Epiphany 3.3.4 Released With New Menu And Toolbar, More

Epiphany 3.3.4 has been released today with many user interface changes which bring it closer to the mockups we've seen about a month ago.

The new version features a much cleaner, unified user interface that's optimized to offer the user as much vertical space as possible. The old-style menu and statusbar have been removed, being replaced with a menu integrated into the top GNOME Shell bar (that will be used by the whole GNOME application stack: Music, Documents, etc.), a new "super menu" and a Nautilus-like floating statusbar.

The application menu, which is displayed on the top GNOME Shell bar uses the new Epiphany brand: "Web" (see screenshot above), and is only used for actions that affect the entire application, and not just the currently focused window.

Epiphany 3.3.4 also uses a new toolbar which displays the back/forward buttons, the location bar, a Firefox-like reload button and a menu button that opens a "super menu", while the zoom buttons, menu, etc. are gone. Here's the new "super menu":

The super menu, as opposed to the application menu, displays actions related to the current page/window and some parts of it are temporarily, like the bookmarks menu which is going to use the new Epiphany Overview.

More features on the way

Even more new features are on the way! For instance, the Epiphany Overview, a feature that will replace traditional tabs in Epiphany, is not yet available in Epiphany 3.3.4, but should be ready for the GNOME 3.4 release. The same goes for the new SQLite history backend and a "surprise gift in the Web Application cam".

You can download the latest Epiphany source files from HERE. Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin users can install it via the GNOME 3 PPA - but note that for some of the new features, you need GNOME Shell 3.3.4.

What do you think?

via/screenshots: blogs.gnome.org/xan

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New Epiphany Browser Design, Probably Without Visible Tabs [Mockup]

Epiphany (GNOME Web), like most GNOME applications, will be getting a new design, similar to that of GNOME Documents, Music and so on which you've seen in our previous GNOME apps mockups post (with no titlebar for maximized windows and no menu inside the main window).

According to its GNOME Design page, among the primary objectives are to provide inter page navigation and to focus on the current page content (removing as much chrome as possible).

A very interesting design decision is the removal of traditional tabs, but obviously, you'll still be able to switch between open pages, but in a different way. In the new GNOME Web, you'll switch between open windows from the new tab page which looks a lot like the GNOME Shell Overview or the Firefox Panorama:

The new "GNOME Web" will also bring a feature that I for one will definitely use a lot, called "queues". Queues will allow you to save a page for later reading and for instance, when you open links in a Google Search results page using middle click, "a new queue could be automatically created with the results page as the parent and all the links you open as items in the queue". Unfortunately that's about all the info regarding "queues" for now.

According to Xan López, the new design implementation has already started, but it might not be ready in time for GNOME 3.4:

The mighty Igalians (namely Claudio and myself) are already busy at work implementing the new design. For now we are focusing on a series of incremental patches that will move us closer to the end goal, that way we’ll have something usable even if the design or the full implementation of the Web application are not ready in time for 3.4.

More info @ Iocane powder & live.gnome.org

Thanks to Pedro Inácio for the tip!

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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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