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On Ignorance, Intolerance, and Bigotry

It seems incredible that lawful permanent residents of the United States are stranded abroad, prohibited from boarding flights home, for such a capricious reason as being unfortunate enough to be traveling at the wrong time. (This is not even to mention the plight of millions of innocent refugees fleeing violence and terror, who are no less deserving of justice.) And yet, here we are.

Who do you know who is affected by Friday’s executive order?

One of my friends in college was of Iranian descent. Years ago, he joined the US army and risked his life fighting for our country in Iraq. Later, he visited his extended family in Iran, fearful that the government would imprison him if it discovered he had served in our army. Now he cannot go back, due to Iran’s entirely-justified reciprocal ban on Americans. When will he be able to see his family again? Will this really only last 90 days?

Who do you know?

I should not have had to detail my friend’s military service or present him as a sympathetic character. It should not matter. Equality is supposed to be one of the uniting principles of our country. We have a long history of failing in this regard, but it has mostly been a history of progress in the right direction. Clearly, that is no longer the case.

So who do you know? If you do not know anyone affected by yesterday’s executive action, perhaps you should think twice before voting for ignorance, irrational fear, hate, and bigotry. Of course I mean that you should think twice before voting for the Republican Party. If you still, after this weekend, do not believe that is what the party now stands for, then you are long overdue for a reality check.

The great irony of the just and tolerant society is that it must refuse to tolerate intolerance. At this, we have failed.

I have never before today been so ashamed of my country. It’s not like we didn’t know this was coming. We have brought it on ourselves via a legitimate democratic election (of which, absurdly, only the winner contends was marred by massive fraud). Donald Trump campaigned on his Muslim ban, and he is only delivering as promised.

Things are going to get much, much worse before they get better, but at least we have some reason for hope. The United States is fortunate in that it has a strong, independent judiciary. It is nothing short of amazing that lawyers representing victims detained at US airports have been able to win multiple injunctions barring their deportation in just one day. (If you’re not already a proud supporter of the ACLU like me, you should fix that right now.) That strong judiciary also protects our First Amendment rights (which do not, by the way, extend to my personal blog; hateful comments here will not be approved). As we enter the post-truth society where Republicans believe a separate set of “alternative facts,” it remains to be seen what all speech can still accomplish, but now is surely the time to find out. Do not remain silent. If you use social media or have a blog, you have a duty now to express your dissent. Do your part to move the needle of public opinion.

You know, you don’t need to know anyone to see that this is wrong.

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git commit –amend –date

I accidentally committed something with git with the wrong timezone set in my VM. How to fix it? The help message for git commit says:

--date <date>         override date for commit

OK that’s great, but I don’t really want to figure out the input format for feeding in a date. I blindly tried:

git commit --amend --date now

And blindly typing “now” actually worked as intended. git is smart. Thanks git developers!

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Epiphany Icon Refresh

We have a nice new app icon for Epiphany 3.24, thanks to Jakub Steiner (Update: and also Lapo Calamandrei):

new-icon
Our new icon. Ignore the version numbers, it’s for 3.24.

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:

old-icon
The old icon, for comparison

You can view the new icon it in its full 512×512 glory by navigating to about:web:

big-icon
It’s big (click for full size)

(The old GNOME icon was a mere 256×256.)

Thanks Jakub!

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GNOME 3.22 core apps

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.

Classifications

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:

  • Applications classified as core are intended to be installed by default. Distributions should only claim to provide a vanilla GNOME experience if all such applications are included out-of-the-box.
  • Applications classified as extra are NOT intended to be installed by default. Distributions should not claim to provide a vanilla GNOME experience if any such applications are included out-of-the-box.
  • Applications classified as Incubator are somewhere in between. Incubator is a classification for applications that are designed to be core apps, but which have not yet reached a high enough level of quality that we can move them to core and recommend they be installed by default. If you’re looking for somewhere to help out in GNOME, the apps marked Incubator would be good places to start.

Core apps

Distributions that want to provide a pure GNOME experience MUST include all of the following apps by default:

  • Archive Manager (File Roller)
  • Boxes
  • Calculator
  • Calendar
  • Characters (gnome-characters, not gucharmap)
  • Cheese
  • Clocks
  • Contacts
  • Disk Usage Analyzer (Baobab)
  • Disks
  • Document Viewer (Evince)
  • Documents
  • Files (Nautilus)
  • Font Viewer
  • Help (Yelp)
  • Image Viewer (Eye of GNOME)
  • Logs (gnome-logs, not gnome-system-log)
  • Maps
  • Photos
  • Screenshot
  • Software
  • System Monitor
  • Terminal
  • Text Editor (gedit)
  • Videos (Totem)
  • Weather
  • Web (Epiphany)

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.

