Ploum writes about epiphany 2.14, and explain why it’s the best browser for gnome.
To make it short, here is a summary of the killer features in epiphany 2.14
- Easy RSS subscription, integration with gnome programs (liferea, blam, straw)
- “Tagged” Bookmarks management (very Web 2.0)
- Adblock extension working out of the box
- HIG and gnome integration everywhere
- Simple and easy to understand preferences
- Light and responsive
- Very few popups, unobtrusive error pages are used instead
…but he missed the deskbar integration, which i will fix now:
- Deskbar will index and allow to search through bookmarks
- Deskbar will index and allow to search through your browsing history
- Deskbar will allow you to quickly search using epiphany smart bookmarks

This is my epiphany toolbar, i have three smart bookmarks, one to search for gnome bug number, another one to search stock quotes by ticker symbol, and the last one is google.be search

This is the epiphany dropdown when i stype somehting in epiphany URL bar, allowing me to use one of my smart bookmark with the query. Here i’m searching for a random bug number

And finally, i can use deskbar, even if the browser isn’t running, a keyboard shortcut away, to use my smart bookmarks. Here i’m going to search for yahoo quotes for GOOG symbol. Also note how i have history pages, and bookmarks appearing too, allowing me to quickly open them.
There is also a way to associate a keyboard shortcut to search engines, and/or a ‘keyword’ in deskbar preferences:

In deskbar preferences, when you select ‘Web searches’, you can click the ‘More…’ button to get more smart bookmarks preferences.
As you can see, i have the ‘g’ letter for google, which means i can type in deskbar g test
to search in google the term ‘test’.
Even better, i can directly use the shortcut to open the term in google without even selecting it in the list: I type ‘test’, then hit Alt-g
, and it fires up a google search (this of course only works when you have a one-letter keyword)
This is also a feature we want to extend for every possible action in future versions of deskbar.
Now, use epiphany, and be happy !
One last thing…
And finally a quick tip: if you want to open a command-line program and see it’s output, type it’s name and instead of selecting it in the list, hit Alt-t
, it will start the program and redirect it’s output in a text window using zenity, useful for example to see if the command executes successfully.

After launching a sitecopy command with alt-t, i receive the output of the command in a nice window, useful for quick commands like that.