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Learn some tricks to configure this excellent browser and improve the user experience, which will help you familiarize yourself with the GSettings tool. |
I suppose that in each case it may be different, but in mine, since I discovered Epiphany (the official browser of GNOME), I am starting to abandon my dear Firefox.
I know many of you abandoned it a long time ago for Chromium / Google Chrome , but I was looking for an alternative that wouldn't eat up all my RAM and that was available in the official Fedora repositories, and that's not the case.
After trying Epiphany I was delighted by its low memory consumption (in my case between 2 and 6 times less than Firefox 7), but the truth is that it is not very usable at first, so let's learn how to configure it.
Configuration
Epiphany (at least version 3) uses GSettings to store its configuration. This is an abstraction layer for this purpose, which in GNU/Linux uses the dconf system as a low-level data store.
We can use the dconf graphical editor. We'll find the Epiphany keys in the org.gnome.Epiphany schema . To install it on Fedora:
sudo yum install dconf-editor
For those who want to use the tool by command line, you can look at the help with the typical commands:
gsettings --help
man gsettings
For example, to consult all the keys of Epiphany we will use:
gsettings list-recursively org.gnome.Epiphany
Now we will see how to activate some features that seem quite practical:
gsettings set org.gnome.Epiphany middle-click-opens-url true
gsettings set org.gnome.Epiphany new-windows-in-tabs true
gsettings set org.gnome.Epiphany.web enable-popups false
gsettings set org.gnome.Epiphany.web min-font-size 10
I think they are pretty self-explanatory ...
Installing Flash
We already have Flash 11 at our disposal, with native support for 64-bit GNU / Linux. Flash is a proprietary technology that I don't like very much, but unfortunately today it is quite necessary to enjoy the web.
I've been using Gnash for a while, and it's become clear to me that it's not yet mature enough to replace Flash. At least the FSF has realized this and has it as a high-priority software project.
To install it on Fedora, we have an official Adobe repository. We install this repository by going to the Flash installation page and downloading it using the YUM option for Linux.
With this we download an RPM package that installs the Flash repository. We will have to install this package and then the plugin:
sudo yum localinstall ~ / Downloads / adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install flash-plugin
Of course, we can also use the graphical tools ...
Anyway, this installs Flash in Firefox and others, but not Epiphany. To activate it, we will simply create a symlink to the plugin in the Epiphany directory:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so / usr / lib64 / epiphany / plugins /
Using the extensions
One of Firefox's main features is its extensive library of extensions. Epiphany doesn't support them, but it does have a few that can be very useful. We install them with:
sudo yum install epiphany-extensions
Then we can configure them from the Tools > Epiphany Extensions menu. The ones I find particularly useful are:
- Stocks
- Autoload tab
- Ad blocker
- RSS subscription
- Make sure you have Gwget installed.
sudo yum install gwget
- In Epiphany, Edit> Actions> Add.
- In the window, put a name and description that describes the action well, and in command simply write gwget.
- Mark the options to apply to images and pages.
Now right-click on any link, page, or image. You will have the option to download with Gwget, and it will.