Re: Personal remarks on Epiphany/Galeon [Was: Release Team's Almost-Final Modules List]

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> I dont think it's matter to make a call between two finished products,
> but just make a call about which of the codebases and of the developer teams is more
> likely to be a good base to build the Gnome browser.
> If no one of them would be then yeah, I'd agree delay would be the better call.

I think Marco is selling himself short here. Ephy would make a
respectable 1.0 release at this point. Its not perfect, it has some
usability issues (bookmarks definitely being one of them), but its
*well* within the range of the rest of GNOME. I can't remember the last
time it crashed.

Being a little catty... I think Ephy is currently as better than many
other modules we ship with GNOME. Of course, being such a basic and
important piece of GNOME functionality, its reasonable to hold a web
browser to a higher standard. What I've seen of Ephy (and I use it as my
only web browser at this point) suggests that at least from a usability
perspective its full-featured and usable enough to ship as the GNOME

> Pro of making a call now:
> 
> - We will improve the cooperation between the developers and the various gnome
> teams (usability, accessibility etc...)
> - We will avoid the projects to go in a bad direction. (like for epiphany:
> we will not continue with our braindead bookmarks system,
> if there is a concensus that it's wrong ;)
> - We will improve system integration from now. Keep developing GNOME 
> desktop without a key piece of it (the browser), is a big mistake IHMO

Its long past time for a web browser to be integrated with GNOME. I
don't expect really good integration to occur until *after* the first
release when something is included with GNOME, so I'd really like to see
Ephy plugged in as officially approved early rather than later. There's
a lot to lose in waiting for 1.6, and I don't think a lot to gain by
waiting.

-Seth