BLAG

Anyone used epiphany lately? Any thoughts?

A number of people on fedora-devel have said to hell with FF, epiphany is actually quite nice. And it's smaller on disk, so I think that's neat.

I'm going to start test driving it to see how it fares...Check it out. :)

-Jeff

about a browser called Iceweasel (a Firefox clone).

Iceweasel is Firefox on debian. They basically compile Firefox without the trademarked images and name.

It seems to behave just like the browser part of Seamonkey (which I also have on this machine...), that means that you can't go back one page with hitting "backspace" on the keyboard

I can't stand it when hitting backspace makes the brower go back one page. That's the bane of my web browser experience. I can't tell you how many times I'm trying to entire something into a field and somehow a backspace takes me back a page. And on stupid webpages I'll lose my entered info.

I have been using Epiphany for the past five or six months, and I really like it. Epiphany is smaller than FF, it goes well with Gnome for obvious reason, and it renders all web pages just fine. I don't have much use for extensions, so I can't comment on that.

The Fedora Project is closely keeping its eye on the Mozilla debate, and I would expect them to make a change. The most important thing at play here are the ramifications to RHEL. Mozilla is now only supporting FF for about a year and a half, then they just tell you to update. The whole idea of stability (RHEL or Debian) implies that applications/kernel/whatever do not change. Instead, the bug fixes are backported. Enterprise customers pay good money with the expectation that their software is stable, secure, and up to date. Waiting for Mozilla to approve the backports can take a long time, especially when you consider that the following companies have long(-ish) support cycles: Red Hat, Debian, Suse, Mandriva, Ubuntu, any of the BSD's. Why would RHEL customers continue to buy this product of Suse manages to have their FF backports approved first? Why should they be forced to upgrade to a new browser that does not have the stability of a tried and tested, previous version? What would happen if Ubuntu struck a deal with Mozilla to approve all of their backports before any other OS? The change from "mozilla.org" to "mozilla.com" was more than superficial. They are definately taking on more of a corporate mentality.

Of course, the most logical solution for Debian is to take the official FF build, use a different set of logos, and move it to the "non-free" repositories. The Debian Team has decided against this for whatever reason. It remains to be seen what will happen to FF, but Epiphany is a great alternative, and may become even better if the enterprise linux distributions start to aid development.