Epiphany 2.26.3 has been released. It is the last version to support a Gecko back-end. This marks the end of an era.
Also, Xan Lopez has taken over Epiphany maintainership. We wish to thank Christian Persch for all his work through the years!
The Epiphany team proudly presents a brand new release of every Gnome lovers’ pet web browser!
Version 2.24 doesn’t differ much from 2.22 feature-wise. The Webkit
switch is still in progress, so although it can be built with a Webkit
back end, Gecko is still the recommended rendering engine.
In this release, the address entry has improved logic which should
result in faster autocompletion lookups.
Bug fixes:
Enhancements:
Download information can be found here.
Enjoy!
Contributors to this release:
Diego Escalante Urrelo, Sebastian Keller, Josselin Mouette, Mike Hommey,
Paul Drain, Cosimo Cecchi, Bruce Cowan, Lucas Lommer, Colin Walters,
Loïc Minier, Vincent Untz, Christian Persch, Reinout van Schouwen
Translators:
Jorge Gonzalez (es), Kjartan Maraas (nb), Khaled Hosny (ar), Ivar Smolin
(et), Sweta Kothari, Reinout van Schouwen (nl), Daniel Nylander (sv),
Yair Hershkovitz (he), icq, Lucas Lommer (cz), Duarte Loreto (pt), Gil
Forcada (ca), Takeshi AIHANA (ja), sprasad, Theppitak Karoonboonyanan
(th), ituohela (fi), Robert-André Mauchin (fr), grakic (sr@latin), Inaki
Larranaga Murgoitio (eu), pgeyleg (dz), Hendrik Richter (de), Nguyễn
Thái Ngọc Duy (vi), Funda Wang (zh_CN), Philip Withnall (en_GB), Claude
Peroz (fr), mateju, rranjan (hi), apravi, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay,
Gintautas Miliauskas (lt), Baris Ciçek (tr), Gabor Kelemen (hu), ifelix,
sandeeps, kelemeng, cwryu (kr), Alexander Shopov (bg), tvainika (fi),
Nickolay V. Shmyrev (ru), Mugurel Tudor (ro), Ask H. Larsen (dk)
Attention! Ceci n’est pas un poisson d’avril!
Over the last few months, the Epiphany development team has been discussing the future of the Gnome web browser. We feel that we haven’t been living up to the full potential of a well-integrated Gnome application, due to both internal and external constraints.
The Epiphany user interface is built on top of an abstraction layer above the web rendering engine, enabling us to support multiple back-ends. Currently Epiphany supports the Mozilla browser engine (Gecko), and the WebKit engine.
The Epiphany dependency on Gecko creates a number of problems for us. The Gecko release cycle is very long (e.g. Gecko 1.8 was released with Firefox 1.5 in 2005; 1.8.1 with Firefox 2.0 in 2006 and 1.9 will be released sometime this year with Firefox 3.0), prone to delays and not synchronised with the unvarying 6-month Gnome release cycle. Furthermore, it and the feature work on Gecko are mostly driven by the Firefox browser, our main competitor on the Gnome desktop. Also the embedding API of Gecko (GtkMozEmbed) has been unmaintained and stagnant for a long time. Finally, the current plans for “Mozilla 2.0” bring much uncertainty to us, as well as much work to account for their proposed big API changes.
We are a small team, with only one maintainer and a hand-full of regular contributors. Maintaining the abstraction layer, and the Gecko back-end require lot of effort and time. Much time alone is spent on keeping up with Gecko API changes, and we have not had much contributions to the Gecko back-end in a long time.
Therefore we have decided to radically change the future of Epiphany in the upcoming 2.24 development cycle. We will drop the abstraction layer, making the code more maintainable, allowing faster development and enabling us to take advantage of the features of the back-end directly.
Furthermore, we will choose only one web engine back-end to support and concentrate our efforts on it instead of spreading our efforts to multiple back-ends and restricting us to the common features all back-ends support.
This single back-end will be WebKit.
We see several advantages in WebKit. These include:
We will propose WebKit as an approved external dependency for Gnome.
In case that we are unable to complete this development in time for 2.24.0, we will delay the new Epiphany to 2.26. For this end, we will maintain the gnome-2-22 branch in a state that allows us to potentially make the 2.24.0 release off of that branch.
This 2.22 release of Epiphany brings a few architectural changes as well as some user-visible ones. It blesses us with a migration from gnome-vfs to GIO. Also, thanks to a refactoring of Epiphany’s internals, cross engine support has improved a lot. If you’re feeling adventurous, feel free to try Epiphany with the WebKit backend– but be warned, several important features, such as cookies, are still missing.
