Hi Everyone, I recently joined the Epiphany effort thanks to my awesome employer letting me contribute to this lean and mean browser. I am particularly interested in the integration of the Web with the desktop, and think ephy has strong advantages in that regard.
Indeed, being a non-multi-platform browser, ephy is free of the constraints/compromises the others have to make in order to coherently run in different environments. We should take this opportunity and go wild on integration with gnome-shell and the Gnome 3 Desktop in general. Really become "the Gnome Web Browser". Obviously, the gnome-design team members have a clearer view on the kind of global experience the desktop should offer to the user. Ephy being a part of that whole, their input/directions is invaluable. There are already some (controversial, see below) mock-ups regarding ephy in their git repo. Lets build a stronger communication channel. Here are some ideas/user stories/brainfarts on how we could achieve such a synergy. Feedback, comments, other ideas, even bashing, are welcome! = Let the user use web-applications in the same way they use "native" ones = The idea here is to make web applications first-class citizen of the desktop. Those applications would benefits from the same integration level that the "native" apps have: • be launch-able in the overview app pane/dash • have their window be manageable by g-s application switcher and alt-tab switcher independently of ephy • send notifications using the g-s notification area • have nice icon badges for unread mails etc... (I think this feature is planned in post-3.0 g-s) • ... Epiphany's role here would be to create/manage those webapps, actually making a browsed site an application. Also Ephy could be used to display those apps, with a streamlined interface. Or a separate visor could be created. see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=644002 = Let the user switch to a specific epiphany's opened site using g-s facilities = I am using the term site here, instead of tab, because it is not really clear we should to keep the tabs management in ephy IMHO. Tabs and notebooks are just a way to have application-local window management, mostly duplicating wms/shells facilities, compensating for their missing features (windows grouping for instance). Re-giving that responsibility to the shell seems like a natural thing to do, reducing the number of different ways to switch to a specific site/app/context. It seems the design team shares this opinion, as seen in http://gitorious.org/gnome-design/gnome-design/blobs/raw/master/mockups/epiphany/epiphany2.png . This idea being very controversial, going against years of tabbing browsers usage, displaying ephy tabs contents in alt-tab switcher and/or overview might be an intermediate solution. Here is a quick and dirty mockup: http://people.igalia.com/amazari/ephy-tabs-in-switcher.webm = Let the user open a recently visited or a favourite site from g-s = - integrate with the future g-s jump-lists - make gnome-shell's search box access ephy bookmarks/history - make gnome-shell's search box delegates to ephy if the entered text looks like an URL = Make the user's experience coherent with the rest of the desktop = - comply with http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/AppIntegration (notably regarding dialogs) - use symbolic icons wherever possible, see http://jimmac.musichall.cz/log/?p=974 - share data with the shell and other applications (Zeigeist ? Tracker ?) - get the warning theme colours for the location entry in https mode - ... What do you think ? _______________________________________________ epiphany-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/epiphany-list
