For all those who have not tried Epiphany yet, I’d like to say the following:

Using Epiphany is not about reaching the sense of uniqueness by using a less popular browser. It is also nowhere near trying to seem elite. Moreover, you will never manage to impress the ladies by using it…

Epiphany is a tool; a stable, lightweight piece of software, which offers better integration into the GNOME environment than any other browser, the powerful engine of Firefox and some of the most futuristic features that are available among today’s web browsers, for example tagged bookmarks.

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1. The official extensions that are marked as safe by the packagers and, generally, by all the folks that make decisions for each distribution. These extensions are finally available to the end users through the extensions panel.
2. The official extensions that are not mature enough to appear in Epiphany’s extension panel. This means that there is a great issue with this group of extensions. If an end user does not check the official extensions package sources or the Epiphany project’s webpage, it is absolutely impossible even to know about the existence of these “imature” extensions.
3. The third party extensions, which are mainly distributed by their developers.

All these restrictions do a good job protecting the end user from using buggy code, but this situation, not only narrows the end user’s freedom of choice, but also leads new Epiphany users, who are not aware of the situation, to make the false assumption that it is way too difficult to extend this browser’s functionality to suit their needs. The Firefox phenomenon has shown the importance of the high availability of software that extends the browser’s functionality.

My suggestion to packagers is: enable all official extensions (except for the examples maybe) in the epiphany-extensions package. The end users have the right to choose to use imature code.

NOTE: Those users who wish to recompile the extensions package, please read here.

Another thing that requires much thought is how well this epiphany-extensions package concept will work when the number of the available extensions increases. It will give both the end users and the developers a hard time. Furthermore, this concept promotes the distribution of 3rd party extensions by many different locations on the web, which is absolutely unacceptable when it comes to security. I mean this is a web browser, not a calculator!

I hope the folks at the Epiphany project give a higher priority to the organization of the extension distribution system in a more effective way.

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How to create a smart (dynamic) bookmark

This is quite easy. Assume that you need to create a smart bookmark that searches the archives of your favourite mailing list.

All you need to do is perform a search on that list for a distinctive sequence of characters. For example I searched the LGU list for the term AAAAAA:

AAAAAA site:http://lists.hellug.gr/pipermail/linux-greek-users/

Or better, you may want to use Google’s advanced search feature.

Now, all you have to do is bookmark (Ctrl-D) the results page, but before actually saving the bookmark, you should substitute the AAAAAA sequence with %s. (that’s two characters % and s)

%s will be substituted with the requested search terms every time the smart bookmark is used.

Now, your bookmark is a smart one and you may finally press the “Add” button to save it. All you have to do is type the search terms on the browser’s address bar and choose your smart bookmark from the bottom of the dropdown list that appears below the address bar.

Another cool thing you can do with a smart bookmark is to open the bookmarks editor (Ctrl-B), right click on your smart bookmark and select the “Show on Toolbar” option. A textbox should appear in your bookmarks bar, so you can search this resource quickly.

Finally, if you use the Deskbar applet, then you should know that this tool recognizes your saved smart bookmarks and lets you assign a shortcut to each one of them. For example, one could assign the “lgu” string to the aforementioned search on the mailing list archives. So now a search on the mailing list can be performed right from the desktop (deskbar applet) with the following:

lgu kernel

This will search the mailing list for all entries that contain the term kernel.

Smart bookmarks are a neat feature. I use this very frequently. This post was written for those who have overlooked this really useful feature.

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At this point, I should go a bit off-topic and state that I absolutely hate the different wiki text syntaces between the various wiki engines, but I guess the analysis of the human nature and of the reasons that drive people to invent 100 different ways in order to write XHTML is admittedly beyond the scope of this document.

This is the second productivity plugin I write for Epiphany. The other one is Tab Session Management for those who care to take a look at.

Anyway, here go the Tab Links plugin features…

What it does

This plugin (extension) adds a submenu under the main Tools menu, named Tab Links.

Each item within the Tab Links submenu takes all of the open tabs URIs and page titles, formats them as a list according to the chosen menu item and, finally it copies the formatted list to the clipboard.

