Yet another "what-I-think-Epiphany-should-become"

[Stefan Nitsche <junk stefan gmail com>]


Hi everybody! (to be read in the voice of Dr. Nick)

As the subject says it's time for yet another round of the game where we 
tell the world our personal vision of Epiphanys future. I'm aware of the 
lack of developers for Epiphany so the resources must be focused but 
hey, one can always dream. Sadly I only know PHP so I'm unable to dig in 
and help myself.

Why this and why now? Well I've thought about posting a message like 
this for a while and when I read that Gnome 3.0 is about to come I 
realized it was about time to make my voice heard.

To begin with I really like Epiphany but it hasn't been my main browser since 
Firefox 3 was released but when Epiphany-Webkit is released it will most 
likely be my default again. What can be done to ensure this?

An idea for the future of Gnome has been the "online desktop" and this 
is something that I think Epiphany should embrace. My "utopian-Epiphany" 
could best be described as 
"Flock-but-integrated-in-Gnome-and-with-webkit". Basically give Epiphany 
the possibility to integrate with the social sites and other web services 
that exists on the internet. The people behind Flock have a great idea 
but I personally don't like their execution of it.

Since "one-size-fits-all" seldom actually fits all this would ideally be 
implemented as a plugin/plugins so that Epiphany could keep it's 
lightweight core but be extended (perhaps by default) to integrate with 
Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia etc... (Either a plugin for the 
entire integration-concept or perhaps individual plugins for each 
service to integrate with)

What I think Epiphany could do better than Flock:

1. Blogging
I really don't like the blog integration in Flock, if this is done for 
Gnome I would much rather see a ScribFire:ish implementation. The one in 
Flock is too limited.

2. Integration with online bookmarks
Since Epiphany already uses a tagging system for the bookmarks it should 
be easier do nice integration/syncronisation with online bookmarks. (I 
am aware of Epilicious but I'm envisioning something more streamlined. 
Either an automatic synchronization or the possibility to use and store 
online bookmarks instead of local ones.)

Other stuff that should be improved in Epiphany for a better user 
experience:

1. Searching
This is a horse that's been beaten to death. Search-bar or no search-bar I 
actually don't care. Smart bookmarks are ok for me, however as it's been 
pointed out earlier they aren't really user friendly in the state they 
are now. But... If Epiphany is going down the route of only smart 
bookmarks then some functions should be added. Today I found a third 
party extension that makes it possible to map "shortcuts" to smart 
bookmarks, i.e. I can search on Google by writing "g foo" or search 
Wikipedia with "wp foo" in the addressbar. This now works for me but it 
was all but intuitive. First I had to install the third party extension, 
then I had to add the smart bookmarks and then I needed to define the 
shortcuts in Deskbar. This a function I think should exist in the core 
(either of Epiphany itself or in the smart bookmarks) and the process 
should be simplified. There should perhaps even exist a few pre-defined 
smart bookmarks and shortcuts.

2. Bookmarks
It takes a while to get used to Epiphanys bookmark system but it is 
really good when you do. However I have one small request. When you've 
chosen to view a tag on the toolbar it will display everything in a long 
list grouped by "sub-tag". If a "sub-tag" contains more bookmarks than a 
certain amount Epiphany will display this a "sub-folder" (in lack of a 
better description). I would like for Epiphany to always display 
"sub-tags" as "sub-folders", a checkbox in Gconf is good enough for me. 
Perhaps this kind of behavior could help others when migrating from a 
folder-based bookmark structure?

3. Tab close on middle click
Pretty self explanatory.

I think this is all for now, it's already insanely long, of course you 
could always talk about the need for a web developer-extension, a 
firebug-extension and the coolness of something like Mozilla Weave but 
those things are secondary. Kudos to everyone who manage to get through 
this amount of rambling.

Developers: Keep up the good work!

-- 
Stefan Nitsche
junk stefan gmail com