Re: [Fwd: Epiphany, I love it!]

[Luis Villa <louie novell com>]

On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 15:17 -0500, Bryan Clark wrote:

<snip, leaving bulk of conclusion>

> So I took everything that was discussed and made up a list [3] of items
> that I saw needed the most improvement.  Basically Epiphany has the
> burden of matching every firefox feature, in a better way, plus
> integrating so tightly with the desktop that it makes it firefox look
> like some strange 3rd party app.  There's more than on that list of what
> needs to be done, but we at least need to start there if we plan on
> going anywhere.
> 
> Now, back to the future.  Emails to mailing lists saying "me too" are
> completely useless, especially now that the original thread had died.
> What we need is for Epiphany to be (and a much of this is my opinion) to
> match everything firefox has, but better and to pretty much invisible.
> What I mean by invisible is that we want to be such a part of GNOME that
> you don't even know you're using a separate app.  Once Epiphany is at a
> much cleaner and more integrated state I think the start of a campaign
> to bring it back to default in distros like Fedora and others is a good
> idea.  User testing, usability tests and lots of documentation would all
> help the cause.

Heh. This email doesn't surprise me at all, because Novell/Ximian went
through a very similar process with a basically similar conclusion. I'm
with Bryan in my personal feelings, as well.

I won't go so far as to say that ephy needs to match every firefox
feature in a better way; I think we've all seen that matching only key
features + better integration can win if everything is well done. But
ephy must figure out what the most popular features of firefox are
(including the polish features like better find and slick popup
blocking) and it must nail them, and then it must integrate deeply with
the desktop in as many ways as it can, particularly in ways which are
very difficult for firefox to keep up with[1]. That's the way forward
for ephy if it wants to compete and win.

Luis

P.S. I'd been saving the roadmap threads to read and comment on 'soon',
but I'll mark them read now; I think this says everything substantial I
can say on that topic.

[1] RH and Novell are both working hard on getting Firefox to fake
integration (like file chooser and even native icons), so the gap here
is going in the wrong direction. Ephy must be creative and aggressive in
widening the gap again.