GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 312883
Epiphany opens homepage whenever I open a new tab
Last modified: 2008-07-16 17:16:22 UTC
The problem is pretty much what the title says: new tabs default to the homepage. I guess this is supposed to be a feature rather than a bug, but it's REALLY annoying, as 99% of the time I want to go to a different website when I open a new tab. Loading the homepage takes a few seconds, steals focus from the address bar (which ALWAYS forces me to click it again, and some times I just keep typing and notice that it's ineffective too late) and isn't helpful to most users.
The focus bug should be fixed in HEAD, please re-test when 1.7.4 is out. You can tell Epiphany to use a blank page as homepage in the preferences.
The thing is that I want my homepage to appear when I first fire up Epiphany, but when opening new tabs to keep them blank. Perhaps it would be possible to add a configuration option (or a GConf key)?
Ah, but that is simple. :) A configuration option is not needed. Go to the bookmarks editor and find the page you want to see as the homepage. Now drag the bookmark to your desktop or panel. The next time you click it, Epiphany will open with that URL! If you like you can even change the launcher icon to Epiphany's.
But that's an unnecessary hack. My main argument here is that the homepage is useful when the user first starts a browsing session. Afterwards, when he opens a new tab, the homepage just gets in the way, since most of the time a user opens a new tab since he has a clear idea of the site he wishes to visit or the term he wishes to search for (and not everyone's homepage is Google ;-). This is standard behaviour for Firefox, and I don't think anyone has ever complained about it. To sum it up, I think the current Epiphany policy just doesn't make sense for most users.
It's not an unnecessary hack, it's the way it's supposed to work. :-) I think your idea is against Epiphany's conceptual model; tabs exist only to organize the view of multiple webpages. Tabs that don't display a webpage break this conceptual model (although you can cheat by setting about:blank as homepage). You don't think anyone has complained about the Firefox behaviour in this regard? Then please take a look at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=187573, and its 15 duplicates.
Discussed this on irc, marking NOTABUG. See also the fix for bug 313012.
*** Bug 324201 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Arrghh. I was looking for a solution to my number 1 annoyance with epiphany, and i see it was resolved "not a bug". I agree with this: "The thing is that I want my homepage to appear when I first fire up Epiphany, but when opening new tabs to keep them blank. Perhaps it would be possible to add a configuration option (or a GConf key)?" in addition, there are problems with the suggested solution (change the launcher for the homepage): 1) If you work with multiple desktop enviorments (like me), you will have to create a new launcher for each desktop you work with. 2) This assumes that you either have a custom louncher or you are williling to hack the menu system if you don't. 3) If you change your homepage, you will have to go back and change all the lounchers (yes, people do chagne homepages on a regular basis). 4) This brakes the "home" button in the toolbar. 5) If you start epiphany from a keyboard shortcut and not from alouncher- this will not work. Please please re-consider adding the option for the homepage to be used only on startup and not for tabs as a pref/ or have an option for epiphany to default to focusing in the address bar.
I'd like to let Epiphany developers know that I too would rather have Epiphany not loading the home page in new tabs. In my bookmarks, when a site is light and reusable enough to be loaded everytime a new tab is opened, usually it is some kind of search engine, so I just add a smart bookmark. Oh, and when I first saw Firefox's behaviour* it really made me remember GNOME's emphasis on nice defaults. I don't want an "option"; as far as I can remember it takes me longer to configure KDE than to configure the Linux kernel! I understand it's up to you guys to make decisions like that. I won't keep trying to convince you, but please think about it again, some day. * Not loading the home page in new tabs.
