The Notable Improvements of GNOME 2.22

Michael Larabel writes "Phoronix has up a list compiling eight of the most interesting improvements on track for GNOME 2.22. These improvements include the Epiphany browser switching to the WebKit back-end, transition effects inside the Evince document viewer, a new GNOME application for taking photos and recording videos from web cameras followed by applying special effects, a mouse tweaking module for improved accessibility, and a new GNOME VNC client. On the multimedia end, GNOME 2.22 has a few new features appended to the Totem movie player and the Rhythmbox player. Totem can now search and play YouTube videos and connect to a MythTV server and watch past recordings or view live TV. Rhythmbox now can utilize FM radio tuners, integration with new lyric sites, improved Podcast feed support, and even has support for communicating with newer Sony PSPs. There will also be a standalone Flash player and flash previewing support from the file browser in this release."

Comments

gtkhtml

[LizardKing]

I wonder if the move to WebKit for the rendering engine used by Epiphany will prompt other GNOME projects to transition from the various gtkhtml versions that are currently used. The maintenance of gtkhtml seems to be sporadic, and the API changes drastically between versions. For example, on a Fedora 8 install at work there's two versions of the gtkhtml library required by different apps in the basic GNOME desktop ...

Re:gtkhtml

[ozamosi]

Actually, the plan is to create a new "gtkhtml" widget that's supposed to be able to work with different backends, so that you can use Gecko, Webkit, and existing gtkhtml through the same API. http://www.atoker.com/blog/2008/01/10/putting-the-web-in-gtk/

Re:gtkhtml

[UtucXul]

But the fewer cores the web devs need to support, the better.

I really have to disagree there. Web devs should not support any rendering engine. It may makes sense to test against more than one engine, but a website should never be written for a given rendering engine. We've seen the mess that gets us. Website should be written to standards and the people who write the rendering engines should then try to write their engines to that. Some of them do. No one gets that perfect, but with one exception, they all do at least an okay job. And supposedly even IE is doing better although I really have no way of testing that myself.

Re:gtkhtml

[UtucXul]

I said some of this in the post answering the post above yours, but enough browsers (Gecko-based, Webkit-based, and Opera) support enough of the standard that yes, I think people should code to the standard. And even IE is supposed to be moving towards better standards compliance, so I don't think I would call HTML 4 and XHTML unused standards.

There is also the idea that html is supposed to degrade fairly gracefully, so unlike say a C compiler, even if a browser doesn't fully support the standard, things may (and very often are) still okay. That is where testing comes in. XML based things mess up this graceful degrading a bit, but that is a whole other discussion.

am I missing something here?

[rucs_hack]

The main reason I like gnome is that its a fast window manager with a low cruft index. This looks to me like Gnome trying too hard, and adding too many capabilities to what is, so far as I understand it, just a window manager. Why, for example include vnc? It's not like seperate client/servers for this task aren't available, and most are pretty good.

Is all this new stuff going to slow it down, that's the thing that interests me. If the team have too many things to maintain, just how good a job can they do?

Re:am I missing something here?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If you expect Gnome to be just a "fast window manager with a low cruft index", what about its CORBA server on which the whole beast is based? Gnome, as far as I can recall, has always strived to be a full-blown desktop environment. I think it works quite nicely in this role (even though I like KDE much more, I find it much more resource-efficent on older machines, and not that spartan, from the POV of a power user - oh, and being a friend of some of its developers, I don't want to make them upset :D), but if you want to use just a window manager, you should probably start using just Metacity (although I'd prefer Fluxbox in such case).

Re:am I missing something here?

[gujo-odori]

First of all, GNOME is not a window manager. It is a complete desktop environment. When last I used GNOME, Sawfish was the default GNOME window manager. Before that, it was Enlightenment. I haven't followed GNOME for a while, maybe they've changed the WM again. The point being, you can use a number of WMs with GNOME; it is not, itself, a window manager.

Low cruft? Anything that is a complete desktop environment probably doesn't meet most people's definition of low cruft, but if there is one that makes that cut in the free software world, I'd vote for XFCE (I'm a KDE user, and neither KDE nor GNOME come anywhere near low cruft in my book; XFCE is reasonably low cruft, although you also give up some things to get there; one user's cruft is another user's indispensable feature. YMMV).

