14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME developers are currently preparing to unleash the second and last Beta milestone for the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, due for release on March 22, 2017.
Therefore, we can't help but notice that many of the core components and applications from the GNOME 3.24 Stack have been updated lately, including the Epiphany web browser, which was bumped to version 3.23.91 (3.24 Beta 2).
Quite a bunch of improvements and some new features have been added in this second Beta release of Epiphany 3.24, among which we can mention the implementation of a new search engine dialog, along with support for search engine bangs.
Furthermore, the Ctrl+Shift+N keyboard shortcut has been re-implemented if you want a faster way to enable open new Incognito windows of Epiphany for browsing the Internet anonymously and without the fear of being tracked by government agencies.
Many other issues and bugs were addressed
Epiphany 3.24 Beta 2 is not a major milestone, so there aren't any other new features implemented, especially that GNOME 3.24 is in Feature Freeze since mid-February, so the rest of the changes are about some of the most annoying issues and bugs.
For example, there's a fix for a major data loss in the history service, a heart icon is now used for favorite bookmarks, some critical warnings were addressed too, and it looks like the "Add Bookmarks" popover star will no longer appear in the Incognito mode.
Also for the Incognito mode, Epiphany 3.24 Beta 2 disables the forget actions in the history dialog by default. Many other bugs that affected the bookmark list popover were fixed, along with a patch for correct replacement of old overview snapshots.
It's also now possible to delete old bookmarks during the migration process of a profile, and it appears that the default encoding preference was removed again in this Beta. The recently added "Clear Personal Data" dialog should also work better in this new Beta.
Early adopters can download the Epiphany 3.24 Beta 2 source tarball right now from our website, or they can wait for the GNOME 3.24 Beta 2 desktop environment to land in the testing repos of their favorite GNU/Linux distribution. Full changelog is attached below.