A small plea to remember screen ratios which are *not* wider than they are tall, in the case of Hylke / Garrett’s design. I have my screens in portrait orientation. A sidebar-centric design would leave me with a very narrow view of the actual page.

Thanks for the update. I am about to try the prototype (if jhbuild doesn’t choke on any required package), however:

– From what I see here, I really, seriously miss the URL bar. I very often use it to copy & paste URLs or type them directly (and it doesn’t make sense to make a bookmark for a use-once URL, e.g., when testing a website and stuff); it’s not essential to have it on all the time, but I’d appreciate if it wasn’t necessarily always hidden behind a mouse click or CTRL+L. An option to turn it on permanently (just like the location bar in Nautilus) would be acceptable tho.

– Speaking of which: where is the ‘Preferences’ button/menu entry? Will the Web configuration window(s) be folded into gnome-control-center?

– Easy cut-copy-paste for mouse users?

– Is the design really suited to large bookmark collections? It is likely to require quite some scrolling to get what you want. Typing to filter the icon view is fine as long as you remember *something* about the bookmark you are looking for. Which brings me to …

– What about bookmark categories/tags? In epiphany, I use them heavily to quickily find the pages I need (by prefixing the bookmark name with multiple [$FOO] tags, say “[GNOME] [Jhbuild] Manual”) but they are not exactly well-integrated in epiphany (you have to go to the Bookmark Editor and use the mouse… gah ) It would be nice to get them right from the start.

– Seriously now, NO TABS??? Just kidding Anyway, I take that CTRL+PageUp/PageDown won’t work anymore, right? The workflow depicted in the GNOME Live page looks more complex than that (involves exiting to the overview page, hopefully with a key press, TABbing, etc.) I often work with two close tabs (similar to using :vs in vim) and switch between them with the aforementioned key combinations to easily compare/reread/check out references/etc. The sidebar in the GUADEC design seems a sensible way to lay out tabs, and would support this kind of switch-between-close-tabs workflow.

- Off-topic but on my wishlist: integrated online bookmark syncing?

I really appreciate the lets-try-a-working-prototype-and-make-it-public workflow. It renders the design process a bit more controllable. Thanks for doing it.

Hi, I thought of a great solution for my problem of having hundreds of tabs open. In chrome it’s possible to drag the tab out
and make a new window. What if you would drag the tab down and a drawer would open below the location bar with
categories you have chosen. And with that the tab would close and be added to the category. Let me ascii art it out for you:

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One thing that I desire that is not so UI-oriented is to have epiphany be able to replicate Google Chrome’s ability block plugins-by-default.

This is invaluable.

I depend on some things that are undesirable to have running on untrusted websites. Things like Java and Flash. I really do not want to trust my browser to run those as they are not safe. In the past I would have two browsers. One with the plugins enabled and one with it disabled. Later on browsers like Firefox and Chrome could use flashblock-type extensions to disable flash elements on the website. However, like pop-up blockers, they were not perfect and did not stop everything.

Chrome’s ability to simply block all plugins at the browser level is vastly superior approach.

From a usability standpoint one of things to keep in mind is that many websites will not display a ‘blocked plugin’ of ‘flash block’ type icon on many flash elements. They are hidden, or possibly behind other elements, or the website has javascript that tries to take into account users that are not using flash. So having the ability to enable plugin support for a entire DNS name is important.

Thank you. I hope in the future Epiphany will be caught back up to were Firefox and Chrome are. I enjoyed using it in the past.

Here is how you enable blocked plugins on Chrome:
http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=142064

I think epiphany does indeed need a redesign, so I’m glad this is happening, that said, it’d be nice if this effort went towards applications that REALLY need help (like GIMP/Pitivi–those are extremely complicated apps that could really use the help of gnome and additionally FLOSS doesn’t really have great answers to photoshop/vegas–making yet another web browser doesn’t seem like the best use of resources, but you’ve already questioned this with your comment about what “Web” actually offers).

A few comments:
1)the sidebar doesn’t make much sense to me– you typically wouldn’t use that while are browsing (hence the use of Back rather than Close)– since GS requires compositing take advantage of it and use an overlay– this is something that firefox should do but I suppose they don’t since they can’t assume compositing;really, I see no reason to force tab views into such a tiny area
2)related to the previous comment are the tiny close buttons on the sidebar tabs– those look similar in size to GS’s overview close buttons and those too are hard to hit (for me)–however if you use an overview you can use a different UI element to close windows (what I would prefer is something like android 4′s swiping to left or right, or in our case, dragging to the screen edge, and perhaps offer the option to use the lasso to close bunches of minmapped windows at once)
3)not having an explicit url bar is confusing (I think this was taken from honeycomb, and it is confusing there as well)–one shouldn’t have to scrub the page to figure out what is clickable, and, moreover, having somehthing that highlights as a button doesn’t scream “CLICK ME! I turn into a text input area!”
4)the name Pages doesn’t connote, to me, that all my open web pages are there– in fact, I clicked on it not knowing what to expect
5)I don’t know what the far right icon is supposed to do– it must be of extreme importance and something that you must use since it is one of only 5 UI elements but it is off to the side…it seems strange
6)I don’t know what Queue is for
7)I don’t know which pages are active or not, and it’s not clear how to bookmark a page
8)in Pages it wasn’t immediately obvious how to get back to the page I was just on… I spent a few moments looking for a Back button, then despaired, and eventually realised it must be one of the minmaps below (but trying to figure out which minmap is which isn’t easy if you are looking at pages primarily composed of text)

In short, please, take advantage of GS’s technology, otherwise there is no point in creating a browser that is basically like Chrome/Firefox expect without their advantages (plugins/speed). If you want to go the route of apple-like integration you need to do it in a way that nothing else can without using your platform. For Apple, they use quartz for rendering (not just displaying like is currently done) so scrolling is super snappy. They integrate core audio/video so multimedia works seamlessly in browser. I’m sure there’s more but I don’t use apple often enough to pick out the finer points, but if you start with those things you will automatically offer a better linux experience than ANY other browser on linux.
As for the interface, think about what people do on the web, then think about what you’d LIKE to be able to do. For me, I’d like gestures so I wouldn’t have to keep trying to click tiny buttons (you really only need a few to capture the majority of actions, and they can be simulated by right-clicking and doing a gesture is the PC itself doesn’t support gestures). I’d also like a way of grouping pages together, like tasks, and being able to only view the pages in that area (firefox does something similar, but it is a little clumsy). This would be an in browser version of GS’s window management, obviously, so it should make sense to introduce as few new control methods as possible (but no less than are needed).

Best/Liam

If minimalism is what we want, then lets get rid of back/forward buttons.

When I have “feeling” that I will need to go back somewhere (e.g. search results) I open links in new tabs. Perhaps the new Epiphany could do something smart here such that going explicit back/forward buttons are not needed.

A. Automatically open a new “page” when switching domains (leaving the origin page open in your pages overview).
B. Or just present the complete navigation history nicely in the pages overview (i think there’s some overlap here with A)

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