If you really want low cruft, though, you need to really run just a window manager. Fluxbox and IceWM are a couple of very good choices in that area. They really are low cruft and they are also very, very fast. Of course, unless you truly are willing to trade a lot of features for speed, you may find yourself wishing for a bit more cruft after a while.

Is this new stuff going to slow it down? Yeah, maybe. OTOH, they may make tuning improvements in other areas to offset it. Of course, GNOME is already slow [1], so you may not notice an incremental slowdown. KDE is slow, too (especially KDE 4; having tried it, I put it back on the shelf to wait for 4.1, and went back to the 3.5 tree).

[1] Compared to faster things like XFCE, or even faster things, like $WINDOW_MANAGER_OF_YOUR_CHOICE, but still seems relatively responsive compared to certain proprietary systems.

Re:am I missing something here?

[cparker15]

GNOME is a desktop environment. Metacity is a window manager.

Re:am I missing something here?

[hr.wien]

Neither KDE nor Gnome are just window managers (that's Metacity and Kwin). Desktop environment is a more fitting term for them. They both aim to include most of what you need for basic day-to-day use of your computer. They also make sure everything they include is nicely consistent, which makes for a good user experience.

As for your speed concerns, I don't see how inclusion of a few new apps will slow down anything? It will take a bit more disk space probably, but it won't slow anything down unless you use these new apps. You're also free to uninstall anything you feel is redundant.

Re:am I missing something here?

[brunascle]

these are mostly just changes to applications in the "official gnome apps" list, and new apps added to that list. they're not really going to affect the performance of the desktop itself (i.e. gnome-panel, nautilus, metacity, etc).

Re:am I missing something here?

[Ckwop]

This looks to me like Gnome trying too hard, and adding too many capabilities to what is, so far as I understand it, just a window manager. Why, for example include vnc? It's not like seperate client/servers for this task aren't available, and most are pretty good.

This is a very good point. Linux is so flexible because each project has a different agenda and a different set of design criteria it is trying to satisfy.

I think that Gnome should not try to be a direct competitor to KDE. KDE is huge, has tonnes of software included with it and tries to be everything to everyone.

We need a desktop environment that does that.

However, this doesn't mean that Gnome should try to be this too. If it tries to, it will lose. KDE's software base is absolutely huge, and it's all controlled from a series of close-nit projects. Gnome would struggle to match that style of development.

Gnome's advantage is that is simpler and less complex. It is my view, Gnome should be a like a good text-book; it is complete not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away.

Free software is about choice. You don't have a real choice when both options put before you are the same. The differences between open-source projects are not weakness but strengths. Being different allows you to choose your software according to your needs; it allows you to adapt.

Simon.

Re:am I missing something here?

[FudRucker]

RE:["why don't you make a lighter, faster gnome"]

http://www.xfce.org/ = a lighter, faster gnome...

Re:am I missing something here?

[samkass]

I assume you're with the crowd that are (mis)using Slashdot's tagging feature to make editorial comments about window transitions not being a "feature". It's kind of ironic, because some of those same people will, at times, talk about Linux's viability as a desktop operating system, where utility of transitions are immense. In fact, transitions are probably one of the more valuable HCI movements lately, and give users great feedback as to what happened to their data/windows and where they went. All the way back to the Newton's "crumpling paper" when things were thrown away, Apple has been using them to great effect. When minimizing something to the dock in MacOS X, it's an extremely good way of showing the user where they can find it later.

Considering my 6-year-old PowerPC-based Mac can do them just fine, I think keeping things "lean" for lean's sake is counterproductive. All the visual aspects should be analyzed from a consistency and return-on-performance factor, and while transitions may have been too expensive to performance at some point, nowadays they're virtually free and a great tool.

Re:am I missing something here?

[VValdo]

When last I used GNOME, Sawfish was the default GNOME window manager. Before that, it was Enlightenment. I haven't followed GNOME for a while, maybe they've changed the WM again.

For a while now (since 2.2) the default WM has been Metacity.

W

Re:am I missing something here?

[ChristTrekker]

Anything that is a complete desktop environment probably doesn't meet most people's definition of low cruft, but if there is one that makes that cut in the free software world, I'd vote for XFCE. [...] If you really want low cruft, though, you need to really run just a window manager. Fluxbox and IceWM are a couple of very good choices in that area.

Between those "extremes" are even-lighter desktops like Étoilé and EDE, and somewhat-heavier WMs like Enlightenment. Lots of options in the X11 world. Readers may want to take a look at this comparison to start.