Incubator

Distributions that want to provide a pure GNOME experience REALLY SHOULD NOT include any of the following apps by default:

  • Dictionary
  • Music
  • Notes (Bijiben)
  • Passwords and Keys (Seahorse)

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.

Extra apps

Distributions that want to provide a pure GNOME experience REALLY SHOULD NOT include any of the following apps by default:

  • Accerciser
  • Builder
  • dconf Editor
  • Devhelp
  • Empathy
  • Evolution
  • Hex Editor (ghex)
  • gitg
  • Glade
  • Multi Writer
  • Nemiver
  • Network Tools (gnome-nettool)
  • Polari
  • Sound Recorder
  • To Do
  • Tweak Tool
  • Vinagre

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.)

Games

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.

Third party applications

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.

Summing up

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.

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Epiphany 3.22 (and a couple new stable releases too!)

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.

New stuff

So, what’s new in 3.22?

  • A new Paste and Go context menu option in the address bar, implemented by Iulian. It’s so simple, but it’s also the greatest thing ever. Why did nobody implement this earlier?
  • A new Duplicate Tab context menu option on tabs, implemented by Gabriel. It’s not something I use myself, but it seems some folks who use it in other browsers were disappointed it was missing in Epiphany.
  • A new keyboard shortcuts dialog is available in the app menu, implemented by Gabriel.

Gabriel also redesigned all the error pages. My favorite one is the new TLS error page, based on a mockup from Jakub Steiner:

Web app improvements

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.

Shortcut woes

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.

Stable releases

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.

elementary OS

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.)

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A WebKit Update for Ubuntu

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!

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Wayland by default in Fedora 25?

I’ve noticed various reports that Fedora has decided to switch to Wayland by default in Fedora 25. It’s true that the alpha release will default to Wayland, but these reports have misunderstood an authorization from FESCo to proceed with the change as a final decision. This authorization corrects a bureaucratic mistake: FESCo previously authorized the change for Fedora 24, but the Workstation working group decided to defer the change to Fedora 25, then forgot to request authorization again for Fedora 25 as required. An objection was raised on the grounds that the proper change procedure was not followed, so to sidestep this objection we decided to request permission again from FESCo, which granted the request. Authorization to proceed with the change does not mean the decision to proceed has been made; the change could still be deferred, just as it was for Fedora 24.

Wayland by default for Fedora 25 is certainly the goal, and based on the current quality of our Wayland desktop, there’s a very good chance it will be reached. I expect the call will be made very soon. Stay tuned.

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On the killing of intltool

If you have a project that uses intltool, you should be trying to get rid of it in favor of using AM_GNU_GETTEXT instead. Matthias wrote a nice post about this recently. Fortunately, it’s very easy to do. I decided to port gnome-chess during some downtime today, and ran into only one tough problem:

make[1]: Entering directory '/home/mcatanzaro/.cache/jhbuild/build/gnome-chess/po'
Makefile:253: *** target pattern contains no '%'. Stop.
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/mcatanzaro/.cache/jhbuild/build/gnome-chess/po'

This was pretty inscrutable, but I eventually discovered the cause: I had forgotten to remove [encoding: UTF-8] from POTFILES.in. This line is an intltool thing and you have to remove it when porting, same as you need to remove the type hints from the file, or it will break the Makefile that gets generated. This is just a heads-up as it seems like an easy thing to forget, and since the error message provided by make is fairly useless.

A couple unrelated notes:

  • If your project uses git.mk, as any Autotools project really should, you’ll have to modify that too.
  • Don’t forget to remove any workarounds added to POTFILES.skip to account for intltool’s incompatibility with modern Automake distcheck.
  • For some reason, msgfmt merges translations into XML files in reverse alphabetical order, the opposite of intltool, which seems strange and might be a bug, but is harmless.

Say thanks to Daiki Ueno for his work maintaining gettext and enhancing it to make change practical, and to Javier Jardon for pushing this within GNOME and working to remove intltool from important GNOME modules.

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Positive progress on WebKitGTK+ security updates

I previously reported that, although WebKitGTK+ releases regular upstream security updates, most Linux distributions are not taking the updates. At the time, only Arch Linux and Fedora were reliably releasing our security updates. So I’m quite pleased that openSUSE recently released a WebKitGTK+ security update, and then Mageia did too. Gentoo currently has an update in the works. It remains to be seen if these distros regularly follow up on updates (expect a follow-up post on this in a few months), but, optimistically, you now have several independent distros to choose from to get an updated version WebKitGTK+, plus any distros that regularly receive updates directly from these distros.

