On Fedora Workstation, GNOME, Epiphany, and WebKitGTK
We have a nice new app icon for Epiphany 3.24, thanks to Jakub Steiner (Update: and also Lapo Calamandrei):
Wow pretty!
The old icon was not actually specific to Epiphany, but was taken from the system, so it could be totally different depending on your icon theme. Here’s the icon currently used in GNOME, for comparison:
You can view the new icon it in its full 512×512 glory by navigating to about:web:
(The old GNOME icon was a mere 256×256.)
Thanks Jakub!
GNOME 3.22 is scheduled to be released today. Along with this release come brand new recommendations for distributions on which applications should be installed by default, and which applications should not. I’ve been steadily working on these since joining the release team earlier this year, and I’m quite pleased with the result.
When a user installs a distribution and boots it for the first time, his or her first impression of the system will be influenced by the quality of the applications that are installed by default. Selecting the right set of default applications is critical to achieving a quality user experience. Installing redundant or overly technical applications by default can leave users confused and frustrated with the distribution. Historically, distributions have selected wildly different sets of default applications. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it’s clear that some distributions have done a much better job of this than others. For instance, a default install of Debian 8 with the GNOME desktop includes two different chess applications, GNOME Chess and XBoard. Debian fails here: these applications are redundant, for starters, and the later app looks like an ancient Windows 95 application that’s clearly out of place with the rest of the system. It’s pretty clear that nobody is auditing the set of default applications here, as I doubt anyone would have intentionally included Xboard; it turns out that XBoard gets pulled in by Recommends via an obscure chess engine that’s pulled in by another Recommends from GNOME Chess, so I presume this is just an accident that nobody has ever cared to fix. Debian is far from the only offender here; you can find similar issues in most distributions. This is the motivation for providing the new default app recommendations.
Most distributions will probably ignore these, continue to select default apps on their own, and continue to do so badly. However, many distributions also strive to provide a pure, vanilla GNOME experience out-of-the-box. Such distributions are the target audience for the new default app guidelines. Fedora Workstation has already adopted them as the basis for selecting which apps will be present by default, and the result is a cleaner out-of-the-box experience.
Update: I want to be clear that these guidelines are not appropriate for all distros. Most distros are not interested in providing a “pure GNOME experience.” Distros should judge for themselves if these guidelines are relevant to them.
The canonical source of these classifications is maintained in JHBuild, but that’s not very readable, so I’ll list them out here. The guidelines are as follows:
Distributions that want to provide a pure GNOME experience MUST include all of the following apps by default:
Notice that all core apps present generic names (though it’s somewhat debatable if Cheese qualifies as a generic name, I think it sounds better than alternatives like Photo Booth). They all also (more or less) follow the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.
The list of core apps is not set in stone. For example, if Photos or Documents eventually learn to provide good file previews, we wouldn’t need Image Viewer or Document Viewer anymore. And now that Files has native support for compressed archives (new in 3.22!), we may not need Archive Manager much longer.
Currently, about half of these applications are arbitrarily marked as “system” applications in Software, and are impossible to remove. We’ve received complaints about this and are mostly agreed that it should be possible to remove all but the most critical core applications (e.g. allowing users to remove Software itself would clearly be problematic). Unfortunately this didn’t get fixed in time for GNOME 3.22, so we will need to work on improving this situation for GNOME 3.24.
Distributions that want to provide a pure GNOME experience REALLY SHOULD NOT include any of the following apps by default:
We think these apps are generally useful and should be in core; they’re just not good enough yet. Please help us improve them.
These are not the only apps that we would like to include in core, but they are the only ones that both (a) actually exist and (b) have actual releases. Take a look at our designs for core apps if you’re interested in working on something new.
Distributions that want to provide a pure GNOME experience REALLY SHOULD NOT include any of the following apps by default:
Not listed are Shotwell, Rhythmbox, or other applications hosted on git.gnome.org that are not (or are no longer) part of official GNOME releases. These applications REALLY SHOULD NOT be included either.
