Ship epiphany, make it the "default" browser?
 

After a few weeks of testing, I'd like to make a, err... Possibly controversial
suggestion. :)

Certainly not for Lucid, but say, for 12.04, it might be interesting to switch
to Epiphany for Edubuntu's "Default" web browser. Here's why:

1) It's based on WebKit, which, with my initial testing, works MUCH better on
thin clients, with much less X server ram usage.
2) It integrates very well into Gnome, being the default Gnome browser.
3) (A biggie) it speaks gconf, and you can do lockdown on it in Pessulus and
Sabayon.
4) With my newfound idears gained from playing with evoldap, getting som gconf
setting via an LDAP backend shouldn't be too hard.

Not saying we should. Just saying it might be worth... examining, post lucid.

Cheers,
Scott

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Ship epiphany, make it the "default" browser?
 

Just a few things from my experience,

1) Epiphany is a good browser over-all.. it's fast, I've been using it
as my main browser on my eeepc 701 and it's good for the most part.

2) I had one of the schools I work with test out Epiphany since Firefox
was giving us some grief... I didn't get into too much detail, but I'll
note that the teacher told us Ephiphany performed even worse than
Firefox. So in any case we'll want to do some testing with a recent
version (I'm still on 8.04 atm) and a moderately sized LTSP lab.

3) We're going to want to extensively test all of the plugins for
Epiphany (which I haven't done yet myself).. Flash, Java being the most
noteable ones. All of the people I've worked with with Linux/LTSP seem
to really show that the plugins are the most important thing since so
many sites use them so much. I just installed epiphany-browser on my Ubu
9.10 AMD64 machine at home and Java doesn't work ootb. Not really sure
how to get it going right now actually. Last I heard Webkit and Java
weren't very good friends.

4) 100% agree on gconf == good. I've always envied Epiphany because of
what you can do with it in gconf, and the lack of support Firefox has
for it.

All in all I'm for testing and making it a goal.. I'm not really happy
with the direction Firefox is going in, anyway. If Epiphany can smooth
out the rough edges I think we'd have a good candidate for a replacement
default browser.


Jordan


Scott Balneaves wrote:
> After a few weeks of testing, I'd like to make a, err... Possibly controversial
> suggestion. :)
>
> Certainly not for Lucid, but say, for 12.04, it might be interesting to switch
> to Epiphany for Edubuntu's "Default" web browser. Here's why:
>
> 1) It's based on WebKit, which, with my initial testing, works MUCH better on
> thin clients, with much less X server ram usage.
> 2) It integrates very well into Gnome, being the default Gnome browser.
> 3) (A biggie) it speaks gconf, and you can do lockdown on it in Pessulus and
> Sabayon.
> 4) With my newfound idears gained from playing with evoldap, getting som gconf
> setting via an LDAP backend shouldn't be too hard.
>
> Not saying we should. Just saying it might be worth... examining, post lucid.
>
> Cheers,
> Scott

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Ship epiphany, make it the "default" browser?
 

On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 09:50:57AM -0800, Jordan Erickson wrote:
> Just a few things from my experience,
>
> 1) Epiphany is a good browser over-all.. it's fast, I've been using it
> as my main browser on my eeepc 701 and it's good for the most part.

Yeah, as part of my "experiment" I've switched myself over to it.

> 2) I had one of the schools I work with test out Epiphany since Firefox
> was giving us some grief... I didn't get into too much detail, but I'll
> note that the teacher told us Ephiphany performed even worse than
> Firefox. So in any case we'll want to do some testing with a recent
> version (I'm still on 8.04 atm) and a moderately sized LTSP lab.

Hmmm, interesting. On my home ltsp "lab" (two thin clients), it was
"noticeably" peppier, for completely subjective values of "noticeably". Like I
say, I think I really need to sit down and come up with some objective
measurements opposite speed, memory usage, etc. As well, the ephy you'd have
been running on would have been gecko based, same renderer as in FF, with all
it's associated goodness/badness. 9.10's ephy's switched over to webkit, which
seems (to me) to haul donkey/horse admixtures way faster.

> 3) We're going to want to extensively test all of the plugins for
> Epiphany (which I haven't done yet myself).. Flash, Java being the most
> noteable ones.

Flash I know works, Java I haven't tested yet.

> All of the people I've worked with with Linux/LTSP seem
> to really show that the plugins are the most important thing since so
> many sites use them so much. I just installed epiphany-browser on my Ubu
> 9.10 AMD64 machine at home and Java doesn't work ootb. Not really sure
> how to get it going right now actually. Last I heard Webkit and Java
> weren't very good friends.

