Add a new bookmark when you’re at Google.com, and then add %s to the end so it looks like this:
http://www.google.com/%s Then View Bookmarks, and drag that bookmark to your toolbar.
- JIRA: Search the Foresight issue / bug tracker from your toolbar:
http://issues.foresightlinux.org/secure/Dashboard.jspa/%s (I may have a typo, I have issues with this one).
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Search rBuilder / Foresight to see if a certain package is maintained on rBuilder: http://www.rpath.org/rbuilder/search?type=Packages;search=%s” Great for when folks stop by in IRC looking for a package, and you can tell them to use Conary to install if it’s there.
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Make sure you go to System > Preferences > Preferred Applications and have Epiphany chosen as your default web browser, and then click on the radio button for “Open link in new tab”. If you have Epiphany, and click on a Mugshot link for example, it will open in Epiphany. Unfortunately, I haven’t found an extension yet to have links in your web browser always open in a tab, ala Tabbrowser Preferences for Firefox.
One ongoing complaint, is the dialog box to remember passwords doesn’t work if I type “R” – I can only use the mouse, even when the dialog box has focus.
The last complaint I have is that the Epilicious and Gmail Notifier plugins are currently broken. I’m a del.icio.us and Gmail junkie, and those are almost enough for me to go back to Firefox, but I’ll manage manually.
If you haven’t tried out Epipany, take the challenge. Give up your other browser for 30 days, and with a few exceptions, Epiphany as just as good any other browser out there, and it integrates with your GNOME experience that much better. I’m dedicated to using Epiphany, and here is my obligatory screenshot (click through to Flickr to see larger sizes):
