Why I'm Still On F12?

First, let me warn you that this is not an objective and exhaustive review of Fedora 13 but just a (hopefully) short list of things (both bad and good) I noticed while trying to use it and to add that most of the issues I'll talk about are bugs/odd features in upstream, so not Fedora's fault.

Evolution

I think it's fair to start with an app that I use most and that is most likely Evolution (especially its e-mail component). The UI is reworked and I'd say it both looks better and is more usable, it's almost pain to return to F12 Evolution's interface. On the flip side, IMAP backend has also been rewritten (or so I've heard) and it hits a dead end here and there and because of that, using Evolution isn't very smooth and joyful. So in short, with future releases there is high probability Evolution will be significantly better that what's in F12, but currently it's one of the pieces that blocks me from advancing to F13. Plus, I forgot to mention, Evolution lost the option to keep gpg passphrase stored during session.

Intel Video Driver

Well, this one's a little bit of pain. I've grown quite used to F12 which has been damn stable so fast, so X or even the whole notebook frozen was a big surprise. Seems the frozenness of whole system have been already fixed, but last time I were in updated F13 (about a week ago), I still managed somehow to endup with half-frozen X — I move with mouse, switch to tty, kill apps (without any graphical response though) or kill X completely. But only full reboot fixed it for good.

Nautilus

Another UI change. Generally it seems cleaner, but what irritates me is that I cannot keep the entry-like input for paths — I seem to be able to access it only via ctrl-l and after entering the path, it reverts back to the button mode. No good, no good.

Webkitgtk

This where the most goodness (from my point of view) went, albeit not exactly as I'd prefer it. Thanks to hard work the guys over at webkit and epiphany, epiphany now can store passwords, but as epiphany does not have sensible session saving (why the hell do I need to kill it to save session?) [and for some other reasons] I use midori, which however it does not seem to know how to save passwords (in web forms, not in web auth pop-ups). The rest of the goodness (I know about) is same for both browsers — html5 youtube flawless support (only fullscreen seems to be missing), html5 video tag finally has handler, sites (like anidb) which serve pages in compressed format are now supported and java applet (I've tried only the openjdk one) is almost working.

Gnome-keyring

In one word it behaves strange. Sometimes the keyring that should get unlocked at startups refuses to unlock, sometimes I get asked for new password for 'default' keyring, which however never gets created… This is incidentally also the last thing that shows when trying to start up gajim. The good thing is that thanks to this I started using emapthy with a chat theme from one of my favourite anime durarara >_<

Conclusion

Well, there are still some hick-ups that keep me from transferring from the probably best fedora release so far (F12) to F13 to feel the new awesomeness, and one thing to keep in my mind is: don't be lazy and finally fill the bugs you've encountered!

Alternatives to The Alternative

For some time now (some years to be more precise) all the open source world have been spinning around firefox when it comes to web browsers. There are even forks (ice weasel or something like that) or whatever they call it because a) it's apparently good and b) it's apparently not enough free (as in FLOSS). But as many of you who follows my blog know, it does not suit me for various reasons. One of the problems I see is too complex GUI, not very well integration into gnome (this one improved a lot during past releases), sluggishness, XUL, direction towards implementing useless stuff (like personas) instead of bringing actually useful extensions (like adblock) into the browser itself, localization handling (why the hell are languages treated as extensions?!!!). Firefox was originally supposed to be something like lightweight and speedy version of mozilla, but it's no longer truth.

When I first switched away from firefox I used epiphany, then webkit came along and I started testing it on midori, which in rather short time became my main web-browser. And then Google Chrome / Chromium came along and caused a little revolution (compare the simplistic Chromium with one toolbar, mostly occupied by some magic input field, with no menubar whatsoever with default firefox setup). Not only in UI, but also in stability — something on a page freezes? A (flash) plugin crashes? No worry, it will bring down only the tab in question, the browser itself remains working. And not to mention it started the competition in javascript speed.

The main purpose of this post is to shortly describe the three open source alternatives to Firefox I mentioned above and give a quick overview in what are they good and in what they aren't.

