Multi-Platform is the Enemy of the Epiphany Browser

Image via Wikipedia

The GNOME Journal for November was just announced, and it includes an article about Epiphany "from a - not so experienced - user perspective." A important quote from the article is

As I read in the Epiphany Manifesto, Havoc’s “main goal is to be integrated with the GNOME desktop.” For me, it’s interesting that the first priority of people who think and reflect on Epiphany and are behind its development is the exclusive integration with GNOME, and that they don’t feel compelled to make Epiphany usable outside of GNOME. This argument stems from the intuition that “the union of all features anyone’s ever seen in any equivalent application on any other historical platform” is not necessarily the path indicated to a good UI.

Other points in the article:

• Epiphany is focused on just browsing (in the Unix tradition)
• It's simple and intuitive
• It has a private mode. 

GNOME needs more of this. More integration. More specialization. More connections between integrated and specialized desktop apps. GNOME is a desktop environment. It is also a development platform, but the desktop has default applications, and those applications need to move in the direction of integration, specialization, and connection.

Epiphany is in flux right now from Gecko to WebKit ... so it's not particularly featureful but GNOME 2.30 should solve most of the problems. With Tracker-store as the future back-end for Zeitgeist, I'd like to see the Epiphany bookmark storage move into Tracker.

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Who's Winning the New Browser Wars?

Image by Sam Cornwell via Flickr

Who's winning the new browser wars? We are. By "we," I mean consumers.

Just look at the stuff that has happened in the last couple of years. We've got a mature Safari, based on WebKit and the Squirrelfish engine, running just about as fast as any browser. Chrome is also based on WebKit but uses a completely new JavaScript engine named V8, and it blows the doors off of just about everything else. Firefox has hit 3.0 and now 3.5, with improved Gecko rendering and Spidermonkey / Tracemonkey keeping the browser competitive and all the extensions keeping it attractive to large numbers of users. Even IE has bumped up a couple of versions to 7 then 8, and there's no reason to call it a pig, either. (Oops, I forgot Opera Unite!)

Just imagine what we would have had in 2004 if IE hadn't won the original browser wars and sat at version 6 and 95% of web traffic for five years.

Competition benefits the cunsumer.

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