Agreed, we need to test/fix the snot out of that sort of thing. Fortunately,
I'm Gnome Upstream now, so, as I've done with Sabayon, so may I do with ephy.

> 4) 100% agree on gconf == good. I've always envied Epiphany because of
> what you can do with it in gconf, and the lack of support Firefox has
> for it.

Well, that's the HUGEST advantage I see. If we get "ldap everywhere", and a
connector from some of the lockdown/homepage functions in gconf to ldap, it'd
be saweeet to be able to, at account creation time, set things like homepage,
proxy for DG or whathaveyou, etc.

> All in all I'm for testing and making it a goal.. I'm not really happy
> with the direction Firefox is going in, anyway. If Epiphany can smooth
> out the rough edges I think we'd have a good candidate for a replacement
> default browser.

Agreed. That's why I'm setting a 12.04 goal for looking at this. That gives
us two solid years to get it to where we want.

Cheers,
Scott


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Ship epiphany, make it the "default" browser?
 

Scott Balneaves wrote:
> Hmmm, interesting. On my home ltsp "lab" (two thin clients), it was
> "noticeably" peppier, for completely subjective values of "noticeably". Like I
> say, I think I really need to sit down and come up with some objective
> measurements opposite speed, memory usage, etc. As well, the ephy you'd have
> been running on would have been gecko based, same renderer as in FF, with all
> it's associated goodness/badness. 9.10's ephy's switched over to webkit, which
> seems (to me) to haul donkey/horse admixtures way faster.

For sure. At first tinkering w/9.10 Epiphany, it is pretty awesome, even
compared to 9.04. They've done a good job with asthetics (I really liked
the progress meter in address-bar thingie :) )


>> 3) We're going to want to extensively test all of the plugins for
>> Epiphany (which I haven't done yet myself).. Flash, Java being the most
>> noteable ones.
>
> Flash I know works, Java I haven't tested yet.

I did a quick Google on it when I saw it didn't come up - I verified my
sun-java6-plugin was installed, but still no go for Epiphany.


>> All of the people I've worked with with Linux/LTSP seem
>> to really show that the plugins are the most important thing since so
>> many sites use them so much. I just installed epiphany-browser on my Ubu
>> 9.10 AMD64 machine at home and Java doesn't work ootb. Not really sure
>> how to get it going right now actually. Last I heard Webkit and Java
>> weren't very good friends.
>
> Agreed, we need to test/fix the snot out of that sort of thing. Fortunately,
> I'm Gnome Upstream now, so, as I've done with Sabayon, so may I do with ephy.

If you're a Gnome upstream dev, I will be bugging you a lot. ;)


>> 4) 100% agree on gconf == good. I've always envied Epiphany because of
>> what you can do with it in gconf, and the lack of support Firefox has
>> for it.
>
> Well, that's the HUGEST advantage I see. If we get "ldap everywhere", and a
> connector from some of the lockdown/homepage functions in gconf to ldap, it'd
> be saweeet to be able to, at account creation time, set things like homepage,
> proxy for DG or whathaveyou, etc.

Oh man... =) If we could do some fancy footwork with homepages, that
would make my year.


>> All in all I'm for testing and making it a goal.. I'm not really happy
>> with the direction Firefox is going in, anyway. If Epiphany can smooth
>> out the rough edges I think we'd have a good candidate for a replacement
>> default browser.
>
> Agreed. That's why I'm setting a 12.04 goal for looking at this. That gives
> us two solid years to get it to where we want.

Well let me know what I can do. I'll start using Ephy as my only browser
at home on my 9.10 box and take notes and relay them here.

Who else is in on this adventure?


- Jordan

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Ship epiphany, make it the "default" browser?
 

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:31 AM, Scott Balneaves
<sbalneav@legalaid.mb.ca> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 09:50:57AM -0800, Jordan Erickson wrote:
>> Just a few things from my experience,
>>
>> 1) Epiphany is a good browser over-all.. it's fast, I've been using it
>> as my main browser on my eeepc 701 and it's good for the most part.
>
> Yeah, as part of my "experiment" I've switched myself over to it.
>
>> 2) I had one of the schools I work with test out Epiphany since Firefox
>> was giving us some grief... I didn't get into too much detail, but I'll
>> note that the teacher told us Ephiphany performed even worse than
>> Firefox. So in any case we'll want to do some testing with a recent
>> version (I'm still on 8.04 atm) and a moderately sized LTSP lab.
>
> Hmmm, interesting. *On my home ltsp "lab" (two thin clients), it was
> "noticeably" peppier, for completely subjective values of "noticeably". *Like I
> say, I think I really need to sit down and come up with some objective
> measurements opposite speed, memory usage, etc. *As well, the ephy you'd have
> been running on would have been gecko based, same renderer as in FF, with all
> it's associated goodness/badness. *9.10's ephy's switched over to webkit, which
> seems (to me) to haul donkey/horse admixtures way faster.
>
>> 3) We're going to want to extensively test all of the plugins for
>> Epiphany (which I haven't done yet myself).. Flash, Java being the most
>> noteable ones.
>
> Flash I know works, Java I haven't tested yet.

