A change in direction for Epiphany?

[Ryan Thiessen <ryanthiessen gmail com>]

A change in direction for Epiphany?

Let me preface this by saying that I like using Epiphany.  It's been
my primary browser for at least a year now, so please take the
following as an attempt at constructive criticism and not a whiny
complaint by an ignorant user.

It seems to me that Epiphany is at a bit purposeless at the moment. 
It's mission to be a simple and easy to use browser for Gnome is a
noble one, and Epiphany achieves this goal quite well.  The problem is
that the browser is not getting much use because since the creation of
Epiphany a new powerhouse browser emerged, Firefox.  Firefox has its
own failings, but by and large it has succeeded well at being a simple
and easy to user browser for Gnome.  I still think that Epiphany does
a better job at this, both in the simpler part and in the Gnome part,
but by and large Firefox does the job "well enough" for most users.

Because of its name recognition in Windows and official Mozilla
branding (and probably other reasons), Firefox has managed to become
the default browser on most Linux desktop distributions that use
Gnome.  Since the users already have a simple browser for Gnome, few
have much reason to install Epiphany, and certainly the users most
targeted by Epiphany (the most inexperienced) would never discover it.
 This has resulted in Epiphany having a very small share of the
browser market.

Having a small share in the market is not the end of the world by any
means -- I'm sure the developers do what they do for Epiphany out of
love and not some arbitrary goal like being the most successful
browser.  But at the same time, having less users means a smaller base
of testers, and probably less potential contributors as well.  So
while the sky is not falling, it's certainly not the best situation
for Epiphany right now, it has seemingly lost much of its purpose.

What Epiphany may need in order to increase the size of the userbase
is to give a stronger and more compelling reason to use it instead of
Firefox.  The extensions and especially the python extensions go
partway to this goal, and this will build over time as more developers
contribute useful extensions now that they are so easy to write.  But
I do not think this will be quite enough to get a significant change
to Epiphany.

I suggest that the drastic change for Epiphany be the adoption of
Apple's webcore as a replacement for Gecko as the rendering engine for
Epiphany.  The highly publicized announcement of Nokia's work in
adopting webcore for the maemo platform means that they have already
undertaken a significant porting effort, and that despite the seeming
lack of activity on gtk-webcore.sf.net Nokia's efforts in this area
have not stalled.

If Epiphany were to adopt Webcore, it would suddenly have a clear
differentiation from Firefox.  Users seeking an alternative rendering
engine to the one provided by the Gnome distributions would now have a
reason to discover, download, and ultimately enjoy using Epiphany. 
Webcore and KHTML have a reputation for being smaller and lighter than
Gecko, though I am admittedly not qualified to comment on this matter
myself, but if true it could add to the already good Epiphany user
experience.

At the same time, having a choice (either compile-time or user choice)
between two rendering engines might encourage some healthy competition
to the rendering engine developers.  I've personally been cc'd on a
bug that has existed since 2003-02-04 and has many many duplicates and
cc's on it.  It seems to be a giant catchall for a wide variety of
"mozilla interaction doesn't play nice with focus" bugs, some of which
seriously interfere with regular browsing, but it seems stalled
waiting for someone to take charge of this upstream.  Perhaps if
Epiphany had the option of using different rendering engines, this
would increase the visibility of upstream developers with serious
longstanding problems like this.

I am not suggesting that this would be an easy project to undertake --
I realize that this would be very difficult on many fronts, as the
gtk-webcore project is still immature, and also that changing
rendering engines would not be a simple task at all.  In fact, for all
I know as an outsider this may even be so difficult as to be
impossible for all intents and purposes.  So, you tell me: is this
feasible?

While I am not a C coder of any merit and am unable to provide any
programming help toward this project, I am willing to put up $200 USD
as a bounty on this -- hopefully others are interested enough to
increase that number to make it more worthwhile for the amount of
effort that would have to be done to accomplish it.  If the Epiphany
developers don't respond to the gist of my suggestion with bile and
hatred, I'll flesh that out a bit -- I just want to know that I'm
serious about this and not just another whiner wanting other people to
do work for me for free.

Cheers,
-Ryan Thiessen-