The result is an intltool 0.50.0 release, which has a few reasonably sized changes.

The biggest changes are:

• #580526: Finally, support for gsettings gschema.xml files is merged in, which should enable maintainers to get a slightly simpler build setup (i.e. no need to use NOMERGE rule anymore, and you can have intltool directly extract translations from .gschema.xml files).
• #790574: Let xgettext extract Scheme strings out, and add support for intltool-update -m to find files with marked strings.
• #806006: Improve handling of quotes in intltool-update -m so you get less (no?) warnings about mismatched quotes, and Python processing doesn't get messed up with docstrings and similar.
• #520986: one for the translators—messages are extracted in the order they appear in original files now, thus allowing translators to infer more of the context from the ordering.

There are a few other bug fixes, but listed above are those with the highest risk factor. Please test and file bugs!

If you want Evolution as well, I've reused Debian packages and modified it only slightly (to match GNOME 3 dev package names) and built it in my own PPA which depends on the GNOME 3 PPA:

This time, I'll also be talking a bit more about "bridging the gap" theme Launchpad development team has taken over the last half-year or so, and what we are doing to help connect two amazing communities: GNOME development community with the Ubuntu development community.

There's a lot of cool stuff going on in Launchpad that should have positive benefits for both Ubuntu and GNOME. I hope to be able to spark some interest in what's going on.

Epiphany already supports password storing for HTTP authentication, and does that in conjuction with gnome-keyring, exactly how I want my browser to work. And thanks to the always awesome Epiphany developers, password saving for web forms works now as well.

And as always with Epiphany, password saving is even better than it used to be!

Thanks go to Gustavo (kov) and Xan for fixing this important issue and their ongoing contributions to the best web browser!

If you are an Ubuntu (perhaps even Debian) user, you can try it out using WebKit team PPAs for webkit itself and for epiphany.

However, with 1.1.18 release (and slightly earlier versions) of WebKit I hit bug #32900 repeatedly and often. Fortunately, that's now fixed as well, so I packaged it in my own epiphany PPA (my first experience with Debian packaging and PPAs, so it's quite likely something is done inappropriately).

I did see more problems with a git version of Epiphany from some 10 days ago (like password saving not allowing more than one login/password for the same web page, or it not picking up some login forms like, interestingly, the one on bugs.webkit.org :), but I'll be reporting those if I confirm them to still be a problem with Epiphany 2.29.5.

Note: I started packaging this before it was available in webkit-team PPA since I wanted to get hold of password saving sooner rather than later, but my ignorance of packaging and some personal issues kept me stuck for a while. I wasn't striving to replace the good work webkit-team is doing, but it was part of a learning exercise which I might be writing about later.

Chris Lord:

Epiphany uses Gecko, but then elects to change the web font sizes and default background colours, breaking a lot of sites that expect size 10pt/96dpi and white (the former of which is actually specified somewhere in a w3c spec, I think?) - sites such as the new official GTK site, for example.

It would be nice if these 'features' could be turned off - as nice as it is for web pages to match the desktop theme (to a very small extent), it doesn't work very well in a lot (the majority?) of cases.

Also, some of Firefox's extensions are quite nice - when epiphany has a nice delicious extension (no, epilicious isn't quite enough) and the annoying jump-to-focused element bug in gtkmozembed is fixed... and maybe the re-parenting breaking pop-ups bug too... Then, maybe I'll move back to Epiphany.

Perhaps WebKit will nullify the latter two of those complaints; I live in hope :)

My take on this is: I am short-sighted and I use generally high resolution screens (120dpi). I still prefer to be able to read the text on my screen comfortably, regardless of what a web designer thinks would suit me better (and I couldn't find any reference to default font size for HTML 4.01, and I can't imagine there should be one: 10pt/96dpi is basically a size in pixels, so if some web designers want to force a font size of 13px, they should do that without pretending to be a11y friendly). And no, I don't feel like downgrading my screen dpi (I also like it to match real world sizes). As far as extensions are concerned, they are really easy to write for Epiphany, and if it was default in more distros, I am sure we'd see many more.

Also, if someone is fine with this, why not set their entire GNOME like that, and Epiphany will follow. Also, one can use a separate .gtkrc for Epiphany as well, if they want to change theme colours.

Thomas Thurman:

I think you should include a link to http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/229/ in your post about replacing Firefox with Ephy, so that people can vote on it.

Indeed. So everyone, here's the link above: go and make Epiphany default. :)

Quentin Hartman:

On my Gutsy machine at work, I started using Epiphany a few weeks ago because I got tired of how painfully slow FF2 was when I had a large number of tabs open that involved complex javascript. Epiphany feels substantially faster, not just in this case, but in browsing in general.

However, I can't use it for a large portion of my browsing because the only flash plugins that I could easily get to work in it are far from feature complete. Also, the big "pause button" thing it does when a flash item first loads is annoying.

Regardless of whether or not it technically uses the same engine, some sites render incorrectly in it. The biggest example I saw while using it semi-regularly was Lenovo's Thinkpad configuration page. The column of options would render in a too-narrow fixed-width column, whereas with all other browsers I used it in (including FF2) the column would flow to fit the window width. Clearly, the Gecko engine used in Ephy has diverged from the one used in FF2.

Do these behaviors change in newer versions? I don't know. I, like so many other people out there, don't have time to diverge from what is available in my distro.

I think the flash issues are probably something regarding proprietary software (i.e. it's not trivial to use Flash 32-bit plug-in inside 64-bit environment, but it is as possible as inside firefox, afaik). And I only know of "pause" button in two free software implementations that are indeed feature-incomplete, but are quickly "getting there": swfdec and gnash. I even prefer this kind of behaviour, but it still doesn't have anything to do Epiphany afaik: they'd work the same in Firefox.

Again, here are some problems with rendering of pages in Epiphany, and it could only be due to font size and colours display (oh yes, I am using a "dark" theme, and hit a lot of those). However, these sorts of problems happen only when web designers pretend to be designing for usability, but combine absolute and relative measures (and 10pt is a relative measure in terms of screen pixels). It's simple to demonstrate the same problem with font sizes in Firefox: just use Ctrl++ to enlarge the font size. Or with a theme: just set your default colours to dark background and light foreground, and many web sites will be messed up (yes, even ubuntu.com, which is otherwise wonderfully designed web site).

Ok, we can admit to living in a non-perfect world where many web sites are broken usability-wise, but most of this would not affect a default Epiphany installation: default colour theme is black-on-white, and default "document" font size is 12pt, with default desktop screen resolutions being around ~100dpi (and you get to customize fonts in the same way you can for Firefox, just the starting default size is different).

But, when will those who really need better usability get it if web browsers work around some problems in web sites to make them 'look better' instead of 'behave better'? How are high contrast white-on-black themes actually working in Firefox and other browsers?