Epiphany

Epiphany

Epiphany 2.28.0 running on Ubuntu 9.10
Developer(s)	Marco Pesenti Gritti/GNOME Project
Stable release	2.28.0  (2009-09-21; 52 days ago) [+/−]
Preview release	2.29.1  (2009-10-26; 17 days ago) [+/−]
Written in	C (GTK+)
Operating system	Linux, BSD, Mac OS X
Engine	WebKit (previously Gecko)
Platform	GNOME
Available in	More than 60 languages
Type	Web browser
License	GNU General Public License
Website	projects.gnome.org/epiphany/

Epiphany is a web browser for the GNOME graphical computing desktop. It is also available for Mac OS X^[1] and is a descendant of Galeon.

Epiphany 2.20.1

Development

Epiphany was developed from Galeon by Marco Pesenti Gritti (also the initiator of Galeon) with the aim of making a web browser that would be fully compliant with the GNOME human interface guidelines and that would have a very simple user experience. As a result, Epiphany does not have its own theme settings — it uses GNOME’s settings, which are specified in the GNOME Control Center.^[2]

Epiphany initially used the Gecko layout engine from the Mozilla project to display web pages. It provided a GNOME integrated front-end to Gecko, instead of the Mozilla XUL interface. The Epiphany project development team began working with WebKit as a rendering engine and released an experimental build of Epiphany 2.27.x using WebKit instead of Gecko.^[3] As a result of these experiments, the Epiphany team announced on 1 April 2008 that it would stop using the Gecko rendering engine and proceed using only WebKit.^[4] On 1 July 2009, the project team announced that Epiphany 2.26.3 would be the final Gecko version^[5]and in September 2009 the Webkit-powered Epiphany 2.28 was released, as part of the release of GNOME 2.28.^[6]

In reviewing the Webkit Epiphany 2.28, reviewer Ryan Paul of Ars Technica said "Epiphany is quite snappy in GNOME 2.28 and scores 100/100 on the Acid3 test. Using WebKit will help differentiate Epiphany from Firefox, which is shipped as the default browser by most of the major Linux distributors."^[6]

Epiphany supports tabbed browsing, cookie management, popup blocking and an extensions system. Epiphany can be extended with the Epiphany-extensions package.

Bookmarks

While most browsers feature a hierarchical folder-based bookmark system, Epiphany uses categorized bookmarks, where a single bookmark (such as “Epiphany”) can exist in multiple categories (such as “Web Browsers”, “GNOME”, and “Computer Software”). Special categories include bookmarks that have been used frequently (“Most Frequent”) and bookmarks that have not yet been categorized. This is similar to the Firefox 3.0 Places feature which integrates bookmarks and history into a SQLite database. Another innovative concept supported by Epiphany (though originally from Galeon) is “Smart Bookmarks”. These take a single argument specified from the address bar or from a textbox in a toolbar.^[2]

Epiphany-extensions

Epiphany-extensions is a set of official extensions to the web browser. Extensions include:

See also

Free software portal

Computer Science portal

• List of web browsers
• Comparison of web browsers

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Epiphany (browser)

• Epiphany Homepage
• Galeon History homepage covering the decision to split development
• GNOME Human Interface Guidelines
• Epiphany WebKit Project

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