Re: Weekend experiment: change your Epiphany usage patterns

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinouts gnome org>]

Hi Brandon,

On Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:25:42 +0200, Brandon Invergo wrote:

> 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.

I agree with you and I'd love to see this happen. Xan did a demo during 
the desktop summit showing off chrome-less epiphany running web apps as 
first class citizens on Gnome Shell. That's along the same lines as you 
are thinking.

However, witness bug 656091, there are also contributors who want 
*more* tab exposure instead of less.

I guess it comes down to the question what we want Epiphany to be. A 
"classic" web browser competing with Firefox and Chrome on the Gnome 
desktop? A low-profile web technology provider for other Gnome 
applications? Something in between? I think it's impossible to be 
everything to everyone - that never was the philosophy behind Epiphany 
anyway.

--
Reinout van Schouwen