Taking Epiphany for a second (default) spin

Posted on July 20th, 2008 at 21:07 in Linux, Ubuntu

Since I upgraded to Ubuntu hardy, I’ve been trying to give Firefox 3 a fighting chance, mostly because of all the hype around it, along with a couple of bumps with Epiphany.

With Epiphany using the gecko backend, it was hard adding exceptions for every website using self-signed certificates, or broken certificates, including my own, due to the interaction which was covered in Firefox but no in Epiphany. I even started my own Certificate Authority (it’s just a bash script). All of this made me give Firefox a try for a while..

But, after a while, I have come to dislike all the things that made switch to Epiphany in the first place. It’s slugish, it eats all my memory, and makes me squirm in pain…

On the other hand, Epiphany feels lightning fast, snappy and doesn’t eat all my RAM. Meanwhile, with the updates in Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.1 adding SSL exceptions is not a broken process that equals fail. It shouldn’t be easy though, but it should be doable.

Does anyone have any hard facts if the page rendering is faster on Epiphany than on Firefox ? Or is that just a “feeling” people get ?

I can only wait to check out Epiphany with webkit! In the meantime, I’ll take it as it is, and make it my default once again.

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