The first Beta release of Epiphany 3.20 is out for testing

Feb 16, 2016 04:15 GMT  ·  By

As reported earlier, the GNOME Project is in the process of preparing the first Beta release of the forthcoming GNOME 3.20 desktop environment, which means that they are updating numerous of the core components and apps.

While still not very popular, the Epiphany web browser of the GNOME Stack got a lot of attention from the GNOME developers in the latest development release, which will be distributed as part of the GNOME 3.20 Beta 1 release later this week.

As usual, we got our hands on the internal changelog (attached at the end of the article), and we're happy to share all the juicy details with our readers. Without further ado, Epiphany 3.20 Beta 1 (3.19.90) now lets users open downloaded tar.xz files.

There's now better compatibility with GTK+ 3.20, the encoding preference got removed from the Preferences dialog, restore-session-policy is now exposed in the Preferences dialog, and thumbnail update requests are respected in the Web overview.

Mnemonics were added for error page buttons in the Web view, the extensions are now using private D-Bus connections, new tabs inherit history of parent ones, and the downloads popover is now being activated when a download is started.

Numerous issues were fixed

In addition to the changes mentioned above, Epiphany 3.20 Beta 1 makes the downloads popover disappear more smoothly, adds a safetypes patch from Debian GNU/Linux and encodes URIs before copying and pasting them.

The session saving feature now saves tab and window history, as well as re-instates it on the session restore. Moreover, local files won't be displayed in the overview, the encodings dialog received various minor improvements, and the help files were fixed.

Last but not least, a placeholder image is now displayed in the overview if it's empty, and session states are automatically restored when attempting to restore recently closed tabs. Download Epiphany 3.20 Beta 1 right now from Softpedia, but keep in mind that it's a pre-release version.

Epiphany 3.19.90 Changelog