Epiphany - intuitive grasp of reality

(EDIT: I added some info to this post after I got some feedback. Scroll down to the end to read it)

Epiphany ("intuitive grasp of reality through something usually simple and striking") is the default browser for Gnome desktops and what better name to have for this great piece of software. It uses gecko - the mozilla render-engine - to draw websites so it's able to view any website Mozilla has no problems with. Epiphany is not a browser like the other ones available as it's really simplistic but still very usable and enjoyable. It has all the features you expect from a modern browser; bookmarks, tabs, popup-clocking, zooming, costumisable toolbars etc. and it is really well integrated with Gnome too; it uses GTK, you can drag 'n drop from/to epiphany in Gnome, it downloads default to the Gnome downloads directory, to view a page's source-code (press Ctrl-U or select View > Page Source) it opens gedit - the gnome text-editor etc.
I think a lot gnome-users don't know the power of Epiphany and thus use another browser, I hope to convice them with this article because epiphany earns more respect then it gets :).
Something very specific about epiphany is it's bookmarks-system. Most browsers store bookmarks like files in directories where you can create subdirectories to order 'm. Epiphany uses a kind of "virtual folders". You can create "topics" and when you add a bookmark you can pick some topics where it belongs to, this way 1 bookmark can belong to 1 or more topic(s). When you want to open a bookmark, you can open the bookmarks menu and click on the title, or just start typing the title of the bookmark in the location bar and - as you type - you can pick the bookmark fromthe dropdown menu. When you start typing the name of a topic in the locationbar, all the bookmarks of that topic will be showed in the dropdown-menu. Ain't this great ?
The behaviour of the tabs in epiphany is nice too. Press Ctrl-T or click on a button on the toolbar you added to add a new tab, press Ctrl-W or click on the little cross on the tab (I like this behaviour much more then the one in e.g. Mozilla Firefox where the cross is not on the tab but on the right side of the tabs-bar) to close a tab, press Alt-[number] to go to the [number]st tab, Ctrl-PageUp and Ctrl-PageDown to scroll through the tabs, or scroll to the tabs with the arrow-keys after selecting a tab by clicking it. You can also drag tabs to other windows or just out of the window to create a new window with the contents of that tab. The hotkeys for these actions can be found in the Tabs-menu!

Epiphany screenshot:

Click the image to open the Epiphany homepage.

Also the mousewheel can be used very intuitive for several tasks, like Alt+scrollwheel to scroll in the browser-history, scrollling above the zoombutton on the toolbar (add this via Edit > Toolbars) or with the Shift button held down makes you zoom in/out on the viewed webpage and Ctrl+scrollwheel makes you scroll per page (like using PageUp/PageDown). [EDIT: Reinout (cfr. last paragraph) told me I forgot to mention the fact that Epiphany scrolls through the tabs when your mousepointer is on a tab, nice example of intuitivity! Thank you!]
Another feature you find in other modern browsers is the type-ahead search. When you want to search something on a website, click in the background of the website and start typing what you're searching for. Epiphany will search-as-you type and select the typed words if it finds them. To jump to the next result, press Ctrl-G, Shift-Ctrl-G to go back to the previous result. This is only for links to other websites. If you want to search this way for the whole text of the website, press '/' first.
A very innovative thing in Epiphany is it's popup-blocker. It doesn't have a heavy interface (only one option in a menu) but it Just Works ! When you don't want popup-windows for a website, block 'm with View > Popup Windows and epiphany will remember this setting again when you visit this website in the future. Nothing more, nothing less and it rocks!
Epiphany also has a build in websearch function (via Google by default*). To search for something on the web, just type the searchwords in the location bar and press enter; if it's not a url it will be searched for on Google*.
Epiphany's also great at remebering passwords. When you enter a password in a form it asks you if it has to save it again. When you save a password, the next time you visit that site it will already be filled in so you only have to click on the confirmation / ok / login - button. To delete this information, go to Edit > Personal Data. Also if you have fill in a lot of forms on a webpage, epiphany will ask to remember them for a next time you visit that website. Isn't this just great ?

Happy Epiphany'ing ! :D

By the way: did I tell you how to change your default browser settings on gnome to epiphany ? Load Applications > Desktop Preferences > Advanced > Preferred Applications and just select epiphany on the first tab.

EDIT: The first comment on this post made me point out I forgot to mention the Epiphany Extensions. Epiphany has a great plugin system and those plugins are called "extensions". They are different from Firefox's extensions, so you can't use those with Epiphany. There exist some nice Extensions for Epiphany though, like mouse-gestures, a sidebar, more options on tabs etc. I also heard from Reinout van Schouwen an addblocker and tab-coloring (to show the state like 'unread' and 'loaded' the same way gaim does it for 'is typing' and 'unread' ) extension will be available soon. The future is bright :).

EDIT: I've got a lot of feedback on this post via the comments on Footnotes, the comments on this blog, an email and some forums where this blog was mentioned. Some people asked why they should choose Epiphany over Firefox. Well, I found something in the epiphany-wiki that might help you making a choice.