Re:am I missing something here?

[NotZed]

Oh if only CORBA were the problem - corba is actually quite light-weight in C. It isn't really any worse than gtk+ is (these days) - and probably lighter for the facilities it provides (e.g. == gtk+ + d-bus + other things). Although more work for the coder, but not 10x more work.

Bonobo was just a bad idea though, too fine-grained for what CORBA does, and hell it was based on fucking COM, so it was always a dumb idea ... Most of the problem was with the design of the CORBA api's used in gnome. Not enough experience at the start, definitely not enough focus on performance, and then left with a legacy that everyone hated. Too many synchronous apis, and too many one-return methods, rather than async and batched, etc.

Re:am I missing something here?

[chromatic]

Because of this so hailed 'flexibility' I now have to install two *complete* desktop environments, just because the program I want to use happens to use 'the other one'.

That sounds like a packaging bug to me, honestly. Even if your KDE- or QT-based torrent client did mark dependencies on all of KDE, certainly having your package manager download all of the dependencies correctly is a huge advantage over almost all software installation I've seen on other platforms.

Re:am I missing something here?

[Excelsior]

First, can you not wait to see the result before jumping to the bloat criticism.

Secondly, the world does want eye candy (see OSX or the IPhone). Gnome is competing with OSX, Vista, KDE 4, and others. In comparison, Gnome is behind in the eye candy department.

I know I've converted more people to Linux by showing them Compiz/Beryl/Compiz Fusion than anything else, by far. When I show them Avant Window Navigator and Compiz in the same desktop, they are snatching the live CD from my fingers. Like it or not shell huggers, eye candy sells.

When you say "do we need more eye candy", I guess you are referring to the "we" that is 0.8% of the browsing public using Linux. In that case, I guess "we" don't need eye candy. But "I" would like to see more people interested in open source and free(dom) software, and eye candy in Linux is one of the best ways to make that happen.

Re:am I missing something here?

[mandelbr0t]

I have a powerful enough machine that the eye-candy doesn't slow things down. Compiz+GNOME can be configured to look very sharp indeed. It's not OSX, it's definitely not Windows, but I'd have no problem convincing someone that it's a very useable desktop environment. There's alternatives for people who don't like GNOME. As one who likes the look and feel and has had very few problems, I'm most looking forward to improved PSP support in Rhythmbox and MythTV support in Totem. Moving to libswfdec seems to be a good idea. I had GNASH installed, but I switched since seeing the article, and other than a missing symlink, no problems with FLASH support. The Flash-block behavior is ideal for me, who hates "Punch-the-Monkey" popping up all over the place.

Re:am I missing something here?

[jhol13]

The problem with all those animations is that I really, *REALLY* hate them. All of them.

I have never ever seen a single "windows transition" or any other animation which does not look boring when you it the second time and annoying when you see it third time. BTW Compiz is the worst, the wobbly windows makes me want to puke.

When minimizing something to the dock in MacOS X, it's an extremely good way of showing the user where they can find it later. Are you implying that it goes to a different place every time? If yes, it is a horrible misfeature (minimize ten windows and try to remember where all went ...). If no, I will remember it the second time and after that information content of the silly animation is zero. But the animation is still silly and still annoying.

Re:khtml

[N3TW4LK3R]

AFAIK, the KDE team is also switching to Apple's fork of KHTML, WebKit.

KHTML is very good of course, but it wouldn't make sense to switch to an engine that's going to be made obolete soon.

Gnome's notable improvements

[Colin Smith]

Just encouraged me to switch to XFCE...

And people say there should be a single desktop...

Re:Epiphany? Really?

[ozamosi]

I used to. And my Gnome using friends that I've talked into trying it still use it.

Compared to Firefox, it's prettier (if you think "fancy colors and icons" is more important than "consistent", you'll disagree), is much better integrated into Gnome, has much nicer "search engine support" (type in the address field, and your installed search engines are at the end of the auto complete list - please, someone, give me a firefox extension for that!), and has a quite nice tag based bookmarking system which can be synchronized with del.icio.us or ma.gnolia.com. All of that, and just a fraction of the memory of Firefox.

I stopped using it approximately the same time as they switched backend, and now use Firefox 3 instead - it doesn't swallow all memory (only almost all), and it actually looks more integrated into Gnome, than Epiphany with a Gecko backend (the times I tried Epiphany/Webkit, it didn't really work yet) since it's not only has a native theme, it also has native form controls (which Epiphany/Webkit apparently has too, but not Epiphany/Gecko). It also works with Online Desktop, and has the famous extensions, which makes up for the other downsides of not using Epiphany.

