New Tab Behavior and Close Other Tabs

["Martin Grondin" <martin grondin gmail com>]

Hello all,

Sorry if this has been beaten to death before. I'm sure it comes up. I tried searching to see if this has been discussed but the search function for the archives doesn't seem to work entirely too well.

I just want to say that I really love Epiphany Browser. It has recently become my default browser of choice when using GNOME. However, though I find it very awesome, I find there are one or two things that really seem to kind of grate on me:

1.) Opening the homepage on every new tab. This would feel a bit better if the location bar was selected by. In another case I feel every page should be blank, at the most. The reason being is when a user opens a new tab they automatically try to type in their new destination. Epiphany breaks this reflexive behavior.

Case in point, I asked several of my classmates to open a new tab in their browser (among the browsers were IE7, Firefox, and Opera). All of them opened a new tab and immediately started typing in the new address. None clicked into the address bar to clear it (since they all keep it blank by default.)

It would seem to me that epiphany breaks this intuitive behavior. The solution I see is to often Ctrl+T and then Ctrl+L. This is asking a user to break their old habit, a task that often leads to frustration.

I had submitted a patch that adds a gconf key to toggle this behavior on and off. I find that it is the simplest solution. The default would be epiphany's current behavior, turned off it would act like most other browsers.

2.) Another small thing, which isn't major at all, is a "close all other tabs" option in the tab context menu. I find writing an extension of this would be more waste and overhead than simply adding it to the default feature set.

In closing I hope I added at least a partially fresh view on a topic I'm sure has been discussed many times before. It's really the only main sticking point I have with Epiphany. Otherwise I find your browser fast and intuitive to use.

Cheers,
Zotnix