Epiphany

Epiphany 2.19.6 released; WebKit back-end

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:

• Add support for the WebKit engine, compile with –with-engine=webkit to activate
• #162489: Added a checkbox for smooth scrolling.
• String changes based on user feedback:

– “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.

• We now use g_get_user_special_dir to get the Desktop and Downloads directory location
• Use the new gtk functions to persist and load the print settings and page setup. Migrate our old settings, if present.
• All tooltips are now creatd using the new GTK tooltips API.

Bug fixes:

• #459552: Improve the restricted ports message
• #448610: Make the status icon clickable so it shows/hides the download window, works across workspaces
• #318947: Update tab title when the statusbar text is updated, so we don’t have out of sync messages (like “Loading “)
• Misc: #461689, #433173, #313636, #410223, #385872, #452707, #347637, #450904

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

Foresight and Epilicious

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.

A new stabler stable release

Epiphany 2.16.3 is out and it’s probably the most stable edition in the “stable” 2.16 series! A nasty crash when deleting bookmarks has been worked around (thanks to dieguito!) so
please stop
filing bug reports
for
this problem with
bug-buddy , ok? 🙂

Of course, development for the GNOME 2.18 is well underway. Noticeable changes in the last development releases are mostly visual polish and stability improvements: the themed icon support is now (almost) complete, favicons and page titles are now shown in the address bar dropdown, a problem with the browser history and the deskbar applet has been resolved, and last but not least, the Epiphany Adblock extension is now configurable through the graphical user interface!

Because of a harddisk replacement I don’t have any screenshots of these nice improvements ready right now, but feel free to contribute one…

Before I forget: info about obtaining Epiphany is on the downloads page.

New extensions and 2.15 developments

• Two generous people have contributed some new Epiphany extensions for you to try out. See the webpages of dieguito and Stefan Suhr. A couple of highlights: Undo tab close, Menu bar and toolbar besides each other, and Remove throbber. Thanks for the contributions!
• Since the last post, there have been a couple of Epiphany minor releases (2.14.1, 2.14.2, 2.15.1, 2.15.2, 2.15.3) that went by unannounced. The stable branch has received mostly polish and a few translation updates. In the 2.15 branch, support for mozilla 1.7 has been dropped, GTK 2.9.x is required and the code is ported to the new notebook API. And here is a small hint about what else is being worked on for the next release:

  

  Please note that the UI isn’t finished yet! 🙂

Topic suggestions

Due to time limitations the Epiphany 1.9.5.1 release wasn’t announced on this blog. To make it up, here’s a screenshot of the new merged Add Bookmark/Bookmark Properties window, that suggests topics based on existing topic combinations:

Please test it out and let us know your feedback!

In the future, we hope to offer suggested topics based on more sources, such as existing del.icio.us tags for the bookmarked URL.

Other notable changes are new buttons for zooming in and out on the default toolbar, and the dependency on Bonobo has been removed in favour of DBUS. Read the full announcement in the list archive, download here. A known bug is that context menus on the toolbar don’t work, this has already been fixed in CVS.

Enjoy!

Epiphany tidbits

A quick entry this time. With GNOME 2.13.2, a new Epiphany release 1.9.2 (NEWS), went by without much fanfare. A fairly large number of people have contributed to this release, thanks to everyone involved! Epiphany-extensions 1.9.2 (NEWS) has seen the light of day as well.

Notable change in this release is the fact that Epiphany now compiles against XULRunner, which, opens a perspective on a standalone version of Epiphany that doesn’t require Mozilla or Firefox to be installed.

In the mean time on the Epiphany list, there’s a lively discussion on a redesign of the Add Bookmark/Bookmark Properties dialogues, and about using a database backend for history and bookmarks, which would be faster and easier extendable than it is now.

Epiphany 1.7.6 released

What is it ?

Epiphany is the GNOME web browser, based on the mozilla rendering engine. It aims to be simple and easy to use.

Epiphany 1.7.6 is the last release in the unstable series leading
up to GNOME 2.12.

Changes from Epiphany 1.7.5 to 1.7.6

• Don’t empty find entry on Ctrl-F
• Fix local file monitoring when loaded after a blank page
• Remove check for redirected URL [#313756]
• Fix configure check for gecko >= 1.8
• Disable keyword searches by default [#158486]
• Fix some compile warnings
• Configure and makefile fixes for broken gecko header layouts
• Define out the focus fix for gecko >= 1.8
• Fix pointer grab lockup when gecko pops up a dialogue while reordering tabs with DND
• Don’t create host node in ephy_history_get_host if not already existing
• Add an “add-page” signal to the EphyHistory object
• Set default prefs for warn-on-mixed-security pages [#309088]

Contributors to this release were Crispin Flowerday and Christian Persch.

Updated translations:

• Jordi Mallach (ca)
• Rhys Jones (cy)
• Ivar Smolin (et)
• Xavier Claessens (fr)
• Ankit Patel (gu)
• tunggul arif siswoyo (id)
• Reinout van Schouwen (nl)
• GNOME PL Team (pl)
• Afonso Celso Medina (pt_BR)
• Mugurel Tudor (ro)
• Clytie Siddall (vi)

Where can I get it ?

Source code:
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/epiphany/1.7/epiphany-1.7.6.tar.bz2
with SHA1 sum aabc8e9e5c0359742acbfe0c41b5d07313b46547.

Epiphany 1.7.6 requires mozilla 1.7, 1.7.x, 1.7 branch, 1.8b2 or trunk, or firefox 1.0.x or trunk.
The recommended version is Mozilla 1.7.11

More about dependencies and installation tips.

New Epiphany extension: autoscroll

A new epiphany extension has been added to the collection: Autoscroll. Basically it is a port of the Galeon code that enables scrolling a webpage using the middle mouse button. Available for Epiphany 1.6.x (GNOME 2.10) and 1.7.x (GNOME 2.12).

Enjoy.

The Epiphany team

New text entry field with focus indication and icons

A new address entry widget which supports focus indication and multiple draggable icons on either side of the entry improves Epiphany’s GNOME integration.