Note that the inclusion of applications in core versus extra is not a quality judgment: that’s what Incubator is for. Rather, we classify apps as extra when we do not believe they would be beneficial to the out-of-the-box user experience. For instance, even though Evolution is (in my opinion) the highest-quality desktop mail client that exists today, it can be very difficult to configure, the user interface is large and unintuitive, and most users would probably be better served by webmail. Some applications listed here are special purpose tools that are probably not generally useful to the typical user (like Sound Recorder). Other applications, like Builder, are here because they are developer tools, and developer tools are inherently extremely confusing to nontechnical users. (Update: I originally used Polari instead of Builder as the developer tool example in the previous sentence. It was a bad example.)
What about games? It’s OK to install a couple of the higher-quality GNOME games by default, but none are necessary, and it doesn’t make sense to include too many, since they vary in quality. For instance, Fedora Workstation does not include any games, but Ubuntu installs GNOME Mahjongg, GNOME Mines, and GNOME Sudoku. This is harmless, and it seems like a good list. I might add GNOME Chess, or perhaps GNOME Taquin. I’ve omitted games from the list of extra apps up above, as they’re not my focus here.
It’s OK to include a few third-party, non-GNOME applications by default, but they should be kept to a reasonable minimum. For example Fedora Workstation includes Firefox (instead of Epiphany), Problem Reporting (ABRT), SELinux Troubleshooter, Shotwell (instead of GNOME Photos), Rhythmbox, and LibreOffice Calc, Draw, Impress, and Writer. Note that LibreOffice Base is not included here, because it’s not reasonable to include a database management tool on systems designed for nontechnical users. The LibreOffice start center is also not included, because it’s not an application.
Distributions, consider following our recommendations when deciding what should be installed by default. Other distributions should feel encouraged to use these classifications as the basis for downstream package groups. At the very least, distributions should audit their set of default applications and decide for themselves if they are appropriate. A few distributions have some horrendous technical stuff visible in the overview by default; Fedora Workstation shows it does not have to be this way.
It’s that time of year again! A new major release of Epiphany is out now, representing another six months of incremental progress. That’s a fancy way of saying that not too much has changed (so how did this blog post get so long?). It’s not for lack of development effort, though. There’s actually lot of action in git master and on sidebranches right now, most of it thanks to my awesome Google Summer of Code students, Gabriel Ivascu and Iulian Radu. However, I decided that most of the exciting changes we’re working on would be deferred to Epiphany 3.24, to give them more time to mature and to ensure quality. And since this is a blog post about Epiphany 3.22, that means you’ll have to wait until next time if you want details about the return of the traditional address bar, the brand-new user interface for bookmarks, the new support for syncing data between Epiphany browsers on different computers with Firefox Sync, or Prism source code view, all features that are brewing for 3.24. This blog also does not cover the cool new stuff in WebKitGTK+ 2.14, like new support for copy/paste and accelerated compositing in Wayland.
So, what’s new in 3.22?
Gabriel also redesigned all the error pages. My favorite one is the new TLS error page, based on a mockup from Jakub Steiner:
Pivoting to web apps, Daniel Aleksandersen turned his attention to the algorithm we use to pick a desktop icon for newly-created web apps. It was, to say the least, subpar; in Epiphany 3.20, it normally always fell back to using the website’s 16×16 favicon, which doesn’t look so great in a desktop environment where all app icons are expected to be at least 256×256. Epiphany 3.22 will try to pick better icons when websites make it possible. Read more on Daniel’s blog, which goes into detail on how to pick good web app icons.
Also new is support for system-installed web apps. Previously, Epiphany could only handle web apps installed in home directories, which meant it was impossible to package a web app in an RPM or Debian package. That limitation has now been removed. (Update: I had forgotten that limitation was actually removed for GNOME 3.20, but the web apps only worked when running in GNOME and not in other desktops, so it wasn’t really usable. That’s fixed now in 3.22.) This was needed to support packaging Fedora Developer Portal, but of course it can be used to package up any website. It’s probably only interesting to distributions that ship Epiphany by default, though. (Epiphany is installed by default in Fedora Workstation as it’s needed by GNOME Software to run web apps, it’s just hidden from the shell overview unless you “install” it.) At least one media outlet has amusingly reported this as Epiphany attempting to compete generally with Electron, something I did write in a commit message, but which is only true in the specific case where you need to just show a website with absolutely no changes in the GNOME desktop. So if you were expecting to see Visual Studio running in Epiphany: haha, no.