In other words: people are actually using Epiphany, but I don't think they will for long.

filechooser ?

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

my pet peevee with _any_ GTK based app is the filechooser.

it's ugly and far from intuitive.

there's a wrapper aplication that allows some GTK apps use KDE's filechooser, but it doesn't work with everyting.

if GTK developers really don't wan't to fix this, could they at least put something to allow the use of KDE's dialogs when the app is not running under gnome ?

BTW, the wrapper is here: http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=36077

Re:filechooser ?

[NotZed]

Umm, newsflash, the kde (or windows) file chooser isn't 'intuitive' either - fuck, they're not even easy to use.

The gnome one is awful, but so are the rest. I mean for fucks sake, in windows you double-click too slow and suddenly you're renaming files! Who wants to rename a file when opening it?

Re:Gedit wish list...

[deanlandolt]

I'm running 2.20.3 on Ubuntu Gutsy...

when working on an indented line and press enter, the next line is indented the same distance. Edit > Preferences > Editor > Enable automatic indentation

When the cursor is next to a bracket (brace, etc.) {([ ])}, or even quotes ' " " ', it highlights one that matches it. Edit > Preferences > View > Highlight matching bracket I'm not sure when the features came in, but perhaps you need a minor version upgrade?

Re:epiphany?

[h4rm0ny]

Epiphany is a good browser. I started using it a while ago because I found that it didn't lock up when browsing Slashdot whilst Firefox 2 did (both on Ubuntu platform). I've recently ended up using Konqueror as I have a Kubuntu install this time round and I find it similarly faster than Firefox.The odd thing is, I didn't have any extensions in Firefox at the time, either. Anyway - Epiphany is very good and I suspect quite a lot of Gnome users use it.

Transition effects = good

[thatblackguy]

For the proverbial 'year of the Linux desktop' this is the sort of thing that we need. The flashy stuff might not matter to the slashdot crowd but to the average joe, the cosmetic improvements itself would be a reason to consider linux. We just had that article about better designed GUI's rating over better functioning programs, looks like the Gnome developers have taken that to heart.

filechooser is terrible...

[neapolitan]

Was going to mod you up, but I'll reply instead (sorry!).

I completely agree.

The GNOME filechooser is an abomination. It is one of the reasons that Linus Torvalds uses KDE, and the reason that no sane person will touch GNOME.

1. COMPLETELY unintuitive (and difficult to get used to) initial layout. Instead of having an area with the file name that you can type in, there is simply a three-panel directory. What happens if you start typing? Some weird mystery box appears that is right on top of your filter dialog, which is unlabeled!

Want to type part of the filename? Go ahead, but as soon as you make a selection to change to a different directory, it is gone! What's more, if you were in a Save dialog, the default value is now gone forever.

2. The CANCEL and OK buttons are reversed from almost all other GUIs. Cancel to the left? Cancel above OK? What???

3. Windows-like distrust of any other directories other than your home. Want to save something in /usr/local? Well, go to "File System" first so you can then access your root.

Numerous other issues (resize behavior -- the whole dialog moves if you change file type), etc. prevent me from using this, EVER.

For those linux readers using firefox, a simple fix is to go to about:config and change ui.allow.platform.filepicker to FALSE. Do it now, for your own sanity.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[sayfawa]

I have to agree. I don't like to diss open source products, but man, out of several years of using Gnome I just haven't ever had a good thing to say about Totem.

But an interesting anecdote is that my flatmate recently converted to Linux. He was a Windows "power user", not afraid of getting into any aspect of the system, and he's the same now with Linux. And he is actually completely satisfied by Totem. "But don't you find that it never plays anything properly, ever?" I asked him. "Nope, it plays everything I throw at it" he tells me. I've seen it too. Weird how experiences can vary so much.

Re:epiphany?

[xiaomai]

Yeah, epiphany is great. Much faster and more stable than firefox, plus it has native widgets instead of XUL. It's support for extensions is not as good, so I still use firefox when I need Firebug, but 99% of the time I'm in epiphany.

Re:Epiphany? Really?

