Posted on by Michael Catanzaro

Modifying hidden settings in Epiphany 3.24

We’re just one short month away from releasing Epiphany 3.26, but this is not a post about that. Turns out there is some confusion about how to edit hidden settings in Epiphany 3.24. Many users previously relied on the dconf-editor tool to tweak hidden settings like the user agent or minimum font size, but this no longer works in 3.24. What gives?

The problem is that these settings can now be configured separately for your main browsing instance and for each web app. This gives you a lot more flexibility, but it does make it harder to change the settings because dconf-editor will not work anymore. The technical problem is that dconf-editor does not support relocatable settings schemas: settings definitions that are reused in many different places. So you will unfortunately have to use the command line to change these settings now. For example:

# Old command, *this no longer works*
$ gsettings set org.gnome.Epiphany.web user-agent 'Mozilla/5.0'

# Replacement command
$ gsettings set org.gnome.Epiphany.web:/org/gnome/epiphany/web/ user-agent 'Mozilla/5.0'

Changing a global setting like this will also affect newly-created web apps, but not existing web apps.

4 Replies to “Modifying hidden settings in Epiphany 3.24”

  1. > dconf-editor does not support relocatable settings schemas

    Uh… Doesn’t it? I only use relocatable schemas to store a bunch of window geometries for reloading, but I’m 99.9% sure I could always go into those and update the keys manually.

    1. The problem is that the gsettings schema cannot be mapped automatically to the dconf path. This means that dconf-editor won’t be able to link informations (summary and description) to existing values, but also that it doesn’t know anything about not edited values (as there’s nothing in the dconf database). That’s a known problem, but it needs some work.

  2. Hm, OK:

    http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/docs:gsettings

    > A big confusion with relocatable schemas is that only changed keys show up in dconf and dconf-editor.

    So mine were showing up because the default window position/sizes are -1, and obviously after one run those are updated to valid values.

    but obviously you have useful settings, and usable default values, unlike me :P so indeed they will not show up on a fresh install.

    See the upstream bug – still open for improving this situation:

    https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=755925#c4

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