Ubuntu Tutorials

So as many of you know I recently got back from the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Boston where we hashed out the details for the upcoming 8.04 release. It was loads of fun, I met a lot of cool people and I’m excited to get a lot of work done between now and then. In the meantime I thought I’d share something with you all that I noticed while I was there. Nobody seemed to use Firefox.

Nearly everyone at the conference was using Epiphany browser on the Gnome desktop. When asked why the two most common responses I got were:

1. Its faster.
2. Firefox is non-free.

While both of these are technically true this takes us back to the best part of Free Software, which is choice. If you’d like to try out the Epiphany browser (which I have been using pretty strictly since) follow these steps:

Installing Epiphany Browser

Installing Epiphany can be done a few ways, depending on your preference. I’ll outline a few ways that I can think of off the top of my head.

1. sudo aptitude install epiphany-browser
2. Applications > Add / Remove > Search “epiphany” > check-box > Apply

The Epiphany browser is based on the Gecko 1.8 engine and it does appear to render web pages very quickly. It is easy to use, simple, and just does what its supposed to do–render web pages. Nothing fancy other than what you just need. It does support extensions like seahorse for encryption, del.icio.us connections, greasemonkey and more, but it doesn’t feel like you need to rely on any of these (I haven’t even been using any).

I’m interested in your thoughts on Epiphany vs Firefox. Like it? Love it? Hate it? Why do you use one over the other?

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