It’s all in the small things

June 18, 2011 Blogroll, General 14 Comments

A long time ago, in a book whose title I have forgotten, I read something that went like:

Alice: Oh, there’s problems in our relationship, but it’s nothing. Just small things that annoy me.

Bob: Then there’s nothing to be done. Small things are all that matters in the end.

It is, of course, an exaggeration, but one of those that can perhaps hide a deep truth. Maybe because in many cases small things are indicative of bigger problems, or maybe because we very easily take for granted the parts that work and end up obsessing with small details to the point where they ruin the whole experience for us (see: Death by a thousand cuts).

In any case, in the last weeks we Igalians have implemented a few nice improvements in Epiphany, all of which are available in GNOME 3.1.2. Only small things, but they matter.

Spell checking

Spell checking! I know I hate writing long chunks of texts without it, and I’m probably not the only one. We enable the feature by default, and will perform spell check using the languages selected in Preferences→Languages or, if there’s none, the default system language according to GTK+.

But of course knowing that you have made a mistake is only half of the battle. If you right click on the misspelled word you’ll get 4 suggestions from WebKit to use as corrections. Click on any of them and it will replace your blunder.

Warning on leaving pages with unsubmitted forms

A feature that old-time Epiphany users will remember fondly. Has it ever happened to you writing a huge comment on reddit, or perhaps a fantastic resignation letter to your boss, only to accidentally close the tab losing all of it for good? Yeah, me too. We will now detect this unfortunate situation, and warn you one last time before tragedy ensues.

Hide that menubar

An ability I enjoy from our terminal is the possibility of hiding its menubar. It’s nice to regain those pixels if you are rarely using them. Since imitation is the most sincere form of flattery we went ahead and copied the feature almost verbatim. Right click on any chrome area in the browser and you’ll see the option to show or hide the menubar:

When unselected the menubar will just go away, although you can always bring it back by performing the same action again. The result? Well, there’s not a lot more to hide now!

Symbolic icons in the URL entry

Jon McCann (repeatedly) asked for Epiphany to drop its yellow tint in the URL entry for secure sites, and Cosimo Cecchi suggested in a bug that we should also use the new symbolic icons for the security lock. Both great ideas, which combined give us a more modern look.

about:plugins

about: support finally landed, and with it about:plugins. There’s a few more things we should add here, like the full path of the plugin and a checkbox to disable it, but at least now it should be easier for users to figure out whether the browser knows about a particular plugin or not.

Also rumor has it another well-loved about: page made it into the release, but you’ll have to figure out that one for yourselves.