Re: Weekend experiment: change your Epiphany usage patterns

[Brandon Invergo <b invergo gmail com>]

Hi Reinout,

On Tue, 2011-08-16 at 12:41 +0200, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> 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.
> 

I certainly am not asking/expecting a radical change in the Epiphany UI
which would break tabbed browsing. The more I work with the browser this
way, the more I find that sometimes tabs are a good thing. And I know
there are some people who like to keep 50 tabs open (craziness), for
whom this method probably wouldn't work. But, I wanted to suggest it
anyway to spread the word a bit. With Gnome Shell, we have awesome
window management that I think can allow us to use browsers in a more
intuitive way without really changing anything other than our habits.
But in the end, what's important is the *choice* to be able to use the
browser in this way or in the traditional tabbed way.

With that said, I can report after a few days of doing this that I
absolutely *love* it and I highly recommend it. I find that I mostly use
Alt-` to find the page I'm looking for but I sometimes use the
Activities overview. As I said above, I do sometimes use tabs if I want
to quickly check something that's directly related to what I'm doing on
the site I'm primarily looking at. But if I open something that's
unrelated, it goes in its own browser. The funny thing is that I end up
getting annoyed when I have tabs open because I can't see them with
Alt-` or the overview.

In the end, the only functionality that I miss that would make this
better are the update notification that I mentioned before (which would
make a fine plugin), the ability to hide the menu which will come in
3.2, and the ability to open a new window in the background (rather than
having it pop up over whatever I'm reading).

Also, I found I'm not alone in this sentiment. A lot of the minimal
browsers (see Uzbl, for example) are built around the notion that the
web browser should do its job (browsing) excellently and the window
manager should be in charge of figuring out what to do when multiple
browsers are open. But I'm using Gnome and I want Gnome integration, so
I was pleased that I could do something similar with Epiphany as it is
now and with just some small changes in my habits.

Anyway, I still recommend at least giving it a try for a few days. I
think you'll find that you really like it. :)

Cheers,
Brandon