Clearing privacy-sensitive data is now easier than ever. From a single dialog, you can clear your cookies, cache, history and saved passwords. Furthermore, the download manager will now show notification bubbles if the download window is hidden and a download completes. The address entry now filters history and bookmark duplicates, an image preview has been added to the filechooser, and finally, the history window can now display the date and time of the last visit.
Thanks to all contributors, and we wish to mention that, as a result of the hard labor of all translators, Epiphany has been localized into more than 70 languages!
The indispensible little companions to your web browsing experience, Epiphany-Extensions, have been updated to version 2.22 as well.
The list below covers all development releases from 2.21.90 up to and including 2.22.0.
Bug fixes
Changes
Contributors to this release:
Sebastien Bacher, Luca Ferretti, Cosimo Cecchi, Jan Alonzo, Xan Lopez, Thomas Wendt, Jens Granseuer, Carlos Garcia Campos, Christian Persch
Translations:
Kjartan Maraas, Artur Flinta, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, Chao-Hsiung Liao, Wadim Dziedzic, Djihed Afifi, Kenneth Nielsen, Priit Laes, Daniel Nylander, Hendrik Richter, Arangel Angov, Theppitak Karoonboonyanan,
Maxim Dziumanenko, Changwoo Ryu, Ankit Patel, Luca Ferretti, Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle, Petr Kovar, Inaki Larranaga Murgoitio, Ignacio Casal Quinteiro, Takeshi AIHANA, Wouter Bolsterlee, Gabor Kelemen, Claude Paroz, Duarte Loreto, Gil Forcada, Nikos Charonitakis, Ihar Hrachyshka, Philip Withnall, Jorge Gonzalez, Åsmund Skjæveland, Amitakhya Phukan, Žygimantas Beručka, Yair Hershkovitz, Baris Cicek, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy, Pawan Chitrakar, Ilkka Tuohela, Reinout van Schouwen, Rahul Bhalerao, Yannig Marchegay
How to get it:
http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/Downloads
The first Epiphany release in the unstable development series has hit the FTP servers!
A lot has happened on the WebKit front, get all the facts from Xan…
A lot of changes and bugfixes have accumulated before this release. Check the release announcement for details. Unfortunately, Epiphany-extensions isn’t in releaseable state yet because of the refactoring that has taken place in Epiphany.
A few highlights from the NEWS to whet your appetite:
The translation teams have been working hard to localize Epiphany. We currently have 60 languages that are supported (80% or more strings translated). Still there is some work to be done, especially the documentation translations are lagging behind. If you’d like to contribute but don’t know how, this could be a way to get involved! Drop by in the #i18n or #epiphany channel and we’ll get you started!
Last but not least, check out the totally wicked screenshot of Epiphany/WebKit with HTML 5 media support that Alp made:
It’s been way too long since an “official” Epiphany blog. Anyway, here are a few highlights to keep you up to date.
As Wouter noted already, Epiphany 2.20.2 is out. We even have a proper NEWS file this time! It includes a few notable bug fixes, for example in the areas of printing and session recovery.
On the GNOME 2.21 side of things it has been a bit quiet, but rest assured that work is continuing. A lot of refactoring work is taking place to bring the Gecko and Webkit back-ends on equal footing.
But even though Epiphany is “awesome“, please keep in mind there are still lots of open bugs in bugzilla, so anybody who wants to help out, come on, don’t be shy! 🙂
GUADEC
The most important change in this release is obviously that an experimental
WebKit back-end was added by Xan Lopez during the GNOME conference.
Read all about it here. Fer also blogged about it and it was even mentioned in an article on Ars Technica. Imran posted additional build instructions.
The Epiphany team was represented on GUADEC by Xan, Diego, Wouter, and Reinout. Don’t forget to check out Diego’s photo album!
Empathic Epiphany
Another notable GUADEC event: Senko caught the Epiphany virus and wrote an extension that makes sending links to Empathy contacts from Epiphany dead easy. It’s not yet (?) in Epiphany extensions…
Epiphany 2.19.6
Regular development has to continue as well, so we’re happy that Cosimo Cecchi has contributed a lot of small but not less important gnome-love bugfixes!
Changes:
– “Local sites” -> “Nearby sites” (because it is a better description)
– Drop the “Quick” prefix from Topic/Bookmark items in toolbar editor, because it has no function besides confusing users.
