Oh browser, where art thou?

And speaking of Galeon, I’ve actually been using Epiphany as default browser for the last few days. When the fork occured I was estimating Epiphany would catch up with Galeon around the time for GNOME 2.10, at which point it would be pointless to continue with Galeon. In part Epiphany did that, in part it is wildly ahead thanks to epiphany-extensions. In part it’s still sadly lacking.

My biggest gripe has long been the lack of bookmark nick names; you assign (smart) bookmark a nick name like g for Google or pg for Planet GNOME and then typing the nick name in location entry will load that page, or run Google search using given terms. Beats the convenience of any entry completion popdown any time.

Now that there’s an Epiphany extension to implement bookmark nick names I am only little annoyed with certain braindamagefeatures, or lack thereof.

• location entry completion pops up rather than down under some circumstances (probably gtk+ bug)
• entry completion fails to consider some bookmarks (known bug)
• no tab-completion (instead hitting wwtab does some quite funny things in the location entry)
• new tabs are unconditionally opened in background (there’s a Python extension to fix that but it doesn’t support Ctrl or other modifier keys)
• fonts aren’t looking quite the same (and can not be configured, at least not from the prefs dialog)
• the history is stored in some bastardized XML file making history migration awful (it’s trivial to copy cookies and passwords, weird to see Mozilla be the more sensible one *grin*)

The only way to get a decent browser still seems to be to do-it-yourself.