2006-04-25

Falsetto à la Fox

The killer feature in Opera, compared to Firefox and other Mozilla products, is the ability to restore the content of all tabs at every browsing session; not just after experiencing a crash, but in a systematic way, whenever starting the application. I have finally found a Firefox plug-in that does that: Session Manager. Why isn't this a standard feature in Epiphany and Firefox?

Epiphany vs Firefox compatibility issues

Meanwhile, I have encountered yet another essential site (online booking for my favorite airline - this time) that blocks Epiphany but allows Firefox. Yes, I know that their webmaster is to blame for resorting to browser-agent filtering. No, I don't expect anyone at customer service to understand and to rouse their javascripting minion into fixing it. Unfortunately, it also means that I still cannot switch to Epiphany.

Even though Firefox and xulrunner are essentially the same codebase, the different browser-agent is enough to make Epiphany unsuitable for everyday use. As I recall, Rosbeh and several others reported this as being one of two reasons for shipping Firefox as their default browser, the other being a question of brand recognition: Firefox had the full-page ad in the New York Times and is multi-platform, while Epiphany is virtually unknown and GNOME-specific.

This must be fixed.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

the Tab mix plus extension also has a session saver and a un-close tab feature. I did previously use session saver, but tab mix plus has all of its features and more. (I like the duplicate tab and open new tabs next to existing tab features)

Check it out.

- Peter VK

Anonymous said...

IIRC FFx 2 will have a basic session saving capability, which can be hooked into by extensions. It will also add undoclosetab.

Anonymous said...

Well, galeon had it when it was te preferred choice in GNOME (no idea now). As they are merging, I think that should be as a epiphany-extension.