I installed epiphany today and immediately loved it. Great, fast, clean. And unfortunately “useless”. No offense, I think it is great, but lacks two major features that every browser (at least for me, and many of my colleagues) should have.
Bookmarks. Yes, Epiphany has bookmarks. But how should I use them? When clicking the “bookshelf” icon, a popdown appears with the bookmarks… that is merely about 30px wide. I do not understand how this is conforming to Gnomes design guidelines, not to mention usability. There is not even enough space to show a single letter, and all we see is ... (and on hover, the name of the bookmark)
Extensions. Major (used on millions of user’s installs) tools like NextCloud offer extensions (for example for passwords), which are awesome, and almost unthinkable in modern day web. Not everything is “contained” in a secure shell, on the opposite, everything is shared across devices, users, instances nowadays.
These two blockers are of course stopping me (and colleagues) from using this browser. There are other issues, such as shortcuts, which seem ineditable, but one could re-learn the muscle-memory just for Epiphany (since it does not follow system settings).
My post here is mostly a feedback, in the hope these points could be (re) considered, but of course, also open to suggestions if there are actual solutions to the abovementioned problems.
This browser is otherwise pretty awesome, I would love to make it the standard of my install!
At the risk of looking like an illiterate I had to take a picture of the screen because when epiphany is open, none of the shortcuts work - not even the inbuilt ones - to take screenshtos
As for extensions, I had previously read it won’t be done, yet, now I found /GNOME/epiphany/-/blob/master/src/webextension… seems like something is in the experimental stage, indeed.
Thanks!
The problem with the bookmarks menu is probably caused by your custom theme? If you can reproduce it with the default theme, then you can report an issue.
The WebExtensions support is ready for developers to work on. It’s not going to be ready for end users anytime soon unless more interested developers start contributing. I suppose I should update that wiki page.
I use Epiphany for creating some Web Apps. I tried it as a daily driver, but immediately saw those awful ads placeholders, that is sure unusable lol, I dont need extensions, but awful looking pages either. I allready checked that strange json format of adlists… Why is it always so ‘hard way’? I need to figure how to remove elements from webpages now.
I don’t think so: i disabled all customizations and extensions and reloaded the theme (rt) prior to testing this again, sorry for not mentioning it earlier.
Also all other menus in the browser do work correctly, I would suppose, if a theme breaks it (which is unlikely since I do not address that browser in any way), then other menus would break too.
Has no one else ever seen or reported this? That is indeed suspicious, indicating some peculiarity on my system…
I will open a bug report.
I noticed something else: this browser uses almost 1GB memory. I thought chrome is hungry… but chrome ramps to 1GB maybe after 15 tabs are open. Epiphany seems to use almost 1GB just by default.
@Xenon789 - what do you mean by “ads”?
I was referring to extensions such as the passwords app extension by NextCloud - I did not see ads in the browser. Perhaps I misunderstand what you mean?
Yes, epiphany adblocking removes adds (tested with some websites only), but it keeps big spaces (or placeholders) where ads were before. Sure it is better, than seeing ads, but still looks ugly.
Got you
… I do not think that a browser should (natively) alter whatever is delivered by search (or else) engines.
It is up to the user to decide what they want to see or not and what services to use or not.
If google can only be used with ads, and I want to use it, I have to live with that. Not install a browser that removes what google adds there.
A loss of time to even try something like that (IMO), and potentially, even a problem with the services used (I bet Google makes you accept ads when agreeing to their TOS, and unhacking them could maybe be against said TOS)
See this blog post for explanation. It’s the exact same adblocker used by Safari. I’m happy to consider including other filters if they’re compatible. I really don’t want to go back to an Epiphany-level adblocker; it’s much better to let WebKit handle the adblocking.
Removing the space the ads occupy is called “element hiding” and it’s supported by the adblocker. The minimal version of EasyList that we use doesn’t seem to do much element hiding, though, or it doesn’t work well in practice, or maybe something is wrong.
Well, I don’t remember seeing anybody complain before now. Probably only a small fraction of users who notice problems complain, though.
Thanks.
WebKit is a memory hog. Also, unless you’ve used so much memory that the system is under memory pressure, WebKit caches very aggressively. E.g. it caches each WebKitWebProcess for half an hour after it was last used so that it doesn’t have to start a fresh web process if you navigate to the same website again. It’s normal for most of that memory use to be completely wasted, but it makes the browser slightly faster. Caches get dropped when under memory pressure, so if other programs actually needs that memory, it should get released. (In theory. In practice, I have no clue how well that works, because my entire desktop hangs whenever I run out of memory.)
Thanks, I bookmarked the link for reference. I had 2 lists in gsettings, now I created 3rd custom list from GitHub to test element hiding, I have only 3 rules (for div, class and also id), and it did nothing. As I do not know how often Epiphany refreshes those lists I will check sometimes if they worked, as format is simple and probably should work fine.