Epiphany

The main principle behind epiphany is (for good or bad) KISS (keep it simple, stupid) which already suggests in what it might be good and in what it might not. It's a very lightweight browser with a rather simple UI, it has a reasonable set of extensions (like AdBlock or Certificates management), search (via google) implemented in location bar, it's fast and very well integrated in gnome. On the flip side, it does not save session unless it crashes. Which is a major pita, but last time I checked, the authors were against implementing it. And thanks to it using webkitgtk engine, it supports html5 youtube (you'll need Fedora 13 version of webkitgtk, the one in Fedora 12 is too old). Alas, with the switch to webkit from gecko support for ftp were dropped, java is not (yet) supported, and some of the features (like password saving, or managing certificates) stopped working, but it's steadily getting better and I believe in Gnome 2.30, there will be no regressions compared to the older gecko version and tons of new features.

Midori

Another lightweight webkitgtk based webbrowser. As it uses same engine like epiphany, many things that I said about epiphany can be said about midori too — it's fast, it supports html5 youtube, java does not work, ftp protocol is not supported, web auth is integrated with gnome-keyring (thanks to libsoup backend) and it has the awesome webinspector. In addition, it comes with session saving, adblock, trash can for closed tabs, spellchecking in multiple languages, identity masking, and quite powerful means for UI optimizing (like it can hide menu bar, can display tabs on side as a list, can disable close button on tabs [they can be closed with middle-click], can hide status bar — location bar is then used for showing the hyperlinks destination, ...). And to add to that, it has customizable search implemented into its location bar – not only you can can search what you want on whatever search engine you've added, but you can also use keywords (e.g. when I write "j 友達" it will show me the word in jisho, "gi fedora" will redirect me to google images search for fedora etc.).

I could probably go on with this praise — after all midori is the web browser that suits my needs best and has the most usable / effective UI (IMHO) that I've come across.

Chromium

Well, I guess this one does not need much introduction. It's the opensource version of Google Chrome, it's based on webkit/chromium port, has a really simplistic, effective and usable UI — unless you open too many tabs. Then it becomes hell none of the zillions extension helped me out of. Plus, as the UI is heavily customized, it does not fit very well into gnome desktop, but I'd say it's really well designed. As I already mentioned, there are zillions of extensions (probably less than for firefox but still too much for me to be able to know even a tiny fraction of them) which can improve the already very good browser, and among which is not missing adblock and flashblock ;-) I quite fancy the xkcd view one. And like with other webkit based browsers — awesome webinspector, awesome speed, but also no ftp and java. Session saving and tabs undeleting is a sure thing, the already mentioned "magic location bar" works similarly like in midori.

It's possible to get html5 youtube working, but not with Fedora packages (for understandable reasons; I suspect though, that after it matures enough to get into fedora proper repos, there'll appear also something like chromium-nonfree in rpmfusion to fix that).



(note about the chromium title bar — if I cannot have chromium looking nice with plain gtk, I'll at least look at something that I fancy ;-))

HTML5 Youtube — Now in Fedora

I'm finally back to rawhide (the frozen one — i.e. Fedora 13; dual booting with F12 as it is still not over too stable :D). And since I follow webkit commits I noticed a while back that thanks to some of the work in the webkitgtk tree, html5 youtube should work [in theory]. So today I started epiphany, enabled html5 youtube and tried a video. A lo! it works:

Finally! Youtube without flash, with low CPU usage and actually working. Oh and as a sidenote: pages (like anidb) which send themselves encoded are now supported as well. Webkitgtk based browsers are becoming first class citizens finally. Java is the last non-working thing I'm aware of and work on it is also on it's way. Seems like I'll be able to get rid of firefox (which I still keep because of the problems with java) for good (or bad :D) in F13.

And thus the browser war hath started

Behold heathens, new web-browser hath descended upon the land of Fedora. Witness the few steps needed to deploy at FergyTech. The ultimate battle for superiority may begin. Who shall be the winner?

