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Thursday, December 27th, 2007

Epiphany & Firefox on Ubuntu

I've not noticed before, but Epiphany is dependent on Firefox. I know the two browsers both use the same Gecko rendering engine, however I still wasn't expecting to get both when I installed the epiphany-browser package. Is Firefox really needed in its entirety?

While on the subject of Epiphany, contrary to some bug reports, Epiphany's inline spell checking feature was not on by default. To turn it on:

1. Enter "about:config" into the address bar and hit enter

2. Enter "spell" in the filter box and change settings to:

Preference Name                                   Status     Type       Value
---------------------------------------------     --------   -------    -----
extensions.spellcheck.inline.max-misspellings     default    integer    500
layout.spellcheckDefault                          user set   integer    1
spellchecker.dictionary                           user set   string     en_GB

Also, the inline spell checking doesn't seem to offer suggestions for misspelled words. Is there a fix for this?

Tagged with: software, ubuntu

7 Responses to “Epiphany & Firefox on Ubuntu”

Eetu wrote, Friday, December 28th, 2007

"Is Firefox really needed in its entirety?"

Back in the good old Galeon/Mozilla days I think there was some talk about not necessarily needing the whole Mozilla in the future, but there haven't been any changes to that.

You'd have to ask an Epiphany developer, but my guess is that GtkMozEmbed (the embedding widget Epiphany uses) never really got the attention it was supposed to get. Which makes me ever more eager to get my hands on a stable Epiphany/Webkit. (Which I hear won't be in Hardy. Damn it.)
Christer Edwards wrote, Friday, December 28th, 2007

I have been wondering the same thing about the dependency on Firefox. I would actually like to just remove Firefox from my machine and strictly use Epiphany, but removing one removes the other. If you find out the reason, or a fix please let me know.
Philip wrote, Friday, December 28th, 2007

@Christer: The dependency is really noticeable when you attempt to build a system starting from the Ubuntu base packages.

Regarding a fix, I've not found one, at least not for Ubuntu. However, it looks as if the Debian developers have already worked this one out; Epiphany on Debian used to depend on the entire Mozilla suite. It now looks like it depends on the Gecko engine library. From the change log:
- New upstream release.
- Apply patch from Mike Hommey to enable building against the new libxul packages (closes: #351976).
  - debian/control.in:
  - Changed Build-deps from mozilla-browser to libxul-dev.
  - Changed epiphany-browser's dependencies and conflicts accordingly.
  - debian/rules: Add —with-mozilla=xulrunner to the configure line.
  - debian/patches/05_xulrunner.patch: Correctly detect libmozjs location.
- The above removes epiphany's much hated dependency on mozilla-browser, and closes: #271582).
- debian/rules: don't overwrite DEB_CONFIGURE_EXTRA_FLAGS.
- debian/control.in:
  - conflict with epiphany-extensions (« 1.8.2-5) to ensure we get a xulrunner-enabled build.
— Jordi Mallach jordi—AT—debian—DOT—org Mon, 20 Feb 2006 20:39:59 +0100
Christoph Langner wrote, Friday, December 28th, 2007

Right now Epiphany can't display alternatives for mispelled words, take a look at this bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501876
Ken VanDine wrote, Sunday, December 30th, 2007

That is really a packager problem. Epiphany can be built against Firefox, but it is really rather silly when it can actually be built against xulrunner (which firefox is built against). In my opinion, that is a package bug in ubuntu and you should file a bug about that. I maintain epiphany in Foresight Linux and build it directly against xulrunner, works great and no firefox dependancy.

'—with-gecko=xulrunner' is the proper configure argument.
Naaman Campbell wrote, Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

I'm not trying to sound elitist, but why bother with Epiphany? (Insert beginning of witty debate here..)
Dejan wrote, Sunday, January 6th, 2008

Philip: You can build Epiphany against XULRunner for a while now. If I am not mistaken, Ubuntu uses Firefox as the "default" browser, so that must be the reason why developers opted to take the easy way out and build Epiphany against it. See: http://wiki.mozilla.org/XUL:Xul_Runner. However, far more insteresting is Epiphany built against webkit (a rendering engine based on Safari's WebCore). See: http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/WebKit

Naaman: Epiphany has some really nice features. E.g. its bookmarks handling is much better. Also, unlike Firefox, it is very accessible. The selling point for me was the fact that the interface was written in GTK, making it much nicer to work with. It also integrates (user-experience-wise) into GNOME better.

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