June 16, 2008

Short Review: Epiphany Browser 2.22.1.1

Epiphany is GNOME's default web browser, using the Mozilla Gecko layout engine to render web pages. It uses less resources and it's lighter than Firefox at the cost of configuration and features, which are only basic.

Epiphany homepage at GNOME project

Epiphany is the usual web browser type, but it offers decent web browsing performance due to the Gecko engine. It has tabs, and the main feature is constituted by a big number of default plugins it comes with, expanding it to an almost full-featured browser. Some of them are: an AdBlocker plugin, the Greasemonkey plugin (run user scripts in order to modify web page's behavior) or the Page Info one.

Epiphany comes with a lot of plugins

The Preferences window offers only limited options, to set the homepage, font size, privacy and language options. It doesn't look to have spell checking at this point.

Preferences dialogue

Overall, Epiphany is a good browser if you are looking for something lighter and less resource-hungry than Firefox.

The About window

Updated: Jun 16, 2008 (Created: Jun 16, 2008)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting thing: in Debian, you can install the epiphany-webkit package, which will make Epiphany use the WebKit engine (the one used by Safari on the Mac) instead of Gecko. This package is probably coming soon to Ubuntu as well.

Craciun Dan said...

Never tried it since I use Firefox mostly, but that's good to know, thanks.