In reviewing the Webkit-powered Epiphany 2.28 in September 2009, 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 deult browser by most of the major Linux distributors.

The built-in preference manager for Web is designed to present user only basic browser-specific settings. All the advanced configuration is done with the stand-alone GSettings configurator tools such as GNOMEs deult dconf (command line) and dconf-editor (graphical).

Web does, however, support the Web Inspector offered by the Webkit engine, which has similar functionality.

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Previously extensions could be written in either C or Python, but the Python support was dropped with WebKit adoption.

Wallen concluded positively about the browser, Although Epiphany hasnt fully replaced Chrome and Firefox as my one-stop-shop browser, I now use it much more than I would have previously.

Bookmarks management and categorisationWhile most browsers feature a hierarchical folder-based bookmark system, Web uses categorized bookmarks, where a single bookmark (such as Web) can exist in multiple categories (such as Web Browsers, GNOME, and Computer Software).

Indicates new content in background tabsSeveral unofficial extensions exist, though most of them are not currently supported.

Reduced the amount of user intece chrome, geolocation support, switched from text zooming to full content zooming, new download manager, migration to GTK+ 3 and GNOME 3 technologies.

Gritti is no longer involved with the Epiphany project and a GNOME team lead by Xan Lopez, Christian Persch and Jean-François Rameau now direct the project.

Ability to drag bookmarks, smart bookmarks and topics to the , optional Go button for URL bar, Help support.

Renamed from Epiphany to Web, major intece overhaul, performance improvements, super menu introduced.

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Marco Pesenti Gritti

The features of Web include reuse of GNOME configuration settings, smart bookmarks and web application integration into user desktop. Web extensions add support for ad filtering, Greasemonkey user scripts support and other smaller, yet useful, options.

She further noted, Though I still use Firefox as my primary browser, lately it seems to run at a snails pace. So, one of the first things I noticed about Epiphany is how quickly it launches. And subsequent page loads on my system are equally as st.

Webs source code is available under the GNU General Public License from the GNOME project. The binary builds of the browser are available in the package repositories of most Linux distributions and BSD releases.

The size of the development team and the complexity of porting the whole browser to a new backend caused Epiphany to re-release version 2.22 with bugfixes instead of the actual development code,

The second major milestone (after version 1.0) in Epiphany development was the 2.14 release. This was the first Epiphany release which followed GNOMEs version numbering. It also featured network awareness using NetworkManager, smart bookmarks-related improvements and the possibility of being compiled against XULRunner. The latter was critical, as previously Epiphany could only use Firefox or Mozilla/SeaMonkey as a layout engine provider, so it could only be installed alongside one of those browsers. The XULRunner support made it possible to install Epiphany as the sole web browser on the system.

The launcher created this way is accessible from the desktop and is not limited to GNOME Shell. For instance it may be used with Unity, used on Ubuntu.

Zoom control for the , ability to reload page bypassing cache, traditional bookmarks menu, Exit fullscreen button.

Similar features can be found in the Windows version of Google Chrome. For the same purpose Mozilla Foundation previously developed a standalone application Mozilla Prism, which was superseded by the project Chromeless.

spell checking support, page security info dialogue from Certificates extension, new GTK+ Printing dialogs, stability improvements.

Instead of developing a custom web browser engine Epiphany originally used the Gecko layout engine until version 2.28 and WebKitGTK+ starting with version 2.20. This approach allows the relatively small developer community to maintain a sufficient level of modern web standards support.

Gecko 1.8 support, error messages display in content area, use of the standard GNOME printing system.

is smart bookmarks. These take a single argument specified from the address bar or from a textbox in a .

Tooltips, improved GNOME integration, st search for bookmarks and history, drag and drop of URLs in the bookmarks .

In reviewing Epiphany 2.30 in July 2010 Jack Wallen described it as efficient, but different and noted its problem with crashes. When I first started working with Epiphany it crashed on most sites I visited. After doing a little research (and then a little debugging) I realized the issue was with javascript. Epiphany (in its current release), for some strange reason, doesnt like javascript. The only way around this was to disable javascript. Yes thiWebs means a lot of features wont work on a lot of sites but this also means those same sites will load ster and wont be so prone to having issues (like crashing my browser).

Epiphany aims to utilize the st intece possible for a browser. Keep in mind that does not necessarily mean less powerful. We believe the commonly used browsers of today are too big, buggy, and bloated. Epiphany addresses simplicity with a small browser designed for the webnot mail, newsgroups, file management,new york escort instant messaging or coffee . The Unix philosophy is to design small tools that do one thing, and do it well.

Therefore its user intece theme is the GNOME deult theme, the network settings with GNOME NetworkManager configuration, Web printing with the GNOME printing system, settings with GSettings and GNOME deult applications settings are used for internet media types handling.

Currently the web applications are managed within Epiphanys main instance. The applications can be deleted from the page, accessible with a special URIabout:applications. This approach was supposed to be a temporary solution and a common GNOME-wide application management was intended to be implemented in GNOME 3.4, but was not rolled out.

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 intece.

Special category includes bookmarks have not yet been categorized. Another innovative concept supported by Web (though originally from Galeon)

This feature cilitates the integration of the desktop and World Wide Web, which is a goal of the Web developers.

so browser development remained stagnant until , when the project team announced that Epiphany 2.26 would be the final Gecko-based version.