Well, that somehow summarizes my exitement. I wonder which browser I'll end-up with in Fedora 12 :-D For now, I am using simultaneously Midori (webkitgtk)

Epiphany (xulrunner)

and Chromium (webkit/chromium)

now ;-)

Btw. I just recently used firefox once again because of some download which worked only via firefox (I don't really know why though) and the page had an enormous amount of adds... well... to be fair... I got used again to displayed adds with midori (it's not possible yet to block adds in webkitgtk), but the experience with firefox was about five times worse... The amount of windows that popped up was just terrible... Well, I'd say that using firefox without AdBlock is in a sense equivalent to taking a stroll into underworld >_<

Maybe, I'll write a short review about those three above mentioned browses (plus epiphany 2.27 snapshot which uses webkitgtk instead of xulrunner) when I gain more experience with Chromium (so for now I'll keep the awesomeness of midori's location bar only hinted in the screenshot above ;-).

Libsoup now default in WebKit/GTK

Just a short notice that libsoup backend was set to be default backend for GTK port of webkit today. I am thrilled by this partly because the libsoup backend seems to behave much more better than the cURL one, and also it seems that most new features that are somehow connected with HTTP backend are being added only for the libsoup backend.

You can read some end-user comparison of the two backends in one of my previous posts.

One another great thing is the speed with which the GTK port is advancing now. Acording to one of the webkit and epiphany developers, Gustavo Noronha, WebKit/GTK might be the default backend for Epiphany in Gnome 2.28. That's Fedora 12! Whoa! I am already restless :-) More specifically he's asking us, the end users, to "come help us (the epiphany devs) test and get a regressionless Epiphany with WebKit/GTK+ for GNOME 2.28" Well, this might be worth a feature page for F12 ;-) And even though I am using Midori to test WebKit (I use epiphany as my primary web browser and it's rather inconvenient to keep two versions of epiphany installed; and I actually find Midori very interesting and light-weight) I think I will resume testing WebKit in Epiphany as soon as Fedora 12 development starts.

I've fell in love...

...with Ruby.

Yeah, I am neither proffesional nor studied programmer, but I like coding from time to time. I've learnt Pascal (Turbo Pascal implementation) and Delphi during my basic and high school studies and FreePascal and basics of C in my first year on University (we had a Programming for Physics classes). Then I switched to C completely as I started working on gtk-nodoka-engine and I love it, and even though I have basics in C++, I like C more. But lately a rather unexpected competitor came into my view - Ruby. Up until recently it was a hit-and-miss and frantical searching in documentation to get things done (I decided to make the echo-artist scripts in Ruby, since the code I based it off was already in Ruby), but now I decided to learn it properly and the more I read, the more I like it.

It's really a great programming language and truly Object Oriented one (unlike various "object oriented" hacks/workarounds/whatever of C, like Objective C or C++). You know it's great that everything is an object so you can easily do things like
100.times {puts 'I like Ruby!'} (prints "I like Ruby!" hundred times),
['Peter', 'Martin', 'Nicu'].each {|name| puts "Hi #{name}!"} (welcomes Peter, Martin and Nicu) or
1.upto(200) {|num| printf "Try #%05d\n", num} (if you know C you'll get what this does).
And I am just at the begining still...

And one usual rant at the end. Again I updated xulrunner and again epiphany started eating CPU... So I am again temporarily using WebKit backend in ephy... I hope WebKit-gtk gets the still missing functionality I need implemented soon so that I could get rid of gecko in my browser for good... (Yes, I've already gave up on gecko, but for WebKit I try my best with filling bugs I notice and RFEs). And of course, this post was also written from ephy with webkit backend.

Some WebKit news

Ok, with the recent talks about brand new browser by Google, I think I can post some "status-update" on the state of WebKit-gtk. Why? Because google chrome uses WebKit as its rendering engine - and that's very good news. With Google being directly interested in WebKit development we could say that bright future awaits. Google uses it, QT4.4 has it in, now we only need to implement it in gnome.

Among various speed and stability improvements there is one big news for me (at least) in the WebKit bugzilla. Patch [1] for correct font fallback (so far only for freetype backend) for the gtk port of WebKit [2]. I've built a RPM package [3] with this patch included and the result is great - I can finally read Japanese with WebKit.

