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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.