Install Epiphany 3.2.0 With Web Application Mode In Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

GNOME 3.2 got a "web application mode" through Epiphany web browser, allowing you to save websites as web apps. These web apps show up as regular applications in both GNOME Shell and Unity and can be pinned to GNOME Shell's Dash or Unity's launcher, etc. More about them in this post: GNOME 3.2 to get web application mode.

Here is WebUpd8 saved as a web application through Epiphany (using a custom icon) under GNOME 3.2 and Unity:

The latest Epiphany is not available in the Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot repositories so I've created a new PPA for GNOME 3 stuff and uploaded the latest Epiphany 3.2.0 and WebKit 1.6.1 (required dependency).

To save a web page (like Twitter.com, Facebook.com, Gmail or whatever), in the latest Epiphany 3.2.0, select File > Save as Web Application. But please not that for now you can't select an icon or a custom website region for the web app icon so the icons will need further tweaking by replacing the images under ~/.gnome2/epiphany/app-epiphany* (where "app-epiphany*" is a folder stat starts with "app-epiphany" followed by the web app name and some numbers/letters) and then restarting Unity / GNOME Shell.

The Epiphany Browser package in the new GNOME 3 WebUpd8 PPA is the same as in Michael Kuhn's PPA (thanks!), but I've created a different PPA because I want to add some more GNOME 3.2 packages which are not available in the Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot repositories and I wanted to have them all in a single PPA.

Install Epiphany 3.2.0 with web application mode in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

Add the PPA and install Epiphany 3.2.0 in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/gnome3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser

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GNOME 3.2 To Get Web Application Mode

Besides notification counters, new login screen and other changes we wrote about a while back, there's one more really cool feature that GNOME 3.2 will be getting, through Epiphany:web application mode.

Here's how this will work: you navigate to a website and select "Save as web application" - its icon will be used for the new application but if the website doesn't provide a big, iPhone-like icon, a screenshot will be taken instead:

The newly created web apps can then be accessed from the Activities Overview, pinned to dash, etc:

The web applications will feature almost no chrome: only the window titlebar will be visible (see screenshot in be beginning of the post). They will run in a different process than your main browser (so they won't be affected if the main browser crashes) and will use a completely new profile, however they will inherit the cookies for that domain from the main browser profile so you won't have to log in again.

The official GNOME 3.2 release is set for the end of September.


What do you think? Will you use the new GNOME 3.2 web applications?

Info and screenshots via Iocane powder

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