One of the worse news is that it seems Epiphany 2.24 will still use gecko, well, what can I say... Take your time and do it right and I'll be happy to wait (and test and report bugs) :-p

[1] https://bugs.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=23155&action=view
[2] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16792
[3] http://mso.fedorapeople.org/packages/RPMS/i386/WebKit-gtk-1.0.2-0.15.svn35913.fc9.i386.rpm

Gecko is getting worse?!

First let me start with a simple statement: I wrote this post from Midori web-browser. If you'd like to guess why, read on.

I didn't want to write this particular post so soon, but I just couldn't hold it any more. In four hours of doing random stuff on computer, gecko managed to anger me to the point I just couldn't go to sleep before writing a rant about it.

First it started with Firefox only, now it's happening to Epiphany, too. Gecko is eating my CPU. I cannot explain why, I cannot tell when, because it's totally random. Just out of the blue, my laptop starts to be dreadfully slow, and until I kill epiphany, it stay such (well, I have never had the patience to wait more than 2 or 3 minutes, so in longer time it might fix itself).

Why ranting about it today? Because it happened twice and both when I was doing my favourite stuff. First I was sketching some echo icons (I'll perhaps write a post about those tomorrow) and suddenly inkscape started to be so slow that it was literally unusable. I wondered what happened to it, and after about 2 minutes I finally fired up system monitor to see if there is anything to see - and there was! Epiphany, which was on the background, on a different virtual desktop, was sucking up CPU. I killed it (I kill epiphany instead of closing it to keep my session saved) and inkscape immediately stared to behave normally.

Next, I was watching some series and in one of interesting scenes the video started playing so slowly that it was pretty quickly out of sync with audio. I went WHOA? My CPU should handle that well. So I paused the playing, got out of the fullscreen view and looked what was happening. Again, CPU was 100% used! While doing nothing! This time I fired up new tab in terminal and killed epiphany. CPU use immediately droped to 0% and I could watch the rest of the episode.

Why I rant about gecko and not epiphany? The reasons are simple - when xulrunner in Fedora was still 1.9b5, this thing happened to firefox. Quite cassualy. But epiphany was fine. BUT. After update to 1.9 final (and waiting for epiphany rebuild, because the mozilla guys again change something so that most xulrunner apps started crashing) epiphany started to suffer from this issue as well. I can only ask: what are you guys at mozilla doing? Preparing for next release? Putting random infinite loops to gecko code, so that you can remove some of them in next release and say it's faster and more efficient? Gah.

Anyway, don't take the last few senteces seriously, it's over too much exagerated what might be the worst case scenairo behaind the curtains ;-)

And why do I not file a bug against it?

• I am lazy


• Someone probably have done it already


• I'd rather spent my time debuging webkit than gecko


• I have better things to do than trying to figure out some random, hard to reproduce bug in gecko


• If I go crazy, I can use epiphany with webkit backend - even though it lacks some features I use, it works

And yeah, you might ask, isn't it a result of me having 50+ opened tabs assorted into 4 windows? My answer would be - old gecko handled it well, webkit handles it even better than that, why gecko 1.9 cannot?

And one random rant for the end: is it just me, or does firefox/gecko does not remember me being logged in here on the blog? It behaves like I am not logged, when I click log in, it quickly discovers I am already logged, but when I go back to my blog homepage it still thinks I am not logged in. WebKit does not suffer this issue, which makes my blog managing easier to do in webkit based browsers...

Update 1: On suggestion from Kevin Kofler, I hereby thank all the people involved in KHTML, WebKit, WebKit gtk port and epiphany for they hard work towards perfect *nix web-browser engine and lightwieght native-gtk web-browser :-) Well, I could also include konqueror folks, but for some reason I don't like it's UI...

Epiphany WebKit II.

Because there were some improvements lately both in epiphany and in WebKit-gtk I decided to write another post about it.

