Is GNOME's Open Source Web Browser Reader for the Masses

The conclusion, that Web meets the developers' needs but not the needs of the masses, fits not only the browser but GNOME3 as a whole. If there was ever a group of developers that just didn't want to listen to users the GNOME developers are example #1.

Maybe Web is better in 3.6 and 3.8, but it's not ready for prime time in GNOME 3.4.

I saw an interesting post on planet GNOME on proposed design change for Web. I have never used Web/Epiphany for longer than 5 minutes as it just doesn't have the features Firefox, Chrome, or Opera does.

http://blogs.igalia.com/femorandeira/2013/01/29/a-few-more-ideas-for-web-navigation-and-a-talk-at-fosdem/

I saw an interesting post on planet GNOME on proposed design change for Web.

Very interesting indeed. I'm not particularly fond of the presented idea, but it has given me more insight into (what seems) a major design tenet that pervades Gnome these days.

If it is a hard to solve problem while using limited space, just sidestep the limited space and move the problem to a different, context breaking large space.

Menu's are difficult in a limited space? Just side step the small menu on top of the desktop and move it to a different view with ample space.

Multiple open pages in browsers are difficult to portray in tabs? Just ditch the tabs and move the pages to a different view with ample space.

The downside with solving hard problems like this, is that it also moves application relevant information and actions away from the direct sphere of the application. It continually forces you to redirect attention to a new area and that is the opposite of "distration free" computing.

It's a strange thing, but in my experience, the Epiphany browser was faster with the Gecko engine than it is now with Webkit. I used to use it a lot way back before they swapped rendering engines. Now Chromium (and by extension Chrome) is way, way faster despite all using Webkit.

On a related topic, I was looking at Bodhi 2.2.0 last night, and Midori has come a long, long way since the last time I tried it.

Midori has come a long way. There are still some web pages it doesn't work with and there are still some extensions lacking but generally it's a very good browser. Oh,a nd yeah, Epiphany was fast but feature poor once upon a time. Now it's just feature poor.

The browser to watch is Rekonq from KDE team. It is modeled after Chrome/Chromium and based on Webkit. It is very fast without all the hooks and snoops in Chrome. It is minimalist and still doesn't have every feature desired yet, but is very functional and works great.

> Multiple open pages in browsers are difficult to portray in tabs? Just ditch the tabs and move the pages to a different view with ample space.

But we can have (already do have) both -- no need to ditch the classic old standard.

Firefox calls it "tab groups". Click on the down-arrow button for the drop-down list of open taps, and there it is -- first item on the list is "Tab Groups (Ctrl+Shft+E)" It produces a nice grid view of thumbnail open pages. The user can even divide the tabs into separate groups and move tabs between them -- almost like a browser mini-session.

The "problem" comes in when the developers start insisting that users can only be permitted one "correct", developer-approved way of doing tasks, simply because that's the way the developers themselves prefer to do it -- and "ditch" the previous means in order to enforce that preference..