[julian67]

Best browser I've ever used. Does tabs better than Firefox, smart bookmarks better than Firefox, starts faster than Firefox, uses less RAM. I don't need any of the numerous Firefox plug ins so Epiphany is fine. It also fits well in other desktop environments (I use Xfce). A brilliant web browser imo.

Removed .NET yet?

[metamatic]

Any chance that they've removed the dependency on Microsoft's patented .NET technologies via Mono?

(Yes, I know you can manually remove bits of the Gnome environment to get rid of Mono; but the Gnome environment by default includes Mono.)

Switching to WebKit?

[daemonc]

"In order to use the WebKit backend, Epiphany must be built with the --with-engine=webkit argument."

That sounds more like WebKit is available, as an option, if you are compiling from source, than "switching" to me...

Re:epiphany?

[ksheff]

That's what I originally liked about galeon. I haven't tried either versions after one of the galeon developers left and started epiphany.

GDM Greeter

[BadHaggis]

One thing I haven't seen listed here is the rewrite of the GDM. While the core GDM is being rewritten it will not be included with Gnome 2.22 in Ubuntu, Mandriva, and Gentoo. These three main stream distributions have already stated in the GDM mail list that they will stay with the 2.20 version of GDM.

The reasons stated for these distributions not including the 2.22 GDM are configuration issues, lack of a themed login, GDM Configuration tool and lack of testing. While many areas of Gnome are receiving improvements the GDM is one of those areas where there is a significant enough degradation that distros are not including it.

The new version of the GDM may be several release versions away and ultimately be less functional than the current version. I don't necessarily call that an improvement.

Re:khtml

[cozziewozzie]

Why webkit over khtml ? To avoid the irony ? Most likely because KHTML uses Qt internally, and Webkit took the Qt dependency out, and is therefore probably easier to integrate with GTK.

Re:filechooser is terrible... not that bad

[Clansman]

Nothing like as bad as you make out.

What happens if you start typing is not "a mystery" but simply type ahead.

I just tried it - I have a file on my desktop called test.txt.

I open the chooser dialog in Firefox. I type 'de' and desktop is now highlighted. The mystery box is showing you what you have typed so far. I hit enter to go into desktop, then type te and test.txt is highlighted. I hit enter to open it.

And if i try it a second time it remembers where i was last so now just "ctrl-o te enter" and i have opened that file again.

really fast, really good - you just haven't tried it properly, mate :-)

Re:Epiphany? Really?

[ozamosi]

I know I'm being unfair that way - I tried to make it clear what versions I was comparing, but you're right. The comparison is unfair.

But the thing is, I don't think either Epiphany/Gecko 1.9 or Epiphany/Webkit will be That much of a difference to existing Epiphany. It will render more sites better, and with less resource use. I don't feel very excited. I mentioned a bunch of advantages of Firefox 3 in the GP post.

The thing is, Firefox 2 is quite crap, Epiphany 2.20 is mostly great, and Firefox 3 is quite good. Fancy extensions can't turn crap into something great. Fancy extensions can turn something good into something great, though. The only reason I started using Firefox again was because I wrote webpages and needed to access Firebug, and eventually, I just didn't feel like restarting the browser anymore. I could probably code that search engine extension myself - I've played a bit with creating Firefox extensions, and it's quite easy to rewrite the entire UI. On the other hand, I still haven't found a way to make Epiphany's tabs shrink, which annoys the hell out of me.

Firefox 3 is, in my opinion, simply Good Enough to make Epiphany pointless. But I'm probably, and hopefully, wrong.

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[MBGMorden]

What I don't get with the VAST majority (I'd say "all", but there may be an exception I don't know about) is why clicking on a spot in the "progress bar" for a video or song doesn't take me to exactly the spot. The seeker just jumps forward or backward a little in that direction. I can take it and DRAG it to the exact spot, but it won't jump there on a click.

This aggravates me to no end. Quicktime on my Mac gets it right. Windows Media Player even gets it right (though I instead use Media Player Classic on Windows, but it does it right too). I'm not even asking for this to be default behaviour - but for all the touted "customizability" of Linux apps, I sure as hell would like a little checkmark to enable this behavior somewhere in the program.

I've STILL not found a media player on Linux that I really like. Media Player Classic is the pinnacle of video player for me, but really all I want is a window, plays video, seek bar that goes to the location that I tell it, and I want my controls part of the same window as the video (I'll go full screen if I want to hide them). Get me that packaged into a program that doesn't crash when I play videos (a la VLC playing any WMV video on Mac :() an I'll be tickled pink.

