Eitan Suez's Blog

An Epiphany

Everyone stands behind their favorite web browsers. Firefox definitely appears to be at the forefront. But then you come across people who prefer Camino, for example, which is a web browser that uses the Gecko layout engine but taylors its user interface to fit the MacOSX mold, so to speak. Camino indeed is pretty cool and pretty fast. If you run macosx, you should definitely check out Camino.

In a similar vein, I recently (maybe two-three months ago) came across Epiphany..and i'm in love.

Epiphany is to Gnome what Camino is to MacOSX: a web browser that uses Gecko but its UI uses the Gnome and GTK APIs for a user interface. Epiphany was designed to fit in on a Gnome desktop. Indeed, it is the endorsed web browser for Gnome.

But that's not the reason I so love Epiphany. Epiphany's philosophy appears to be along the lines of stay out of the user's way and less is more.

So, beside the fact that Epiphany has the following favorable traits:

1. it just works
2. it has a simple, minimal menu structure
3. it supports tabbed browsing
4. it highlights bits of strings on a page when doing incremental find's

the feature that really speaks to me is the design of its bookmark system and the way in which you can customize the browser with actions for URL handling without having to write any code.

This is subtle but a most wonderful feature. Allow me to illustrate.

When you launch Epiphany, you won't find two text fields at the top edge of the window: one for the URL address and another for doing the Google search. Instead you'll find a single text field where the URL address is entered.

How then does one perform a Google search without having to first visit google.com? By writing a plugin. Here's how:

1. visit google.com
2. enter a search string, for example: testing
3. bookmark the search results: name the bookmark "Google this"
4. edit the bookmark: in the url string, replace the word "testing" with "%s". You've just parametrized the URL. save the bookmark.

Now, open a new browser window and type "java" in the URL field. You'll notice that a pull down menu will appear containing the option "Google this." Selecting that option will automatically visit the google search URL, replacing that "%s" in that bookmarked url with the search string you entered in the url field. It's a dynamic bookmark.

How wonderful! In my browser, I've configured four such dynamic bookmarks: google search, wikipedia search, dictionary search, and ashkelon search. So now when I'm coding I can just type in the url field: "String*" and select the 'ashkelon search' option from the Epiphany context menu, et voila: i get my ashkelon (javadoc) search results.

In addition to this cool search feature, if you type a substring of the name of a bookmark in that magic url field, that bookmark will show up in the context menu as well.

If you do use Gnome, I highly encourage you to give Epiphany a try. It's a stable and robust browser. But just as importantly it's well-designed. If you don't use Gnome but would like to give it a whirl, I strongly recommend the ubuntu distribution. Last note: Epiphany also works on KDE.

Comments

• "less is more"
  Doesn't that contradict your last post? ; )

  Posted by: grlea on December 14, 2005 at 03:43 PM

• Obligatory "Firefox can do something very similar" reply:

  
  Go to any web page with a search box.
  Right-click on it and select "Add a keyword for this search"
  Pick a shortcut and name and save.

  
  For instance, I assigned "g" as a (very brief) shortcut for Google, "w" for Wikipedia etc. I simply type "g foo" in the URL bar to use it.

  Posted by: david_kennedy on December 15, 2005 at 05:47 AM

• thanks for the firefox instructions for doing essentially the same thing. 'less is more' could indeed be in contradiction to my last post. in this case i don't think so. let me explain my reasoning. in the case of the remote, the attempt is to replace 100 buttons = 100 operations with fn(4-buttons, permutations) = 100 operations. less is not necessarily more there. although you definitely see less buttons. in the case of the epiphany dynamic bookmarks, i see 'less' as a reduction of the work necessary to perform a certain type of operation, without any loss in function. i don't think i'm explaining myself well. but i do want to thank you for your post. it's going to make people think hard about this, which is good. :-)

  Posted by: eitan on December 15, 2005 at 07:32 AM

• Great. Another browser. Gnome is already off the deep end but I'll say it again just like the previous posters did: less is more. The world doesn't want 99 different browsers, they want one and they want it to work. Open source programmers need to stop being stupid - if you have some new feature, stop writing a new program to do it, and add it to the existing one.

  Posted by: hexghost on December 15, 2005 at 10:53 AM

• In reply to hexghost, Epiphany is not meant to be "Another browser" - it is meant to be a/the GNOME HIG-compliant web browser. It wasn't designed to have "some new feature" - it was meant to be simple and work in the same way and naturally with the rest of the GNOME desktop for your average (or less than average) end-user.

  I use it (as a realtive-power-user) and so do the rest of my family (as relative techno-phobes/newbies/children).

  Theoretically there should be some memory saved from using all GTK/GNOME apps on the desktop instead of using an XUL one (Firefox) but in reality there appears to be no difference.

  Posted by: mapnjd on December 18, 2005 at 01:32 PM

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