

Version history ĭevelopers of GNOME Web maintain a complete and accurate changelog in its official repository that shows complete and detailed changes between all the releases, following table just shows arbitrarily mentioned some notable and important changes: VersionĪbility to drag bookmarks, smart bookmarks, and topics to the toolbar. In September 2009, the transition to Webkit was completed as part of GNOME 2.28. The size of the team and complexity of porting the browser to Webkit caused version 2.22 to be re-released with bugfixes alongside GNOME 2.24, so the releases stagnated until July 1, 2009, when it was announced that 2.26 would be the final Gecko-based version. On April 1, 2008, the team announced that it would remove the ability to build it using Gecko and proceed using only WebKit. To address these issues, in July 2007, the Epiphany team added support for WebKit as an alternative rendering engine.
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Also, Mozilla increasingly disregarded third-party software that wished to make use of Gecko, until it became viewed as an integrated Firefox component. Notably, the release cycles of the two projects did not line up efficiently. The development process suffered from major problems related to the Gecko backend. Web Inspector, showing a Safari-like user interface
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The XULRunner support made it possible to install Epiphany as the only web browser on the system. Previously, Epiphany could only use an installed Mozilla web browser as a web engine provider. It also featured network awareness using NetworkManager, smart bookmarks improvements, and the option to build with XULRunner. The next major milestone was version 2.14, which was the first to follow GNOME's version numbering. The new widget supported icons inside the text area and reduced the screen space needed to present information, while improving GNOME integration. The most notable was the new text entry widget, which was introduced in version 1.8. The development of Epiphany was mainly focused on usability improvements compared to major browsers at the time. It provided a GNOME graphical user interface for Gecko, instead of Mozilla's cross-platform interface. Įpiphany initially used the Gecko layout engine from the Mozilla project to display web pages. The first version of Epiphany was released on December 24, 2002. Gritti ended his work on Epiphany and a GNOME team led by Xan Lopez, Christian Persch and Jean-François Rameau now direct the project. Galeon development stalled and the developers decided to work on extensions to bring Galeon's advanced features to Epiphany. Galeon continued after the fork, but lost momentum due to the remaining developers' failure to keep up with changes in the Mozilla platform. For example: Making people happy that don't have control center installed is not a good reason to have mime configuration in Epiphany itself. If someone will like to use it anyway, it's just a plus. We don't aim to make Epiphany usable outside Gnome. The Unix philosophy is to design small tools that do one thing, and do it well.Įpiphany's main goal is to be integrated with the gnome desktop. Epiphany addresses simplicity with a small browser designed for the web-not mail, newsgroups, file management, instant messaging or coffee making. We believe the commonly used browsers of today are too big, buggy, and bloated. Keep in mind that simple does not necessarily mean less powerful. Furthermore, on slower processors even trivial tasks such as pulling down a menu is less than responsive.Įpiphany aims to utilize the simplest interface possible for a browser. While Mozilla has an excellent rendering engine, its default XUL-based interface is considered to be overcrowded and bloated. As such, Epiphany used the global GNOME theme and other settings from inception. He intended Epiphany to comply with the GNOME HIG. As a result, Gritti created a new browser based on Galeon, with most of the non-critical features removed. As Galeon was oriented towards power users, most developers disapproved. Īround the same time, the GNOME project adopted a set of human interface guidelines, which promoted simplification of user interfaces. While Gritti regarded Galeon's monolithic design and the number of user-configurable features as factors limiting Galeon's maintainability and usability, the rest of the Galeon developers wanted to add more features. The fork occurred because of the disagreement between Gritti and the rest of Galeon developers about new features.

Marco Pesenti Gritti, the initiator of Galeon, originally developed Epiphany in 2002 as a fork of Galeon.