On another note, I’m pleased to announce that we managed to accidentally stomp on both shortcuts for opening the GTK+ inspector this cycle, by mapping Duplicate Tab to Ctrl+Shift+D, and by adding a new Ctrl+Shift+I shortcut to open the WebKit web inspector (in addition to F12). Go team! We caught the problem with Ctrl+Shift+D and removed the shortcut in time for the release, so at least you can still use that to open the GTK+ inspector, but I didn’t notice the issue with the web inspector until it was too late, and Ctrl+Shift+I will no longer work as expected in GTK+ apps. Suggestions welcome for whether we should leave the clashing Ctrl+Shift+I shortcut or get rid of it. I am leaning towards removing it, because we normally match Epiphany behavior with GTK+, and only match other browsers when it doesn’t conflict with GTK+. That’s called desktop integration, and it’s worked well for us so far. But a case can be made for matching other browsers, too.
On top of Epiphany 3.22, I’ve also rolled new stable releases 3.20.4 and 3.18.8. I don’t normally blog about stable releases since they only include bugfixes and are usually boring, so why are these worth mentioning here? Two reasons. First, one of the fixes in these releases is quite significant: I discovered that a few important features were broken when multiple tabs share the same web process behind the scenes (a somewhat unusual condition): the load anyway button on the unacceptable TLS certificate error page, password storage with GNOME keyring, removing pages from the new tab overview, and deleting web applications. It was one subtle bug that was to blame for breaking all of those features in this odd corner case, which finally explains some difficult-to-reproduce complaints we’d been getting, so it’s good to put out that bug of the way. Of course, that’s also fixed in Epiphany 3.22, but new stable releases ensure users don’t need a full distribution upgrade to pick up a simple bugfix.
Additionally, the new stable releases are compatible with WebKitGTK+ 2.14 (to be released later this week). The Epiphany 3.20.4 and 3.18.8 releases will intentionally no longer build with older versions of WebKitGTK+, as new WebKitGTK+ releases are important and all distributions must upgrade. But wait, if WebKitGTK+ is kept API and ABI stable in order to encourage distributions to release updates, then why is the new release incompatible with older versions of Epiphany? Well, in addition to stable API, there’s also an unstable DOM API that changes willy-nilly without any soname bumps; we don’t normally notice when it changes, since it’s autogenerated from web IDL files. Sounds terrible, right? In practice, no application has (to my knowledge) ever been affected by an unstable DOM API break before now, but that has changed with WebKitGTK+ 2.14, and an Epiphany update is required. Most applications don’t have to worry about this, though; the unstable API is totally undocumented and not available unless you #define a macro to make it visible, so applications that use it know to expect breakage. But unannounced ABI changes without soname bumps are obviously a big a problem for distributions, which is why we’re fixing this problem once and for all in WebKitGTK+ 2.16. Look out for a future blog post about that, probably from Carlos Garcia.
Lastly, I’m pleased to note that elementary OS Loki is out now. elementary is kinda (totally) competing with us GNOME folks, but it’s cool too, and the default browser has changed from Midori to Epiphany in this release due to unfixed security problems with Midori. They’ve shipped Epiphany 3.18.5, so if there are any elementary fans in the audience, it’s worth asking them to upgrade to 3.18.8. elementary does have some downstream patches to improve desktop integration with their OS — notably, they’ve jumped ahead of us in bringing back the traditional address bar — but desktop integration is kinda the whole point of Epiphany, so I can’t complain. Check it out! (But be sure to complain if they are not releasing WebKit security updates when advised to do so.)
I’m pleased to learn that Ubuntu has just updated WebKitGTK+ from 2.10.9 to 2.12.5 in Ubuntu 16.04. To my knowledge, this is the first time Ubuntu has released a major WebKit update. It includes fixes for 16 security vulnerabilities detailed in WSA-2016-0004 and WSA-2016-0005.
This is really great. Of course, it would have been better if it didn’t take three and a half months to respond to WSA-2016-0004, and the week before WebKitGTK+ 2.12 becomes obsolete was not the greatest timing, but late security updates are much better than no security updates. It remains to be seen if Ubuntu will keep up with WebKit updates in the future, but I think I can tentatively stop complaining about Ubuntu for now. Debian is looking increasingly isolated in not offering WebKit security updates to its users.
Thanks, Ubuntu!