On Thu, 2005-06-23 at 10:41 -0700, Alan wrote: > Firefox has a couple of advantages at the moment, the first (for me > anyway) is that it's cross platform Yeah, this is a big plus for Firefox. Epiphany developers have no motive to port Epiphany to Windows. > The second is the extensions. I know that epi has it's own extensions, > but comparing the firefox extension list to the epi one, the epi > extension seems to have more UI enhancements and fixes (tab stats, tab > moving, cert viewing, stylesheet selection) than "extras". As author of error-viewer, I'd just like to give it a little plug ;). It truly rocks the socks off any of Firefox's "HTML validation" extensions, and it's simpler than Firefox's "Javascript Console" (I forget if that's an extension or built-in). These past couple of days I found myself using it without even noticing -- IMO that's the sign of a good program :). There are a few more exciting extensions, too. Not as many as Firefox, but the ones we do have are pretty sweet: - adblock: clone of Firefox, with sensible defaults, minus the UI. Oh, and it crashes Epiphany on close, so it's not compiled by default. - bookmarks-tray: puts your bookmarks in your systray - gestures: mouse gestures... - smart-bookmarks: select text and use it as a parameter to your smart bookmarks - Python console: just plain awesome - Greasemonkey: works with about 95% of Firefox's Greasemonkey scripts > Hopefully > you understand what I'm saying here. For example, plugins like weatherfox, > the DOM browser and web developer tool bar, and the css editor go way > beyond what the browser normally does "Weatherfox" and "music player control" and all those other statusbar-fillers exist only because Windows sucks. Epiphany has no need to turn its statusbar into a panel, because GNOME has a panel. (There are already GNOME panel applets which provide the same functionality and don't depend on a random web browser window being open at the proper time.) The DOM Inspector is way-cool. I seem to recall there's a chrome:// url you can enter to use that extension in Epiphany, but I forget what it is. I seem to recall it didn't work very well. Web developer toolbar, CSS editor: I've been meaning to write those, but I never have time these days :(. I ought to at least commit an extension which applies a temporary stylesheet, since I think I've got all that code on my computer at home.... > I > prefer to have this functionality built in already, and having to > install it as an extension feels like a waste. On Ubuntu, it's just a simple matter of installing the "epiphany-extensions" package to get them all. > That and I don't believe that FF is getting or will get more and more > bloated. That's a matter of opinion, I suppose. Compared to the original Mozilla it's fantastic, but it's still growing slowly but surely. For instance, notice that the "RSS subscription" stuff is installed by default. Judge for yourself whether that's "bloat" or not. > The last reason for not using epi is the simplest, the long standing url > bar focus bug (that is a mozembed bug I know). Pretty valid. One reason I hate Firefox is that I can't enter my search terms in the location bar. It's the little things... :). > Hopefully the above comments about epi extensions won't be taken as > trolling of flaming, as that's definately not intended, just the reasons > why I'm using FF 99% of the time and Epi not as much. No, we certainly value feedback. Thank you! > What are the chances of supporting FF plugins in epi? That would > suddenly open up a HUGE new world to epi, you get the best of gnome > integration, small and light, and not having to re-invent the wheel to > bring back people who like the FF extensions. Snowball in hell, or > better? Or maybe support just a few specific (most popular) extensions? You can search the lists for more descriptive answers. Short answer: Epiphany uses GTK and not XUL, so all XUL-based extensions (i.e., 99% of Firefox extensions) won't work. Python extensions are easier to write than Firefox extensions, though. I'll bet we could get a bigger extensions base if somebody wrote good documentation.... The sweet thing about Epiphany's extensions is that they can take advantage of everything on the host system. We could do some very interesting things with SQLite, Python Imaging Library, the GNOME panel, d-bus, subversion, gamin (actually, there's already an auto-refresh extension using gnome-vfs...), Twisted, OpenGL, sound libraries, the list goes on and on.... It's much harder to do that kind of stuff with Javascript on Firefox. Hrm. We need awesome extension ideas.... Let's develop an extension that blows Firefox out of the water! -- Adam Hooper <adamh densi com>
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