Unfortunately, not all is well yet. It’s still not safe to use WebKitGTK+ on the latest releases of Debian or Ubuntu, or on derivatives like Linux Mint, elementary OS, or Raspbian. (Raspbian is notable because it uses an ancient, insecure version of Epiphany as its default web browser, and Raspberry Pis are kind of popular.)

And of course, no distribution has been able to get rid of old, insecure WebKitGTK+ 2.4 compatibility packages, so many applications on distributions that do provide security updates for modern WebKitGTK+ will still be insecure. (Don’t be fooled by the recent WebKitGTK+ 2.4.10 update; it contains only a few security fixes that were easy to backport, and was spurred by the need to add GTK+ 3.20 compatibility. It is still not safe to use.) Nor have distributions managed to remove QtWebKit, which is also old and insecure. You still need to check individual applications to see if they are running safe versions of WebKit.

But at least there are now several distros providing WebKitGTK+ security updates. That’s good.

Special thanks to Apple and to my colleagues at Igalia for their work on the security advisories that motivate these updates.

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Epiphany 3.20

So, what’s new in Epiphany 3.20?

First off: overlay scrollbars. Because web sites have the ability to style their scrollbars (which you’ve probably noticed on Google sites), WebKit embedders cannot use a normal GtkScrolledWindow to display content; instead, WebKit has to paint the scrollbars itself. Hence, when overlay scrollbars appeared in GTK+ 3.16, WebKit applications were left out. Carlos García Campos spent some time to work on this, and the result speaks for itself (if you fullscreen this video to see it properly):

Overlay scrollbars did not actually require any changes in Epiphany itself — all applications using an up-to-date version of WebKit will immediately benefit — but I mention it here as it’s one of the most noticeable changes. Read about other WebKit improvements, like the new Faster Than Light FTL/B3 JavaScript compilation tier, on Carlos’s blog.

Next up, there is a new downloads manager, also by Carlos García Campos. This replaces the old downloads bar that used to appear at the bottom of the screen:

Screenshot of the new downloads manager in Epiphany 3.20.

I flipped the switch in Epiphany to enable WebGL:

If you watched that video in fullscreen, you might have noticed that page is marked as insecure, even though it doesn’t use HTTPS. Like most browsers, we used to have several confusing security states. Pages with mixed content received a security warning that all users ignored, but pages with no security at all received no such warning. That’s pretty dumb, which is why Firefox and Chrome have been talking about changing this for a year or so now. I went ahead and implemented it. We now have exactly two security states: secure and insecure. If your page loads any content not over HTTPS, it will be marked as insecure. The vast majority of pages will be displayed as insecure, but it’s no less than such sites deserve. I’m not concerned at all about “warning fatigue,” because users are not generally expected to take any action on seeing these warnings. In the future, we will take this further, and use the insecure indicator for sites that use SHA-1 certificates.

Moving on. By popular request, I exposed the previously-hidden setting to disable session restore in the preferences dialog, as “Remember previous tabs on startup:”

Screenshot of the preferences dialog, with the new "Remember previous tabs on startup" setting.

Meanwhile, Carlos worked in both WebKit and Epiphany to greatly improve session restoration. Previously, Epiphany would save the URLs of the pages loaded in each tab, and when started it would load each URL in a new tab, but you wouldn’t have any history for those tabs, for example, and the state of the tab would otherwise be lost. Carlos worked on serializing the WebKit session state and exposing it in the WebKitGTK+ API, allowing us to restore full back/forward history for each tab, plus details like your scroll position on each tab. Thanks to Carlos, we also now make use of this functionality when reopening closed tabs, so your reopened tab will have a full back/forward list of history, and also when opening new tabs, so the new tab will inherit the history of the tab it was opened from (a feature that we had in the past, but lost when we switched to WebKit2).

Interestingly, we found the session restoration was at first too good: it would restore the page really exactly as you last viewed it, without refreshing the content at all. This means that if, for example, you were viewing a page in Bugzilla, then when starting the browser, you would miss any new comments from the last time you loaded the page until you refresh the page manually. This is actually the current behavior in Safari; it’s desirable on iOS to make the browser launch instantly, but questionable for desktop Safari. Carlos decided to always refresh the page content when restoring the session for WebKitGTK+.

Last, and perhaps least, there’s a new empty state displayed for new users, developed by Lorenzo Tilve and polished up by me, so that we don’t greet new users with a completely empty overview (where your most-visited sites are normally displayed):

Empty State

That, plus a bundle of the usual bugfixes, significant code cleanups, and internal architectual improvements (e.g. I converted the communication between the UI process and the web process extension to use private D-Bus connections instead of the session bus). The best things have not changed: it still starts up about 5-20 times faster than Firefox in my unscientific testing; I expect you’ll find similar results.

Enjoy!