Firefox Sync and HTTPS Everywhere support didn't make it

Mar 24, 2017 16:10 GMT  ·  By

GNOME 3.24 arrived a couple of days ago, and it's the biggest release of the popular desktop environment so far, shipping with lots of new features and improvements across all of its applications and components.

During its 6-month development cycle, we managed to cover all the major features implemented in the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, but also the various improvements included in many of the apps that are usually distributed under the GNOME Stack umbrella.

Earlier this week we talked about what's new in GNOME Photos 3.24, and it's now time to take a look at the new features that arrived in the Epiphany 3.24 web browser, as developer Michael Catanzaro published an in-depth article about all of them, as well as the ones that didn't make it in this cycle.

A web browser for awesome people

Dubbed "a web browser for awesome people," Epiphany 3.24 appears to have matured enough to integrate perfectly into the GNOME desktop, and it now comes with an all-new Bookmarks interface by implementing a star icon in the address bar for easy bookmarking of web pages, and an icon for viewing stored bookmarks.

Epiphany 3.24 is also capable of handling sessions with dozens of tabs, lets users set a homepage (finally), makes the address bar visible at all times, improves the tracking protection by adding support for EasyList filters to the built-in adblocker, adds a new search engine manager, and implements a warning for non-secure password forms.

"Tracking protection on the Web is probably a losing battle, and you absolutely must use the TOR Browser Bundle if you really need anonymity. (And no, configuring Epiphany to use Tor is not clever, it’s very dumb.) But EasyPrivacy will at least make life harder for trackers," said Michael Catanzaro.

Under the hood, Epiphany 3.24 benefits of all the goodies of WebKitGTK+ 2.16 web content engine, which you can view in Michael Catanzaro's article. Unfortunately, the promised Firefox Sync and HTTPS Everywhere features didn't make it in this cycle, but they are coming as part of the Epiphany 3.26 release later this year.

Download Epiphany 3.24.