May 2006

I recently got around to finally ditching Mozilla Firefox as the default browser on my desktop machine, which runs Ubuntu Linux. Firefox's sluggishness, together with the necessity to restart it periodically (in order to stop it hogging the CPU) have caused me to switch to the Epiphany Browser.

Epiphany, with its extensions, currently supports all the features that I had grown to love as a Firefox user: tabbed browsing, popup and ad blocking, mouse gestures and an incremental find feature.

As I use a number of search engines on a day-to-day basis (Google, Google Scholar, CPAN, Wikipedia, etc.), I had been using yubnub as my search tool of choice, allowing my to use a single search.

YubNub describes itself as a "command line for the web", though I've found its greatest feature to be its ability to dispatch search terms to different engines by prefixing your search with an appropriate command (e.g. `g' for Google, `wp' for Wikipedia, etc.).

Epiphany and Firefox both support "Smart Bookmarks", which work in the same way, but it is necessary to set these up for each browser you use on each machine. Personally, I find it far easier to merely set up YubNub and use this instead.

Epiphany supports a keywords feature whereby anything typed in the Location bar that isn't recognised as a URL is dispatched to Google (by default) and a search for the keywords entered is performed. I have changed this behaviour to default to YubNub instead, so that I can dispatch any searches from the Location bar. This can be done by firstly typing "about:config" into the Location bar and then changing the "keyword.URL" property to "http://www.yubnub.org/parser/parse?command=". You should also ensure that the "keyword.enabled" property is set to "true''.