Rant off :).

Re:Different designs

[Otter]

Whereas with Gtk+ (and GNOME, and XFCE, etc) or EFL (the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) it's pretty easy to write bindings for other languages, like Perl or C++ or Objective-C (far superior to C++, IMNSHO) or LISP or (insert your favorite language here). That makes GNOME much more egalitarian than KDE.

I find it hard to understand why someone who likes C would then dislike C++ enough to base a toolkit decision on that, especially given the quirky C required for Gtk+, but that aside...

There are, in fact, Qt bindings for C, Objective C, Ruby, Java and many other languages. (QtPython is probably the most widely used.) I'm not sure why you think it's so much more difficult to write bindings for a C++-based API.

File Roller

[bob.appleyard]

I am a GNOME user. And I like it. It's all good. With one exception: the "File Roller" application, which is used to examine archives.

Using it is basically a chore. You open it up, and you get a list of files. So, you think, it's just a matter of dragging those files into a directory you want, and it'll extract them there. Oh no. Total rejection. So you click on "extract," and if you're already in the directory you want to extract those files into, you have to leave that directory, and then re-enter it, before the OK type button (it's also called "extract") actually does anything.

I'm very lazy. I don't want to have to open a terminal window, navigate to the necessary directory, and run tar or whatever in order to get at my files. File Roller makes me do that due to its problems of usability. I suppose I could try looking for something that integrates with GNOME better, but this is part of the package, it should already be integrated.

Re:No contents in moving windows

[NotZed]

a gconf-tool now there's a great user-friendly interface.

a registry on linux! yay!

Re:A Notable Improvement would be ditching Totem..

[Anonymous Bullard]

Middle-click works here as designed.

Re:Different designs

[Anonymous Coward]

There are, in fact, Qt bindings for C, Objective C, Ruby, Java and many other languages. (QtPython is probably the most widely used.) I'm not sure why you think it's so much more difficult to write bindings for a C++-based API.

Maybe because he's used them. As somebody who was written (and maintained) large programs in both PyGTK and PyQt, I must say that these projects are a great argument in favor of using plain C.

The PyGTK project, for the past several years, has released an update to its bindings within a month of the corresponding GTK+ library. PyQt's last version lagged by about a year. (Not a good sign.) Long after the Qt people had gone to Qt 4.0, we were stuck with PyQt for Qt 3.3, because that's the latest stable release. (It was even hard to get PyQt fixes, because the few PyQt developers spent almost all of their time trying to get PyQt 4 out the door.)

PyGTK has always done just what I expected it to. In PyQt, we always seemed to have trouble with object lifetimes. Qt tried to be just a bit too clever with C++ destructors and object lifetimes and such, and it just didn't translate into HLLs. Between this, and needing to pass C++ method signatures (as a string!) to signal handlers, you really had to write C++-in-Python. It's not really possible to write PyQt code without constantly thinking about the C++ layer. In GTK, I never thought about C: I just wrote Python with a Python GUI library.

I also find the phrase "quirky C required for Gtk+" funny. The C used by GTK+ has always seemed perfectly normal to me. If you want quirky, take a look at the "meta-object compiler" (yet another preprocessor!) that Qt's C++ uses.

Re:Epiphany? Really?

[jetxee]

I use epiphany daily and find it much better designed than FF2 or even FF3 betas.

The killer feature in Epiphany for me is its tag-based bookmarking system. They really got it right. Places in FF3 is an attempt to catch-up, but it still has a long way to go.

I also like that URL and search box are the same thing in Epiphany. When I remember URL, I enter URL, when I want to search, I enter search request. Creating a "Smart bookmark" in Epiphany is much faster and easier than packing search engine plugin in FF. Thanks to this feature, my Epiphany is much better integrated with the sites I use.

What else? Epiphany starts faster and is more resonsive, its fonts are OK by default like in all GNOME applications (no need to tweak them like in FF), it respects GNOME settings. It is not bloated. Punto.

Earlier I lacked good adblocking extension for Epiphany. Nowdays it covers my needs. I know not all FF greasemonkey scripts work in Epiphany, but the only one I use on Flickr works well.

P.S. I still use gecko engine. I tried webkit-based engine, but found it not-ready-for-daily-use-yet. Probably it's gotten better today. Fortunately, switching rendering engines in modern Epiphany is easy for the end-user.