Epiphany extensions, where art thou?

For the longest time, ever since I started using Debian, Epiphany has always been my favorite web browser. It's always been just a little quicker and less bloated than what Firefox has evolved into and came with a sufficient number of extensions (including the very useful Greasemonkey). However, after version 2.26 of Epiphany they have dropped the Gecko engine (the one used by all of Mozilla's browsers) in favor of WebKit, something I've been pretty excited about. I've been trying to keep up with the latest Epiphany releases which use this engine, and they have worked brilliantly for the most part. One of the big hurdles at the beginning of development seemed to be porting the extensions over to WebKit version, but port them they did. The extensions are available on the PPA for Epiphany WebKit, but I'm not sure why. I can only remember running one version that ever gave me access to the extensions, and the latest (and I fear last) version for Jaunty has once again disabled the Tools menu and I'm no longer able to access them even though I have them installed. This is quite frustrating, as why would you offer an extensions package and not provide access to it? Just doesn't make sense to me. Guess I'll have to wait for Karmic to get a fully functional version of Epiphany, which can't come too soon as I'm growing a little weary of this game of hide and seek. Meanwhile, I find myself using Midori (another Linux WebKit browser) more and more, which seems to be updating at a breakneck pace and adding new features all the time, even for Jaunty users. It's just beyond me why the Epiphany developers are giving us half functional releases. If they're going to do that, then why offer them at all? Perhaps they should be wooing the developer (which is pretty much a one man show) of Midori and tapping him to add some of the cool functionality of that browser into Epiphany, as Midori remains small, fast and simple (like Epiphany) but still provides some niceties that Epiphany WebKit, at least on Ubuntu 9.04, seems to be lacking. At least October is right around the corner......

Out with the old, in with the new.

Well, the HP mini had some great attributes like size and keyboard, but battery life definitely wasn't one of them, and getting a replacement 6-cell just wasnt worth it in the long run as it would A) ruin the slimline aesthetics and B) the gain in battery life wasn't nearly as much as had been hoped for as reported by those that actually purchased one. So I sold it for a bit of a loss and purchased an equally reasonably priced Eee PC 901 20G (wanted to stay on the small side), the one that came with (blech!) Xandros Linux pre-installed. First order of business was to wipe out that kiddie interface and replace it with a "real" distro. I never got around to trying out Crunchbang as I had heard there were a few issues that needed to be ironed out with the "Cruncheee" version yet and I really didn't have the time or patience to work on it at the time. So during my research I found a distro that was supposed to make an Eee PC run like a top straight out of the box. Said distro shall remain nameless to avoid any flaming (although it's not too hard to narrow down the list of "Eee specific distros), but it certainly did not function as advertised. After many hours and days of the 901 overheating, updates breaking different features and trying to get all the hotkeys to work like they should (if I could get them to work at all), I finally threw in the towel and went in a different direction. Since the 901 was listed as a Tier 1 machine on the Ubuntu Netbook Remix web site, I decided to give it a spin. I installed it, ran all the updates and installed Eeecontrol. This time it was a much different story. Everything functioned as it should and the battery life was amazing. It worked so well, if fact, that my wife fell in love with the machine and decided she had to have one of her own. Unfortunately, by the time she had come to this conclusion the 901 had been discontinued and couldn't be found anywhere at a price of $400 or more, which was obviously unacceptable. Needless to say, the 901 is now the prized possession of Mrs. M and by week's end I'll be the (hopefully) proud owner of an Eee PC 1000HA. Hoping things go just as well with this machine as they did with the 901 fist time around. We shall see shortly, I suppose.

FYI, The Sansa Fuze is stil running like a champ. Looks like it's earned a permanent position in my ever flexible gadget-sphere. It works great with Rhythmbox (and Quod Libet, my alternate music management fave), not so much with Banshee which I gave a brief workout (yes, I'm yet another one of those anti-Mono zealots). Plan to give Listen and a few others a try in the not so distant future as well.