Re: 3.18 big release and future plans

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro igalia com>]

On Fri, 2015-10-02 at 16:12 -0300, Bastián Díaz wrote:
> Hello, I am delighted the evolution that epiphany has taken, and this
> release I have become my default web browser.
> However, I have some doubts about its future performance and features
> that would make before writing a report.

Hi, glad you're enjoying Epiphany!

Since the development team is small, and I'm personally more interested
in working on security features, the common refrain for my answers here
is unfortunately "patches welcome," but most of these would be good
(not-too-complicated) projects for new contributors.

> Improvements:
>
> Pin epiphany tabs: This is a feature used by many browsers (safari 
> recently) and is convenient to maintain some websites or webapps
> always 
> open.

I think this would be fine, but not a priority to me; patches welcome.
This might be a harder project, though.

> Warning when closing multiple tabs: It may seem minor, but it is 
> important to avoid mistakes.

I'm not sure what the problem is here? If you have any modified forms,
you'll get a warning. Otherwise, closing the browser is harmless: all
your pages will be loaded again next time you start the browser.

> Reading view: Another practical element of modern web browsers. 
> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free
> -web-pages

I'm not sure about this one either. I'm not super opposed to it but we
should be extremely hesitant to add icons to the header bar; Firefox's
top bar has recently taken a turn for the worse because their designers
don't know how to say no to things. But apparently the reader mode is
fairly popular, so maybe we should have it. Anyway, it should be fairly
easy to implement by using WebKitUserContentManager and
WebKitUserStyleSheet. If you navigate to chrome
://global/skin/aboutReaderContent.css in Firefox you'll find a nice
style sheet; GNOME News has a copy of it with some modifications to
work in WebKit.

> Add-ons:
>
> Evince browser plugin: An excellent alternative to read pdf directly
> in 
> the web browser. Unfortunately the only way to install is via
> terminal. 
> Is it possible to add as a complement or recommend it to be seen and 
> installed from gnome-software?

GNOME expects it to be installed and enabled by default, but
distributions have the final say on this and can screw that up
intentionally or unintentionally. You can file a bug report with your
distro. It's enabled by default in Fedora Workstation.

> Webextension API: Mozilla announced a new implementation will allow 
> Chrome support extensions (blink api) in Firefox, opening the 
> possibility of universal extensions. Does this fit for the
> development 
> of epiphany? https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions

I think it mostly fits; certainly, it would be nice to support
extensions, and it would be quite silly to use any other extension
model now that there is convergence on WebExtensions. Some particular
APIs just might not be workable, though; e.g. we probably don't want to
let extensions touch the top bar, since that results in cluttered and
mismatched icons. But in that case, we could still support the same
API, and just implement the silly buttons as new menu entries instead.
Note that Firefox is only implementing a subset of the Chrome API, so
the best way to start would be to work towards supporting the same API
subset as Firefox. This would be a big project.

> Other issues
>
> Plugin manager: The current ad blocker is very general.It does not
> allow 
> enable/disable for some websites or block particular elements.


I'm planning to work on improving this.

> Moreover, 
> it is not possible to activate/deactivate a particular plugin. In my 
> case, I have installed the Java plugin for use in some web, but I
> like 
> to keep it off.

A welcome feature. I'm not going to work on this myself, because (1) I
don't use any plugins personally, and (2) there isn't any long-term
value in the project, because we are pushing hard to switch to Wayland
by default ASAP, and plugins will never be supported under Wayland.

> Any feature click-to-play?

Ditto.

> Password Manager: The Password Manager in GNOME worked perfectly
> until I 
> changed my desktop environment (XFCE). Now I can not access some web 
> pages automatically and less asks me to save passwords.
> Any ideas?, there how to use it in conjunction with seahorse?

This is the only request that I see as out-of-scope. It's great that
Epiphany works well in Xfce, but we don't design for that case, and
should assume the existence of gnome-keyring. It should not be too hard
to get gnome-keyring running under Xfce; I'm not familiar with the
process, but you could look into 
https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeKeyring/RunningDaemon

Cheers,

Michael