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Installing WebKit powered Epiphany on Ubuntu Hardy
The next version of Epiphany (it will be included in the future Gnome 2.24) will use WebKit engine by default. The WebKit rendering engine is mainly developed by Apple for their Safari browser and is based on the glorious KHTML, originally made by the honourable KDE Team.
The current version of Epiphany (2.22) is already supporting the WebKit engine, but it is not the default choice because of some issues which make Epiphany-WebKit not suitable for everyday browsing (e.g. embedded flash player). Anyway trying Epiphany-WebKit is a good chance to see whether this alternative is really faster as thay say (I’m anticipating you the result: yes, it is).
I made a little change to the original debian control files in the source package and compiled it using the Launchpad PPA.
To install Epiphany-WebKit you only need to add the following two repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/stemp/ubuntu hardy main #WebKit & Midori deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/michelinux/ubuntu hardy main #Epiphany-WebKit
The first one is the PPA by Stéphane Marguet (aka Stemp), and contains the webkit libraries used by my Epiphany build. It also includes an updated version of Midori, another GTK based web browser using webkit: give it a run. At the moment I’m writing this post, the version of WebKit available Stemp’s PPA is svn34798 (not sure Apple is publicly providing stable releases of WebKit, at least I could only find nightly builds and sources).
The second one is my Personal Package Archive and currently includes only the Epiphany packages.
After you add the two repositories (you also can do this from Synaptic) you have to reload the repositories lists: press the reload button on Synaptic or type in a terminal sudo apt-get update.
At this point you can find the epiphany-webkit package. To install it from the terminal, just type
sudo apt-get install epiphany-webkit
It will automatically load all the dependencies (mainly the webkit libraries from Stemp’s ppa).
The command to run the WebKit powered Epiphany is epiphany-webkit. I suggest you to edit your menu: on Gnome right click on the menu and choose Edit Menu. In the Internet folder you can activate the items to directly launch Epiphany using WebKit or Gecko, the original engine made by Mozilla and also used by Firefox. If nothing is specified Epiphany will use Gecko as default choice.
At this point you will have the Webkit Epiphany available from the menu, along the Gecko version.
In the future, hoping I have time, I will talk about the performances of WebKit compared to Gecko, and the differences about memory occupancy of the two differences. In the near future on this blog you will also find a post about getting Flash Player working in Epiphany-WebKit. Any suggestion or hint is welcome.
A special thanks to Stéphane Marguet.
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9 Responses to “Installing WebKit powered Epiphany on Ubuntu Hardy”
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Michele C. Soccio is licensed under a
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Thanks for the repositories. i installed and then when i run the acid3 test it crashes at 69% with this error :
(epiphany-webkit:26892): Pango-CRITICAL **: pango_font_describe_with_absolute_size: assertion `font != NULL’ failed
(epiphany-webkit:26892): Pango-CRITICAL **: pango_font_description_get_family: assertion `desc != NULL’ failed
Segmentation fault
Any ideas
Dear Salimane,
I really don’t know what’s the matter: never had any problem completing the Acid3 test.
What font encoding are you using on your computer?
Any further information could be useful.
I’m basically using Sans font on my computer. By the way i forgot to mention that before finding this post, i’ve already compiled myself webkit and epiphany from source. And it worked but sometimes crashes. So i decided to install it using the repositories provided here. I’ve compiled the webkit using the parameter with pango font and that font was installed…
[...] dependencies headache. But, luckily, I found two ways of running Epiphany/Webkit: the Soft way from Michele Costantino and the Hard way . If you just want that thing running immediately , just go for the soft way but [...]
Salimane,
I will try to investigate about this, and I’ll also try to work on a clean Hardy install, to understand whether this could related to any missed dependence.
[...] browser using extra-fast and extra-light WebKit backend. Get full Acid3 score on your Gnome desktop.http://www.soccio.it/michelinux/2008/06/29/installing-webkit-powered-epiphany-on-ubuntu-hardy/en/Ubuntu brainstorm – Asunder in repositoriesThe ubuntu community has contributed 10286 ideas, 46172 [...]
Thanks so much for this, I’ve been waiting to test drive a (functional) Epiphany with Webkit back-end for quite some time now, and you have made it possible for me
Thanks – but what about abitlity to use proxy – boht midori and epiphany do not use gnome settings for proxy and midori network settings are disabled while epiphany does not have a gecko takes all info from OS.
cheers
[...] Citation: http://www.soccio.it/michelinux/2008/06/29/installing-webkit-powered-epiphany-on-ubuntu-hardy/en/ [...]