So far I can say it behaves quite nicely and seems subjectively faster than epiphany with gecko backend. Also due to epiphany-gecko instantly crashing after upgrade to xulrunner-1.9 it's also my default browser for the time being, so I guess I am quite acquainted with it already...

Since my last post I noticed especially these improvemets:

• zoom-text is now implemented and works, webkit-gtk also supports full zoom, so if anyone is interested, he's welcome to open new bug with necessary patch with relevant config option to epiphany at gnome bugzilla
  
  
• scrolling seems smoother, only when there are a lot of big images on the page or flash movie, it remains in old "non-smooth" mode. But with text only it is as smoth as it can be :-)
  
  
• and the most awesome is: find. Now finding text inside page is working flawlessly and it's damn fast, I remember in epiphany-gecko it's a bit laggy, but here as soon as you type one letter, you have half of the page content highlighted (in addition to selecting the first found matching text on the page, it also highlights all found matches) ;-)
  

And now the thing that bugs me most: the font fallback with either pango or fontconfig backend (fedora uses pango) is still crapy - and as a result I cannot read Japanese pages - in place of kanji or kana there is only white space :'(
The webkit guys seems to be aware of the problem but not quite apt to fix it, so if anyone with pango knowledge would help fix this bug he'd be praised by all japanese, chinese, korean, ... webkit-gtk users (and me) :-)

EDIT:
Irregular builds of webkit-gtk can be get at my fedora people page: http://mso.fedorapeople.org/packages/RPMS/i386/

Because debuginfo is a little too big, I do not ship it, but you can get it if you rpmbuild --rebuild the source rpm.

Epiphany WebKit I.

Because Epiphany is my favourite browser I am interested a lot in it's switch to WebKit backend in next release (2.24). So I decided to give it a go a watch how it improves along the road. First let me say, that the WebKit-gtk package available in repos is way too old to test cool new stuff, second it's still not in a state to be used as primary browser.

So I rebuild the WebKit-gtk rpms quite regularly when new release of WebKit snapshot happens. If anyone is interested, I can upload it to my fedora people page... Also from time to time I rebuild a local copy of epiphany - it does not have so fast development like WebKit, but I also want to keep my epiphany with gecko backend working...

And why I decided to blog about it? There are several reasons:

• To draw attention to WebKit and epiphany development


• It's cool


• Recently there were some radical improvements

So, what are the improvements I talk about? Mozilla plugins work now in WebKit as well which is cool. I can browse youtube videos without the need for gecko based browser with swfdec. It has one drawback though. Seems like epiphany keeps crashing when trying to load gcj web plugin, so I temporarily removed it, since I really don't need it ATM.

Another radical improvment (from user point of view) is fixed focus behaviour. Not so long ago, filling an entry on webpage, switching focus from web content to adress bar, creating new tabs or switching between tabs was sort of pain in the ass. Not any longer. Now it works just as expected.

Under the hood, they improved java script. People say it's about 4x faster than the older code and tests show that its also faster then Firefox's java script code. Kudos for that!

Last, but not least, I noticed that zoom function has been implemented. Finally, I can zoom text on pages (although, I don't use that function)...

And what are the currently most painful bugs/shortcomings of WebKit? For me it's those

• Broken font fallback (when font is supposed to be from sans-serif family, CJK glyphs are not displayed)


• Missing/Not working open in new window/tab actions


• Missing mimetype handling (i.e. unable to directly download anything)


• Missing features for ftp browsing (only some sort of unformated ls is showed)


• Does not remember passwords/unable to login when page uses pop-up window for authentication

With that said, I think WebKit is really powerful backend and when the gtk port, together with new epiphany version, is finished it will be great competitor for firefox, which does not seem to fit well into linux (from every POV I try to look at it, it always seem like windows oriented app), in the *nix field... Aaah, cannot wait for the time when I would be finally able remove gecko from my Fedora :-D

I hope to post more or less regularly about the improvements in Ephy-WebKit, so stay in touch :-)

BTW: this post was written from epiphany using webkit backend ;-)

Oh, and I just noticed that I can manage my blog when using webkit while gecko always thinks I am signed out. Hillarious. :-D