alex diavatis | March 16, 2013

Final, Web in WebKit2 ;)

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

web-epiphany-iconAfter 2 years of hard work GNOME Web 3.8 came to gain a place in your Favorites Shell Dock!

Web now performs similar to Chrome and Safari OSX but is lighter and free. Maybe Web isn’t yet “there” for everybody, but certainly its friends will have a very nice surprise in this new version!

Major Changes

  • Switch to WebKit2. This brings:
    • More stable, responsive, secure and performant Web.
    • Pages can crash without bringing down the entire browser: http://i.imgur.com/MKq5Nvi.png
    • GTK+2 plugins work again out of the box (in particular, Flash)
    • State-of-the-art browser for GNOME, catching up with Chrome or Safari OSX.
    • Huge effort by the Web team, in development for more than two years.
  • Incognito mode (http://blogs.gnome.org/xan/2012/12/13/theory-and-praxis-of-netbanking/)
    • Let’s you browse without storing any personal information, can be accessed from the app menu.
  • All new Search UI.
  • Revamped UI for HTML5 media content: http://blogs.igalia.com/xrcalvar/2013/02/20/new-media-controls-in-webkitgtk/
  • Undo close tab
    • You can now re-open closed tabs or windows, can be accessed from the app menu or with Ctrl-Shift-t.
  • New Tab button in the toolbar.
  • Asynchronous session saving and restore, plus delayed tab restore on startup
    • This improves responsiveness at all times, especially when restoring tab-heavy sessions.
  • Tons of bugfixes and other small improvements.
  • Mouse Shortcuts support (fw/back)

 

 

Note that on this video I am not using the very latest one ;)

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  • Adrià Arrufat

    Wow, very very impressive!! Thanks for the video! I just got one question: Does the google talk plugin work with Web 3.8.0?

    • alex285

      To be honest I don’t know. However it doesn’t seem to work when I tried it. But didn’t check much. If anyone else knows..

    • alex285

      I guess you mean the plugin to use hangouts, voice/video. The chat works.

      • Adrià Arrufat

        Yes, I meant the plugin to use the hangouts :P sorry for not being clear :P

        • Eduard Gotwig

          I don’t think so.

          • Craig

            If I remember correctly, it uses the nsplugin API, just like Flash and most other native browser plugins. So it “should” work, although it probably doesn’t get any testing.

          • Eduard Gotwig

            Yeah, now it works, I see it e.g in the options for the Midori Web Browser as well =)

  • http://jewelfox.dreamwidth.org/ Taryn Fox

    So, have they fixed the bug where Ctrl-B and Ctrl-U bring up “bookmarks” and “view source” even while you’re in the text editor on Google Drive or WordPress? Because Web is completely useless to me as a writer thanks to that one little bug.

    • Rowan Lewis

      Sheesh, I don’t know, have you filed a bug report and checked the status to see if it’s been fixed?

      • http://jewelfox.dreamwidth.org/ Taryn Fox

        I did file a bug report, and it went ignored for months. I haven’t gone back there to check on it in awhile.

        • alex285

          I can see both there.. pity :(

        • Rowan Lewis

          If you could pop us a link, that’d be great.

        • Claudio Saavedra

          “Ignored” is a bit of an overstatement. As you probably know, since you are pretty close to the GNOME project, the Web team is pretty small and we have a lot of work to do to push both WebKitGTK+ and Web forward. We fix what we can in our limited time and our priorities might not satisfy everyone, but so is life.

          • Rowan Lewis

            I found the bug here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=690191

            But, Claudio, this is kind of a big deal when using web applications, I beg you to fix it next cycle.

          • Claudio Saavedra

            You seem not to get that there are other hundreds of bugs and missing features that are also a big deal. Feedback is great and the bug is already reported, the rest is rather pointless (starting by bringing up this issue here, and bashing on us for not having fixed it yet.)

          • sramkrishna

            No one is bashing here. Mostly people have given feedback that it has a lot of feedback.

            If any of you are interested in helping out. please do. Knowing webkit is going to be a great foundation for a job doing Linux in the future especially in embedded mobile work and this is exactly a great place to start without having to work on a large project like Chrome or Firefox. I say that as a person “in the business”.

