The Facts in the Case of Mr. Epifanio Navegared

It’s been almost 5 months since the last time I blogged about Epiphany. Attentive followers may have noticed that there hasn’t been any Epiphany releases in the 2.21.x cycle so far; why? I’m glad you ask!

First, the GtkMozEmbed situation was a bit chaotic, and we were not really sure if we’d manage to have trunk in release quality levels by 2.22. Thankfully it seems the embed code will travel in time a bit, which will allow us to not take any drastic meassure. With that sorted out it seems likely know that Epiphany 2.22 will simply support both Gecko 1.8 and 1.9 through the archane but well known art known as “massive #ifdef mess from Hell”.

Second: WebKit! A lot has happened since July:

• The embed code went through a massive refactoring: after quite a few late night hacking sessions, tens of thousands of lines of code touched, the final demise of EphyTab and other events, now it’s much easier to implement in a sane way more complete backends for the browser. As a result of this, many previously missing features of the WebKit port started to work with no need of new APIs on the engine side.
• The Epiphany team has grown a few more wizards: thanks to Cosimo, Cyril, Jan and all the others who have recently helped with code, translations or support.
• WebKit/GTK+ itself is progressing at an astonishing pace: there is a great team, patches and features flow every day, and the Apple engineers are extremely helpful and supportive. There’s always something to do, so come to #webkit and #webkit-gtk on FreeNode an join the party. Go WebKit/GTK+ team!

So: 2.21.4 will be released this weekend. Get it, test it, the WebKit backend works now much better than the code we shipped in 2.20.x. 2.22 will be released, as always, to the day; Mozila backend will be as awesome as usual and hopefully WebKit’s will be more or less dogfood-quality by then. But, 2.24? Man. 2.24 is going to be so awesome Jeff Waugh has promised he will personally go to your house and recite “Dónde están mis pantalones” in 25 languages when you download it. Honest.