www.lewiz.org

I’ve been using the Epiphany web browser recently, which is the supposed default GNOME browser. It’s a lot like Firefox in many ways as it uses the same rendering agent, looks fairly similar and so on.

However, it’s lacking in a few areas that make it not quite ready for prime time. That said, epiphany-extensions now includes AdBlock, which brings it a great deal closer to Firefox.

It’s far faster, uses less memory and doesn’t crash as much. It’s a nice browser on the whole… but I think I’ll be switching back to Firefox as soon as the Ubuntu packages get fixed. I’ll keep my eye on Epiphany, though, as there is a lot of promise!

This stuff just keeps getting better and better. Finally the nasty bug with (I presume) totem-xine, nvidia-glx and Xinerama whereby the “Leave fullscreen” and current progress dialogue never disappears has been fixed. This isn’t GNOME 2.13.3, per se, just an update to totem, which is a part of GNOME. This is great as it means I don’t have to kick in my nasty workaround.

Watching GNOME development is one of the most most amazing things I’ve seen. I guess it might be like the Linux kernel development but in a way that you can see things change almost in real-time. It’s very impressive.

Woohoo! Another great little extra thanks to GNOME 2.13.3… Eye of GNOME, the standard GNOME image viewer now works a lot more like the Windows image viewer; something which I have heralded for quite some time (apart from the nasty automatic saving of rotated images).

I can now use the previous/next buttons to view other images in the same directory. If that wasn’t enough there is also an “Image Collection” feature, which displays thumbnails of all images in the directory (I don’t think Windows does this). If they could go ahead and integrate a directory tree then it’d be a great replacement for gthumb, my current image viewer.

Excellent!

As part of the Ubuntu Dapper Drake Development Release I’m now running the GNOME 2.13.3 unstable release on my desktop (and soon my laptop). Unstable isn’t quite the word for it; development would be better.

Dapper is, most of the time, quite a bit speedier than the last Ubuntu release. There have been quite a few major changes (a new Linux kernel, X11R7, GNOME, etc.) so far and Dapper is really starting to look good.

But this post was mainly to mention that thanks to GNOME 2.13.3 I now have sane desktop icons! Yes! Long gone (well…) are the days where plugging a USB disk in caused an icon to appear over the top of another icon. There was much rejoicing!

The taskbar entries also seem to be a bit more sane, too. Previously they had a nasty habit of cramming together at one end, wasting lots of space. I’m not certain yet, but this release seems to have gone a long way towards fixing it.

Thank you GNOME and Ubuntu guys!