          • Rowan Lewis

            If I could do anything other than beg, I’d have done it already.

          • Craig

            The answer to this is the “please fix this bug” equivalent of RTFM: “patches accepted”.

        • Craig

          If it’s on Bugzilla, you should be CC’d for new comments, unless you’ve removed yourself.

  • Eduardo Battaglia

    Off topic question: What do you use to edit your videos? Thanks!

    • alex285

      If you are referring to the logo animations are made by adobe after effects from a friend of mine. I am just putting videos in timeline with OpenShot. I am not doing video editing.

  • http://www.facebook.com/teemu.kielinen Teemu Kielinen

    Flash works? Great! No need to have Firefox as a backup browser anymore :)

    • Chad Lynch

      Not having flash work was the main reason for me to use another browser. If flash is working I might have to give web another change.

  • hells_dark

    I might switch from Chrome !

    • hells_dark

      I just miss a favorites toolbar.

      • Matthew Javelet

        that and syncing everything with my gmail. If they could give me a sweet simple favorites toolbar and sync my data with my gnome.org account I would permanently use it.

        • Cosmin

          Or integrate with google online accounts.

  • Osqui

    Why reinvent the wheel? Why Gnome simply doesn’t help Firefox project? We could have a “real” browser well integrated in a complete desktop

    • 7svito

      Because Gnome needs this wheel to be single complete DE for Linux. You are still free to use another wheels from other vendors.
      There is Gnome integration team that work hard to make what you want happen. https://github.com/gnome-integration-team/firefox-gnome

      Why Gnome simply does not help KDE project? We could have a “real” DE well integrated in a complete Linux kernel

      Web and people behind all this projects are awesome. Wish them more goodies :D

      • http://www.facebook.com/Rajesh.KSV Rajesh Ksv

        Gnome and KDE case is different. I dont think we can cite that example.

        Though I appreciate Gnome devs effort, I am not sure if they can make me shift from FF/Chrome to Web (multiple reasons – some of them being multi device support, addons and many others)

    • Evropi

      They are helping WebKit, which now powers every major browser other than Firefox (Gecko) and Internet Explorer (Trident).

      Very importantly, WebKit (perhaps unfortunately) has approximately a 98% usage share on mobile platforms according to one statistic. This has led a lot of web developers to simply ‘code to WebKit’ and ignore standards, though WebKit is in fact open source.

      No matter your opinion on that, basing the browser on WebKit is bound to improve GtkWebKit, which I assume will become the standard to embed webpages within an application. There’s a network effect you probably missed. And hey, it’s always good to see browsers that truly integrate with the DE get better. I use Firefox too, but if rekonq met all my needs, I’d probably use that instead.

      – KDE dev.

      • Craig

        WebKitGTK is not “based on” WebKit, it *is* a WebKit, *based on* WebCore.

        • Evropi

          Well, you know what I meant.

    • sramkrishna

      Firefox is never going to completely integrate with GNOME anymore than it would with KDE. So having these projects around is useful for having a consistent experience. Consider it R&D as GNOME will be able to play around with various GUI elements. So I think this is a good thing.

    • Craig

      Epiphany is a “real” browser you ignoramus. Firefox is in absolutely awful shape and relies on tons of crap legacy libraries (XUL etc.). Most of the heavy lifting in Epiphany is done via WebCore (via WebKitGTK), so it’s not even remotely “reinventing the wheel”.

      I’ll answer your question with a question: why not get a clue, so you can ask smarter questions?

  • Chad Lynch

    I used to use Web (well Epiphany at the time) as my main browser back in the day when Chrome was still being developed and Firefox had gotten SO slow. It was really fast and great for most surfing. I am glad to see it being developed. Maybe it will become my main browser again. :)

  • JJ

    And ubuntu gnome just moved back to Firefox, wonderful timing!!!

    • Fedor

      Who cares about Ubuntu?

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  • http://www.facebook.com/jesus.bejarano.948 Jesus Bejarano

    Midori already have all those thing and more, why not contribute with it instead?

  • hells_dark

    Too bad it’s not in Ubunt uGnome 3 staging ppa… can’t wait to try it.