Re: Regular crashes / ready for daily use?

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro igalia com>]

On Tue, 2015-06-30 at 22:05 +0200, Ju Nique wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm trying to use Epiphany (3.16.2 from Fedora 22) as my default 
> browser because I'd like to use a Webkit-based browser which is not 
> Chrome/Chromium on Linux. However, I experience very regular crashes 
> regardless of whether plugins (installed by Fedora, Gnome Shell 
> integration etc.) are enabled or disabled. The Automatic Bug Report 
> Tool tells me that these crashes are already reported in the Fedora 
> Bugzilla and upstream.
>
> Is Epiphany / Web ready for daily use? Is there any way how to make 
> it crash less often or maybe how I can help in improving it? I really 
> like the idea (and also the UI) of Epiphany/Web, but I can't use it 
> because it crashes too often.

Hm, I guess I'll take this opportunity to list what I see are the
highest-priority issues for us.

We have three major crashes right now:

Crash in _gtk_css_value_ref due to NULL value 
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=747422

Crash when WebCore::SQLiteFileSystem::openDatabase is called from
multiple threads https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=143245

[GStreamer] Crashes during plugin installation 
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=144099

#747422 is by far the worst; that is probably the one you're hitting
most often. And we have two non-crash bugs that I consider
showstoppers:

www.theonion.com may hang entire desktop 
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=126122

[GStreamer] unrelated codecs required to play videos 
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=135972

Well maybe #126122 is the worst issue in practice, but we don't get any
crash reports for that since it brings down your whole computer.
Replace www.theonion.com in that issue with bugzilla.redhat.com,
consider that bugzilla.redhat.com is where the crash reports originate
and that I am the one looking at them, and you'll see why that one
doesn't leave me a happy camper....

Whether Epiphany is "ready for daily use" depends on how much you hate
those bugs. That is my personal list of the five bugs that would need
to be fixed before I would recommend Epiphany to you. I used Epiphany
as my only browser from summer of 2012 until recently, and plenty of
other people use it too. But since #747422 appeared, I don't use it
anymore, since I discovered that I waste too much type retying long
comments in bug reports, since I lose those comments when Epiphany
crashes, and it crashes very frequently. It's a shame, since it's
really a very small list of issues, but they are quite serious, and we
are working on other things, so they probably won't get fixed unless
someone volunteers. :(

Note that these are all WebKit bugs, except the worst one which is a
GTK+ bug. The Epiphany code itself is in decent shape; it has problems,
to be sure, but nothing really horrible. Actually, as far as the
Epiphany codebase is concerned, our biggest issue is just the list of
unreviewed patches (hovering at 35 right now, actually the lowest I've
seen it yet, but that's still too high).

Michael