Hi Guys,

This sounds pretty cool. I'll just throw in my .02 and say that it
would be great to devise a way to test under load. A lot
of the gotcha's that I have encountered with firefox don't even start
to manifest until I have many concurrent sessions. I suspect the same
may be true of Epiphany. If automated load testing could be built into
this, I think it might be very useful.

Also there are some web sites that "don't work" with less usual
browsers (e.g. users are blocked by client side java script checks
etc), so it might be necessary for epiphany to be able to "lie" (a la
konqueror) about who it is for some sites to work. Perhaps this won't
be much of a problem these days.

Thanks!

John

John

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Ship epiphany, make it the "default" browser?
 

On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 02:28:24PM -0800, john wrote:

> This sounds pretty cool. I'll just throw in my .02 and say that it
> would be great to devise a way to test under load. A lot
> of the gotcha's that I have encountered with firefox don't even start
> to manifest until I have many concurrent sessions. I suspect the same
> may be true of Epiphany. If automated load testing could be built into
> this, I think it might be very useful.

I put some thought to this last night.

I've got no clue on implementation details, but it might be possible to launch
<n> copies of the browser running some kind of test suite in either Xephyr (a
nested X server) or possibly xvfb (A '/dev/null' vurtual X server) might be
something that could be jury-rigged together.

> Also there are some web sites that "don't work" with less usual
> browsers (e.g. users are blocked by client side java script checks
> etc), so it might be necessary for epiphany to be able to "lie" (a la
> konqueror) about who it is for some sites to work. Perhaps this won't
> be much of a problem these days.

Setting the browser type is available, at least in 2.29.6, which I'm testing at
home.

I'm going to create an edubuntu spec for this, so we can keep track of the
state of this.

Cheers,
Scott

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Systems Department | and the blind can read.
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Ship epiphany, make it the "default" browser?
 

On Thu, Feb 04, 2010 at 08:57:19AM -0600, Scott Balneaves wrote:

> I'm going to create an edubuntu spec for this, so we can keep track of the
> state of this.

https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/edubuntu-addon-cd/+spec/edubuntu-epiphany-default-browser

Have at 'er.

Cheers,
Scott

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Ship epiphany, make it the "default" browser?
 

Scott Balneaves wrote:
> After a few weeks of testing, I'd like to make a, err... Possibly controversial
> suggestion. :)
>
> Certainly not for Lucid, but say, for 12.04, it might be interesting to switch
> to Epiphany for Edubuntu's "Default" web browser. Here's why:
>
> 1) It's based on WebKit, which, with my initial testing, works MUCH better on
> thin clients, with much less X server ram usage.
> 2) It integrates very well into Gnome, being the default Gnome browser.
> 3) (A biggie) it speaks gconf, and you can do lockdown on it in Pessulus and
> Sabayon.
> 4) With my newfound idears gained from playing with evoldap, getting som gconf
> setting via an LDAP backend shouldn't be too hard.
>
> Not saying we should. Just saying it might be worth... examining, post lucid.

I like the idea of Chromium more for a distant feature release, both
Chromium and Epiphany should be better than Firefox on thin clients (and
I think netbooks as well). Chromium is starting to get some nice
plugins as well. I guess it's too early to think about it anyway, but I
quite like chromium :)

-Jonathan

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Ship epiphany, make it the "default" browser?
 

post lucid.
>
> I like the idea of Chromium more for a distant feature release, both
> Chromium and Epiphany should be better than Firefox on thin clients (and
> *I think netbooks as well). Chromium is starting to get some nice
> plugins as well. I guess it's too early to think about it anyway, but I
> quite like chromium :)
>
> -Jonathan
>


I guess I don't really understand Chromium's licensing. It isn't GPL'd
afaik, it looks like there is a bsd license and a "google tos"
license? I guess the paranoid part of me keeps wondering if chromium
isn't the name of one of the those shiny rings that the "dwarf lords
in the halls of stone" got recently?

Anyway,

John

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