Web allows creating application launchers for web applications. The subsequent invocation of a launcher brings up an individual chromeless instance of Web limited to that single domain, with the off-site links opening in a normal browser.

Web is only released as source code or with Linux distributions and BSDs binary packages. Thus the availability of Web depends on the distributor.

The development process of Epiphany was mainly focused on numerous small usability improvements. The most notable of them was the new text entry widget, which first appeared in 1.8 stable version series. The new widget supported icons inside the text area, reducing amount of chrome needed to represent the information, and thus conformed to the GNOME HIG.

Epiphany was originally developed as a fork of Galeon by Marco Pesenti Gritti, who was also the initiator of Galeon. The fork occurred because of the divergent aims of Gritti and the rest of Galeon development team about new features. While Gritti regarded Galeons monolithic design and the number of user-configurable features as ctors limiting Galeons maintainability and user base expansion, the rest of the Galeon developers believed that more features should be added. At the same time the GNOME project created the GNOME human intece guidelines, which promoted simplification of user inteces. As Galeon was considered a power user-oriented browser, the implementation of those guidelines was believed to be unacceptable by most developers. As a result, Gritti created a new browser based on Galeons codebase, with most of the non-mission-critical features removed. Epiphany was intended to be fully compliant with the GNOME human intece guidelines, with a very user intece. As such Epiphany does not have its own theme settings and uses GNOMEs settings, which are specified in the GNOME Control Center.

Marco Pesenti Gritti

In April 2012 Ryan Paul of Ars Technica used Web as an example to his criticism of GNOME 3.4 design decisions: Aside from the poor initial discoverability of the panel menu, this model works reasonably well for applications. [...] Unfortunately, it doesnt scale well in complex applications. The best example of where this approach can pose difficulties is in GNOMEs deult Web browser. [...] Having the applications functionality split across two completely separate menus does not constitute a usability improvement.

In most minimalist distributions, Epiphany is installed with the GNOME meta-package or packages group.

Web is extensible with a plugin system called Web extensions. This package is distributed by the developers of Web, containing official extensions. Though it adds some useful features (see the table below), it is often criticized for being too limited, specifically compared to Firefox extensions.

Web can be run on many hardware platforms, including i386, amd64 and several other processor architectures.

Epiphanys main goal is to be integrated with the gnome desktop. We dont aim to make Epiphany usable outside Gnome. If someone will like to use it anyway, its just a plus. For example: Making people happy that dont have control center installed is not a good reason to have mime configuration in Epiphany itself.

To address these issues in July 2007 the Epiphany team added support for WebKit as an alternative rendering engine for Epiphany.

Henry criticized Epiphany for its short list of extensions, singling out the lack of Firebug as a deficiency.

While Mozilla has an excellent rendering engine, its deult XUL-based intece is considered to be overcrowded and bloated. Furthermore, on slower processors even trivial tasks such as pulling down a menu is less than responsive.

In March 2011 Veronica Henry reviewed Epiphany 2.32, saying To be ir, this would be a hard sell as a primary desktop browser for most users. In ct, there isnt even a setting to let you designate it as your deult browser. But for those instance where you need to fire up a lighting-st browser for quick surfing, Epiphany will do the trick.

Since then Web has been developed as part of the GNOME project and uses most of GNOMEs technology and settings when applicable. As required by the GNOME Human Intece Guidelines (HIG), Web maintains the clean and graphical user intece with only a required minimum number of features exposed to users by deult; however, the browsers functionality and configurability can be extended with official and third-party extensions.

and follows the platform-wide design changes. For example in Web 3.4 release the menu for application-wide actions was moved to the GNOME Shells top panel application menu and the menubar was replaced with super menu button, which triggers the display of window-specific menu entries.

While some believe that Epiphany should be the deult web browser in Linux distributions with GNOME as the deult desktop environment, the common practice is to distribute Firefox instead.

Epiphany 2.26.1 (left) showing its larger user intece chrome area than in 3.2.0 (right)The development process heavily suffered from multiple problems, related to the Gecko backend.

Drag and drop of links to tab bar, security preferences, user primary language automatic detection, new history dialog, deult bookmarks .

As the backend development advanced, on the Epiphany team announced that it would stop using the Gecko rendering engine and proceed using just WebKit.

Web is based on the WebKit web browser engine, which provides support for HTML 4 and XHTML, CSS 1 and 2, substantial degree of implementation of HTML5 and CSS 3 features,

projects.gnome.org/epiphany/Web (originally called Epiphany from 2003 to 2012) is a for the . The browser was forked from Galeon after developers disagreements about Galeons growing complexity.

Separate font settings, WebKits internal page source viewer made deult, Web Applications mode introduced.

Webkit GTK 2 Support Adobe Flash Player and other plugins work, Privacy Tab mode, and a New Tab button.

Being a component of GNOME desktop environment, Web has neither software, nor hardware dependencWeb (web browseries beyond the GNOME platform. Though the GNOME Project does not list the minimum system requirements, it states that GNOME 3 should run on any modern computer.

Galeon continued after the fork, but lost its momentum due to the remaining developers ilure to keep up with the new features and changes Mozilla introduced. Galeon development finally stalled and the developers decided to work on a set of extensions to bring Galeons advanced features to Epiphany instead.