Recently in Epiphany Category

The GNOME Web browser Epiphany — formerly based on Mozilla's Gecko engine and now based on Webkit — doesn't ship with Ubuntu (though it does with Debian and most GNOME-based distros/projects).

But if you're running GNOME, I recommend you add it via your favorite package manager.

What Epiphany offers is a streamlined, faster, less-resource-intensive browsing experience.

I have a few Web-delivered apps that absolutely require Firefox, but for as much else as possible, Epiphany does an excellent job and doesn't stress my less-than-new hardware as much as Firefox.

If you run top in a terminal and keep an eye on the running processes, you'll see that Firefox hogs a lot of CPU and tends to keep hogging it even if you're not "actively" browsing. Other browsers, including (in my experience) Epiphany, Opera, Chrome/Chromium, Konqueror, Midori, Kazehakaze (and really just about anything that isn't Firefox) is much more forgiving of system resources than Firefox.

So it pays to shop around for browsers that do what you want yet don't stress your system so much.

Though it's not open-source, I do use Opera on my super-old systems, where it's light footprint makes even my 233 MHz system usable.

I've been pretty happy with Chromium in Ubuntu, and Chrome in Windows runs better now that I have 1 GB of RAM on the XP box (it didn't do so well with 512 MB).

But in GNOME, I've relied on Epiphany as my browser of choice for some time. I didn't find it slow when it was based on the Gecko engine, and now on Webkit it remains fast and functional.

The more I use GNOME, the more I gravitate toward the "GNOME apps," incluiding Epiphany, Evolution (which I've just started using with a couple IMAP mail accounts), the Empathy IM client, Rhythmbox, etc.

While I think the even-tighter integration of GNOME apps in the Ubuntu panel is theoretically a step in the right direction, I find that things are broken enough that the benefits of that integration aren't terrible available at present (but I hope they will be in future).

Note: In the past month or so, I've run GNOME in Debian Lenny, FreeBSD 7.3 and Ubuntus 8.04 and 10.04.

I've probably written a dozen entries in which I wondered aloud about how anybody could use the Google Chrome Web browser when, on my 512 MB Windows XP system, it literally ran aground after maybe a half-hour of use, with screens taking forever to render and sending me scurrying back to the relative comfort of Firefox.

Well since that time I've been running both Firefox and Google Chrome on a Windows box with 1 GB of RAM, and my opinion of Chrome has turned around: It's fast and stays fast.

I guess Chrome is one of those applications that just doesn't do well with 512 MB of RAM.

And now that I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my laptop that also has 1 GB of RAM — and I'm having "issues" with Firefox eating tons of CPU — I've installed a couple of other browsers, including the Webkit-powered GNOME browser-of-choice Epiphany and its close cousin (and Chrome twin) Chromium, both of which are easily added from the refreshingly simple Ubuntu Software Center.

(About the only thing I don't like about the Ubuntu Software Center is its method of installing an application as soon as you select it; I'd rather make a number of software selections and then have the system install them all together. I guess that's what the Synaptic Package Manager is for.)

So how is Chromium in Linux, specifically Ubuntu 10.04?

So far, it's excellent. Everything happens fast. There is absolutely no slowdown when I type into a Web form. I can see in top that when not in active use, Chromium (just like Epiphany) gives back almost all the CPU it uses when rendering a Web page (most unlike Firefox, which holds onto CPU even when you're not in a FF window).

Windows XP runs great in 512 MB. But if you're running a modern Web browser, you really need 1 GB for things to run smoothly. This doesn't mean a modern Web browser — especially Firefox — will run great on a Linux machine with only 512 MB of RAM. But I've never seen it choke so badly with 1 GB of RAM as I have in my current Ubuntu 10.04 installation.

The fact that Chromium is flawless on this configuration and with this CPU (1.2 GHz Celeron) says a whole lot.

My only problem is that the "core" of my Web-based work requires me to use Firefox. ... and if Chromium runs great in Ubuntu, it could only do better in a "lighter" environment, right?

It's a funny thing, but some of the problems I have with the display when I use Movable Type in Firefox/Iceweasel go away when I'm using it in the Epiphany Web browser that ships with the GNOME desktop environment.

The funny thing is that I'm in Debian Lenny, and that means I'm running Epiphany with Gecko, the same rendering engine that Firefox/Iceweasel users, and not Webkit, which is the engine in Google Chrome and newer versions of Epiphany.

Why do I run Epiphany whenever I can instead of Firefox? For uses where Firefox is not absolutely required to make the given Web site or Web-based app work, or where I'm not using the Web Developer and Firebug add-ons for Firefox, I prefer Epiphany because it's faster and uses less CPU.

Having Epiphany work so well with Movable Type is one of those little bonuses.

That brings me to GNOME. The GNOME environment and many of its applications (Epiphany, the Nautilus file manager, Gedit, gThumb, and a bunch of others) just seem to suit the way I work.

It'd be more "cool" to use Xfce or maybe KDE (or Fluxbox or Fvwm), but I just seem to have a better experience in GNOME.