More and more, I have problems dealing with Firefox’s bloat. I gave epiphany a try as a replacement for a week, to see if it’s actually a valid replacement.

Part 0: installing

On Debian/Ubuntu, don’t forget to install epiphany-extensions as well.

Part 1: making the switch

• System -> Preferences -> Preferred Applications : select epiphany instead.
• That’s all for now. (What about update-alternatives ? Is it necessary ? Seems it isn’t.)

Part 2: Configuring

I just added my language preferences. Why doesn’t it follow my session’s defaults ? (It seems that this waits for a localization configuration applet inside Gnome)

Part 3: Importing Bookmarks

Bookmarks -> Edit bookmarks -> File -> Import bookmarks -> Firefox

Bookmarks toolbar handling in epiphany is a bit strange. It seems that you have to add Quick bookmark buttons for each bookmark you want in it. (related bugs: 116726, 112660)

After one week of use …

• Epiphany isn’t faster than Firefox. It might slightly faster to start up, but switching between tabs feels slower. (I reported bug 347225 about this, but it’s non-conclusive ATM.)
• Tabs are fixed-size in epiphany, not variable size like it firefox. It makes it difficult to have a large number of tabs open (in 1280×1024, you can only have 7 open tabs before small arrows appear to let you move the tab bar left/right). It’s actually not an epiphany problem, but a gtk+ one (330676).

Looks like I’m going back to Firefox…

Update :

Frederic Peters posted a comment mentionning unofficial Epiphany extensions which solve the fixed-size tabs problem. Thanks a lot :-)