Re: A change in direction for Epiphany?

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinouts gnome org>]

Hello Ryan,

On Wed, 22 Jun 2005, Ryan Thiessen wrote:

> becoming more of a Gnome browser.  For example, I have read that they
> are planning to even tweak the preferences dialogs to make them more
> Gnome HIG compliant.

That might be true, but tweaking layout is not the key to becoming HIG 
compliant; it also covers Yes/No or OK/Cancel buttons on dialogues for 
instance, that have to be replaced by more descriptive labels. The 
problem for Firefox is that if they do this, they're not compliant with 
windows-style guidelines any more, so they'd have to create separate 
branches to be completely guideline-compatible on all platforms, and I 
don't think they want to do that.

> My suggestion was to differentiate Epiphany from Firefox in a highly 
> visible way, something to get these power users and distribution 
> managers to take notice.

Switching to webcore would definitely raise some eyebrows; but would 
most likely involve huge amounts of work to get it on the same level of 
usability as the current gecko back-end. And then, what happens when the 
initial peak of interest has subsided? There is no guarantee at all that 
switching to webcore would make, let's say Ubuntu, decide to suddenly 
make ephy the default browser on their distro.

> own suggestion.  As I suggested earlier, the python extensions are a
> good start to providing a "wow" feature, and mono extensions might get
> some of Mono people excited about it as well.

Then all we'd need are Java bindings, and we'd have RH/Fedora on board 
as well. ;-)

> I just have a feeling that this will not be enough, and it will fall 
> further from the public eye.

Let's work on it to make sure that won't happen. Spread the word about 
Epiphany! 8-)

regards,

--
Reinout van Schouwen	   ***	student of Artifical Intelligence
email: reinout cs vu nl    ***	mobile phone: +31-6-44360778
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