Now that Google Chrome is finally coming to Linux we have a simple and fast Webkit browser. It is also opensource and uses GTK. So where is the need for Epiphany? One may say that it might better integrate with the rest of GNOME, but currently Empiphany is about just as integrated as Chrome and I guess it would be easier integrating Chrome wih GNOME than making Epiphany a good browser…
No. Chrome may use Gtk+, but it is still uses custom widgets and looks like an alien in any OS.
I for one really like the Epiphany browser. There are already some nice plugins and extensions for it (something that can’t be said at this point about gChrome, or even Chromuim), and it’s become a perfect primary browser for me. gChrome/Chromium? Definitely not there yet, as I can’t even set a custom home page and make it stick (the bugger keeps getting changed back, even in a single session). But more importantly I really dislike the UI for Chrome. It’s simply too darned Spartan for my taste, and I can’t see that changing enough even as they get everything coded the way they are planning on doing.
It’s not even a matter of integration with GNOME for me, it’s a matter of refusing to let me work the way I already work. I dumped Firefox 3 to the bottom of my browser stack because they wanted to shove too many changes from the long-standing default down my throat, and gChrome isn’t looking like it is doing mych differently.
Wake me when Chrome works in 64-bit. I didn’t spend the last 6 years waiting for a usable arch-native environment on modern computers to go back to the idiot days of 32-bit browsers on 64-bit distros