Epiphany (browser)

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This article is about the web browser. For other uses, see Epiphany.


Epiphany
Epiphany 2.14.2.1 showing the Wikipedia homepage
Maintainer:	GNOME
Stable release:	2.18.0 (11 March 2007) _[+/-]
Preview release:	SVN (Current) _[+/-]
OS:	Unix-like operating systems
Use:	Web browser
License:	GPL
Website:	www.gnome.org/.../epiphany

Epiphany is a web browser for the GNOME computer desktop. It is a descendant of Galeon.

It is one of a family of web browsers that use the Gecko layout engine from the Mozilla project to display web pages. It provides a GNOME integrated front-end to Gecko, instead of the Mozilla XUL interface. Like many Gecko-based browsers, Epiphany supports tabbed browsing, cookie management, popup blocking and an extensions system. Epiphany can be extended with the Epiphany-extensions package.

Whilst most browsers feature a hierarchical folder-based bookmark system, Epiphany uses categorised bookmarks, where a single bookmark (such as “Epiphany”) can exist in multiple categories (such as “Web Browsers”, “GNOME”, and “Computer Software”). Special categories include bookmarks that have been used frequently (“Most Frequent”) and bookmarks that have not yet been categorised. This is similar to the planned Firefox 3.0 Places feature which will integrate bookmarks and history into a SQLite database. Another innovative concept supported by Epiphany (though originally from Galeon) is “Smart Bookmarks”. These take a single argument specified from the address bar or from a textbox in a toolbar.

Epiphany was developed from Galeon by Marco Pesenti Gritti (also the initiator of Galeon) with the aim of making a fully GNOME Human Interface Guidelines compliant web browser and a very simple user experience. As a result, Epiphany does not have its own theme settings, like Firefox—it uses GNOME’s settings that are specified in the GNOME Control Center.