As shown in the image above, the following formats for the copied links are supported:

• Plain URI list.
• Mediawiki
• MoinMoin
• Dokiwiki
• HTML unordered list.

Requirements

Having the epiphany-extensions package installed is required.

To install it on a Fedora/OpenSUSE (with yum configured) system, do a:

# yum install epiphany-extensions

or on an Ubuntu/Debian system:

# apt-get install epiphany-extensions

How to install the plugin

The plugin is written in Python, which means you do not need to compile it.

In order to install it for use in your own user account, drop the tablinks.ephy-extension and tablinks.py files in the ~/.gnome2/epiphany/extensions/ directory. If that directory does not exist, just create it.

In order to install the plugin system-wide, it is needed to put the tablinks.ephy-extension and tablinks.py files in the /usr/lib/epiphany/2.XX/extensions/ directory (where XX the epiphany version).

Finally, restart Epiphany.

How to use

First, you have to enable the plugin in the Tools->Extensions panel. Look for “Tab Links”.

Then, open some web pages in tabs, choose Tools->Tab Links->Default and paste to a text file. A simple list of the open pages’ URIs will be there.

License

This project is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Download

All versions of the software, including the latest stable release, are available from the development web site’s download area.

This project has been discontinued.

Changelog

* Wed Feb 28 2007 – v0.1
- Initial version. More formats to come when I have the time. One format that sneaked out of the initial list is Docbook, but I’ll be adding it soon in the new release.

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We will need the epiphany module, so import it:

import epiphany

Next we assign the active tab and its respective embed to variables:

tab = window.get_active_tab()
embed = tab.get_embed()

And now the critical part of getting the page’s HTML code:

persist = epiphany.ephy_embed_factory_new_object( epiphany.EmbedPersist )
persist.set_flags( epiphany.EMBED_PERSIST_NO_VIEW | epiphany.EMBED_PERSIST_COPY_PAGE )
persist.set_embed( embed )
page = persist.to_string()

Then, you can just print the page code in the console, save it to files or filter it to get the info you want.

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epiphany.ephy_shell_get_default().new_tab( window, tab, url, flags )

Here follows the info on how to use it to open new tabs. Open up the Epiphany Python console and start writing:

import epiphany
 
tab = window.get_active_tab()
url = 'http://www.python.org'
flags = epiphany.NEW_TAB_IN_EXISTING_WINDOW \
    | epiphany.NEW_TAB_APPEND_LAST \
    | epiphany.NEW_TAB_OPEN_PAGE
 
epiphany.ephy_shell_get_default().new_tab(
    window,
    tab,
    url,
    flags
    )

For an overview of what flags are available when dealing with new tabs, issue the following statement:

import epiphany
a = dir(epiphany)
for k in a:
    if k.startswith('NEW_TAB'):
        print k

Special thanks to Dieguito at the #epiphany IRC channel for directing me to the right function. The rest was really easy. I just grep-ed the epiphany-extensions source code and some examples of the usage of the new_tab() function came up. They were in C, but were really easy to understand.

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Anyway, this is how it is. For all those who would like to mess around with Epiphany’s Python console, here are the available docs:

• Epiphany’s Python Console
• Writing Epiphany Extensions

These should get you started, but despite the writer’s great effort and contribution, these are not enough for an amateur programmer. You will still need to search in other extensions’ source code and probably in the Epiphany’s source too. This is the situation and I wish things get better in the future. So, I have decided that, whenever my free time permits it, I will write a post for every new thing I discover in the python console. Hope this helps someone else out there…

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So, a custom compilation of the extensions is needed. Just keep in mind that in order to also compile the sample plugins you ‘ll need to add the following option when configuring:

--with-extensions=really-all

The --with-extensions option can take a comma separated list of the extentions that will be built, or the value “all“, which is supposed to build all the available extentions except for the samples, or it can be “really_all” which builds everything. Finally, this option can be completely omitted, which leads to the compilation of the default extentions.

Some of the extensions that do not exist in the default RPM package and I definitely wish they were there, are a feed subscription extension, an almost efficient ad-blocker and of course a Python Console. I do not really know why they are missing, perhaps due to some bugs, but I use them for a long time now and they seem to work fine.

PS: And, by the way, non Epiphany users, just give this browser a shot.

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