Weekend experiment: change your Epiphany usage patterns

[Brandon Invergo <b invergo gmail com>]

Hi everyone,

I've recently been wooed by the idea of Epiphany as a browser that's
much more integrated with my desktop environment than Firefox or Chrome.
I'd like to start helping out, submitting bugfixes and such (if I can
ever get a development environment up and running successfully in
jhbuild), though I guess you guys have heard that a million times, but I
have an idea that doesn't require any coding from anyone (at least not
yet) and that everyone can try.

Anyway, I was thinking about the browser interface and how Epiphany
could be made even more tightly integrated with Gnome Shell. For
example, in one of the documents somewhere on the Ephy wiki, they
mention how tabs are bad because they're hidden from the window manager.
I had an epiphany (heh) was that tabs were developed because of a
problem that arose under the taskbar paradigm: if you had a bunch of
browser windows open, they would consume the taskbar and became
uninformative nuisances. Now, I think Gnome Shell rids us of that
problem quite nicely, and yet in our browser we're recapitulating the
old annoyance all over again. Start browsing for a while and you end up
with a ton of tabs open, which aren't visible in Epiphany or are
squeezed so small in Firefox that they're completely uninformative as to
their contents.

Ok, I'll get to the point. As I thought about how this could be
improved, I realized that we can already do a lot just by changing our
current habits. So, this weekend I'm trying something different. On one
of my workspaces, I do all my web browsing. For the most part, I open
all pages in a new Ephy window. To switch to a different window, I
either bring up the Activities overview, or I cycle through the open
Ephy windows using Alt-`. This is much more visually informative than
tabs, and feels a lot more integrated with Gnome Shell.

As a bonus, I free up some much-talked-about vertical space. By never
opening tabs, I never see that pesky tab bar. I personally also hide the
toolbar, opening it with Ctrl-l when I need it. It'll be even better in
3.2 when we can hide the menu bar. Then there'll be just the title bar
and the Shell panel and all that glorious content. Memory/CPU-wise,
there doesn't seem to be any major hit to my performance, and this
laptop is 5 years old.

This also integrates nicely with the Gnome Shell search providers. Since
I usually open new tabs (well, windows now) and start searching right
away, this is a nice alternative: bring up the Activities overview and
start typing your search query, hit enter, and voila, new window.
Lastly, this browsing method integrates nicely with the application menu
that sits in the Gnome Shell panel. The Quit Epiphany menu item quits
the epiphany process and closes all open windows, so you don't have to
worry about closing each one.

I'm sure this way of working wouldn't please everyone, but I recommend
giving it a try. If people like it, I think there are a couple small
things that could be done to facilitate it and make it a more obvious
way to browse:
- more items in the application menu (in the panel), which I would
imagine is already planned: preferences, bookmark manager, personal data
and maybe the extension manager?

- a new extension, sort of like tab states, which pops up a Shell
message when a site is updated, which would make webmail sites,
Facebook, etc, feel integrated with the Shell. I would guess that this
would be via DBUS. Does Ephy already have any DBUS interfaces? If so,
maybe this would be a good place for me to start programming.

- One could also implement the "browsing queue" notion explored in the
EpiphanyRedux wiki article simply by using tabs in one of the open
windows, but I think this queue idea (which is great) could probably be
more deeply integrated into the interface.

The main question is, if people like this method of browsing, how would
its use be communicated or encouraged to the users, who are used to
tabbed-browsing?

So, please give it a try for a day or two and say what you think. I'm
very curious!

Cheers,
Brandon Invergo