Epiphany ♥ WebKit

When I said a few weeks ago that an important announcement would be made about the future of Epiphany some people told me it was really obvious what was coming. Seeing the reaction of some to the now public announcement, it seems there’s still some room for disbelief. Maybe the date didn’t help too much, but hey, the whole point of April the 1st is to make you doubt. If all the news are obviously false it’s not really that much fun.

So, yes:

  • Starting from now Epiphany trunk is WebKit only, and we’ll slowly get rid of the abstraction layer.
  • We aim to release an usable browser for 2.24, but if we can’t make it the 2.22 branch will be released instead. The 2.22 branch will be maintained as long as it’s needed.
  • We have started (thanks Diego!) a TODO list for the WebKit backend. I’ll try to work more on this in the coming days.
  • Help, as usual, is welcome!

I should have blogged about this before, but I spent the whole week abroad working on some world domination stuff. Should blog about that soon too… (guys, nudge nudge, wake up).

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10 Responses to Epiphany ♥ WebKit

  1. xo0r says:

    we love you! :D!!! continue your great work !!!

  2. Sandy says:

    I don’t see anything a11y-related on the TODO list.

    Does the epiphany/webkit team have no plans to address the issues brought up on d-d-l before the next Epiphany release?

  3. Awesome choice – even if Gecko continues to get better, it can only be good to have two good (mostly) native browsers based on the two alternative toolkits.

  4. xan says:

    The TODO list is by no means complete at this moment. a11y is, of course, in our plans.

  5. ethana2 says:

    Does it automatically lie to microsoft and banking sites about its user agent? That would be really handy.

  6. Sandy says:

    Glad to hear it. 🙂

  7. Patrys says:

    For the people concerned about a11y:

    Read the above post – I believe if WebKit-gtk does not get mature enough, 2.22 will continue into GNOME 2.24.

    May I repeat that I absolutely love the idea.

    We need more diversity when it comes to standards-compliant web browsers. And it’s a great chance to give Epiphany some well deserved exposure. Now it seems most distros think “it’s just Firefox and we already ship one Firefox.”

  8. Kalle says:

    Great! I really look forward being able to try out WebKit stuff directly in GNOME!

  9. Martin Svior says:

    I’m pretty agnostic about browser backends but one thing I really want is:

    ogg to tbe default video format on the web.

    So given that firefox has/will have native ogg support.

    Will webkit have native ogg support?

    If not will will you fork webkit so it does have native ogg support?

    Thank you!

    Martin

  10. Kalle Vahlman says:

    Martin: Yes, WebKit-GTK+ supports using GStreamer as the media backend (for the video/audio tags) so at least in principle it can handle whatever your GStreamer installation can.

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