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Epiphany is a web browser for the GNOME graphical computing desktop. It is also available for Mac OS X[1] and is a descendant of Galeon.
[edit] Development
Epiphany was developed from Galeon by Marco Pesenti Gritti (also the initiator of Galeon) with the aim of making a web browser that would be fully compliant with the GNOME human interface guidelines and that would have a very simple user experience. As a result, Epiphany does not have its own theme settings — it uses GNOME’s settings, which are specified in the GNOME Control Center.[2]
Epiphany initially used the Gecko layout engine from the Mozilla project to display web pages. It provided a GNOME integrated front-end to Gecko, instead of the Mozilla XUL interface. The Epiphany project development team began working with WebKit as a rendering engine and released an experimental build of Epiphany 2.27.x using WebKit instead of Gecko.[3] As a result of these experiments, the Epiphany team announced on 1 April 2008 that it would stop using the Gecko rendering engine and proceed using only WebKit.[4] On 1 July 2009, the project team announced that Epiphany 2.26.3 would be the final Gecko version[5]and in September 2009 the Webkit-powered Epiphany 2.28 was released, as part of the release of GNOME 2.28.[6]
In reviewing the Webkit Epiphany 2.28, reviewer Ryan Paul of Ars Technica said "Epiphany is quite snappy in GNOME 2.28 and scores 100/100 on the Acid3 test. Using WebKit will help differentiate Epiphany from Firefox, which is shipped as the default browser by most of the major Linux distributors."[6]
Epiphany supports tabbed browsing, cookie management, popup blocking and an extensions system. Epiphany can be extended with the Epiphany-extensions package.
[edit] Bookmarks
While most browsers feature a hierarchical folder-based bookmark system, Epiphany uses categorized bookmarks, where a single bookmark (such as “Epiphany”) can exist in multiple categories (such as “Web Browsers”, “GNOME”, and “Computer Software”). Special categories include bookmarks that have been used frequently (“Most Frequent”) and bookmarks that have not yet been categorized. This is similar to the Firefox 3.0 Places feature which integrates bookmarks and history into a SQLite database. Another innovative concept supported by Epiphany (though originally from Galeon) is “Smart Bookmarks”. These take a single argument specified from the address bar or from a textbox in a toolbar.[2]
[edit] Epiphany-extensions
Epiphany-extensions is a set of official extensions to the web browser. Extensions include:
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Richard Petersen, Fedora 10 Linux Desktop, Surfing Turtle Press, 2008, ISBN 0982099827, p. 244
- Scott Granneman, Don't click on the blue e!: switching to Firefox, O'Reilly Media, 2005, ISBN 0596009399, p. 201
- Michael McCallister, SUSE Linux 10 unleashed, Sams Publishing, 2006, ISBN 0672327260, p. 225
- Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, Matt Welsh, Running Linux, Edition 5, O'Reilly Media, 2006, ISBN 0596007604, p. 94
- Rickford Grant, Linux for non-geeks: a hands-on, project-based, take-it-slow guidebook, No Starch Press, 2004, ISBN 1593270348, pp. 166–117
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