Created attachment 78035 [details] [review] Adds the proposed feature Patch against 2.14.3
Being able to change the default behaviour would be great. I implemented that using a gconf key (because I couldn't figure out at first glance how to reach about:config's options easily), so that one can expect almost the same behaviour as mozilla's browser.tabs.loadOnNewTab (2/last visited not implemented), just by setting the key accordingly: gconftool-2 -s /apps/epiphany/general/load_on_new_tab 0 --type int It is defaulted to 1 in the schema, so that the default (no blank page allowed, except if the user tricks by using about:blank as homepage) behaviour isn't impacted. The above-posted patch has been elaborated against a 2.14.3 tree, I can have a look at adapting it to trunk or to another branch in case you're interested. It has also been posted in the Debian BTS at: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=402177
Hello epiphany? Why not integrate Cyril's patch? Please, pretty please? If you are VERY certain about your conceptual model ("tabs must not hold blank pages, never ever never!"), why not just accept this patch from Cyril? It provides an option. That does not clutter the GUI because it's hidden in GConf anyway. And it will keep your power users happy. Common sense? I mean, hey, I have been using epiphany for TWO years and I have been waiting for this to be fixed each 6 months, and today I came back to check why it still has not happened and it's because of some conceptual debate? About a possibly hidden option?! Let me testify that even those two years of getting accustomed to epiphany have NOT lessened my desire for using a homepage AND quickly opening tabs and starting to type straight away. Adding a launcher to the panel is NOT an option in a lot of situations (newbies, locked-down environments, performance addicts, etc), it's a hack only a programmer would think of. I would strongly like to REOPEN this bug if I could. Pointing to some similar discussion about mozilla doesn't seem to be related much to me; they are discussing about the behavior of ctrl+N (not ctrl+T) and they request an option in the gui. Even Firefox does not load the homepage on new TAB (yes, it does load the homepage on new WINDOW; that's pretty different as the user that opens a new window willingly instead of a new tab *might* expect the homepage, and a new window takes more time to paint than a new tab anyway).
I simply don't have a homepage anymore. Loading the homepage in every tab is usefull when the homepage has a general purpose, and is _very_ lightweight or even local. But, hey, why load Google when we have smart bookmarks? I'm sure there are some people which prefer their homepages loaded everytime they open a tab. But, frankly, I don't know of any. Maybe they use Google and Yahoo's start pages?
I don't have a homepage anymore, but that's because I'm forced to (my homepage is not google, I love my smart bookmarks by the way). Some example use case might be this: Bob has his local weather site as a homepage, or has a big portal/feed reader page like Netvibes.com or google IG or yahoo's or whatever. That person might want to check news once in a while by clicking the home button, but NOT everytime he opens a tab (because when he opens a tab he already knows he wants to allocate more space for a new webpage to visit, or start a web search, or access existing bookmarks). Loading that page - takes time and eats bandwidth - repeatedly spams the content provider to refresh everything all the time (depending on the said homepage of course) - could lead to a DoS - kills kittens Of course, since it's an option, the user is free to toggle it.
I'm undecided on the feature itself, so I'm just commenting on the patch for now: - the comment shouldn't mention mozilla prefs, and - the gconf key should be a string (e.g. "blank", "homepage"), not an integer
Bugzilla is not the place for having long discussions; please use the mailing list if you feel the need to. However, if you don't like the current behaviour on opening new tabs, try entering the desired URL in the address bar first and open it with Ctrl+Enter (or Ctrl+click from the Bookmarks menu). HTH.
*** Bug 441579 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Bug 441579 also has a patch attached.
*** Bug 452228 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Based on the comment in Bug 452228, it sounds like a gconf patch will be accepted if it is "good code". Is that true? This is such an annoying problem for so many people that I am motivated to fix it, but ONLY if the fix will be accepted into the official project. See my rants in http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=452228 for why I believe it shouldn't even be an option, but if an option is desired, I'll try to clean up one of the patches that have not yet been accepted. Should I start from the patch in Debian BTS mentioned above, or from the one in Bug 441579? Are there any problems with either patch besides the two mentioned above by Christian Persch? Perhaps the patch truest to the conceptual model would be to add a "Tab Home Page" entry that works exactly like the normal Home Page, but is used when a new tab is created. It can be about:blank, or any other URL. If unset, it would use the Home Page value.
A "New Blank Tab" extension was recently added to http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/ThirdPartyExtensions . ChPe decides whether a patch is accepted or not, so I can't comment on that.
*** Bug 456169 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Oh, I forgot about this patch. I'll rework it as demanded by Christian.