Bug fixes:
Contributors to this release:
Diego Escalante Urrelo, René Stadler, Xan Lopez, Carlos Garcia Campos,
Reinout van Schouwen, Cosimo Cecchi, Kraai, Wouter Bolsterlee,
Christian Persch, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy, Luca Ferretti
Translations:
Priit Laes, Reinout van Schouwen, Inaki Larranaga Murgoitio, Jorge Gonzalez,
Daniel Nylander, Theppitak Karoonboonyanan, Gabor Kelemen, Wouter Bolsterlee,
Ilkka Tuohela, Takeshi AIHANA, Žygimantas Beručka, I. Felix
In case you were wondering: Epiphany 2.19.3 and 2.19.4 were never released.
Changes since 2.19.2:
Bug fixes:
Contributors to this release:
Jaap Haitsma, Luca Ferretti, Felix Riemann, Gabor Kelemen, Diego Escalante Urrelo, Jared Moore, Christian Persch, Sebastiaan Samyn, Bastien Nocera, John Millikin, Jan de Groot, Benjamin Berg, Jean-François Rameau, Jens Granseuer, Björn Lindqvist, Vitali Ischenko, Chris Wilson
Translations:
Theppitak Karoonboonyanan, I. Felix, Ankit Patel, Ilkka Tuohela, Josep Puigdemont i Casamajó, Artur Flinta, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy, Takeshi AIHANA, Pema Geyleg, Daniel Nylander, Clytie Siddall, Kjartan Maraas, Priit Laes, Jorge Gonzalez, Priit Laes, I Felix, Christophe Merlet, Luca Ferretti, Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle, Stéphane Raimbault, Hendrik Richter, Takeshi AIHANA, Peter Bach, Ignacio Casal Quinteiro, Inaki Larranaga Murgoitio, Jovan Naumovski, Baris Cicek, Goran Rakić, Nikos Charonitakis, Gintautas Miliauskas, Artur Flinta, Ankit Patel, Changwoo Ryu, Matic Zgur, Abel Cheung, Jakub Friedl, Josep Puigdemont i Casamajó, Gabor Kelemen, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy, Maxim Dziumanenko, Roberto Majadas, Reinout van Schouwen, Alexander Shopov, Nickolay V. Shmyrev, Duarte Loreto, David Lodge, Djihed Afifi, Evandro Fernandes Giovanini, Žygimantas Beručka, Yair Hershkovitz, David Planella
Attention Novell hackers!
If anyone from Novell is reading this: Please fix your XULrunner library! It causes Epiphany and Yelp to crash when printing is attempted. We’ve been getting a steady stream of bug-buddy reports from people running OpenSUSE 10.2 about this, and now with 10.3 Alpha it still doesn’t stop. The fix has been available for 10 months already, and all this time you’re making us all look bad. 🙁
It’s been awhile since the last blog, but Epiphany hasn’t been standing still!
Since the 2.18.0 release, there have been quite some improvements:
Contributors to this release:
Felix Riemann, Diego Escalante Urrelo, Robin Stocker, Xan Lopez, Bastien Nocera, John Millikin, Christian Persch, Magnus Therning
Updated translations:
Josep Puigdemont i Casamajó, Luca Ferretti, Ignacio Casal Quinteiro, Jakub Friedl, Ignacio Casal Quinteiro, Jorge Gonzalez, Reinout van Schouwen, Stéphane Raimbault, Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle, Gabor Kelemen, Pema Geyleg, Takeshi AIHANA, Daniel Nylander, Christophe Merlet, Nickolay V. Shmyrev, Kjartan Maraas, Mişu Moldovan, Hendrik Richter, Goran Rakić, I Felix, Djihed Afifi
We should not forget to mention here that one Google Summer of Code project was accepted, called: Integrating Epiphany Bookmarks and Browsing History For GNOME-wide Access! Imran Patel is the student who will be working on this. Good luck Imran!
Yesterday, Thilo Pfennig told us some great news: The upcoming release of Foresight Linux will have Epiphany as default browser! And it’s not the only distro doing so: Arch Linux also prefers Epiphany over other Gecko-based browsers. 🙂
Furthermore, at long last, Magnus Therning’s Epilicious extension has been included in Epiphany-extensions 2.17.92. This means that keeping your del.icio.us bookmarks in sync with Epiphany is now easier than ever!
Since the last blog entry, some new Epiphany development releases have made it to the FTP mirrors. The bug fixes have been mostly cosmetic, but at least one crasher with D-BUS 1.0.2 has been fixed thanks to Jan de Groot.
