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Epiphany hits Raspberry Pi founders, users

Epiphany, the new Pi-specific browser, that is, not some mystical revelation

The Raspberry Pi now has its very own web browser.

The Pi foundation has been working on the app since December 2013, when it announced its intention to create a browser that offers “a good multi-tab experience,” ARMv6-optimized 2d rendering and accelerated image and HTML5 video decoding and bake it into future versions of Raspbian.

Yesterday, Pi founder Eben Upton declared the effort to create the browser has concluded and that “Epiphany on Pi” is now “a plausible alternative to a desktop browser for all but the most JavaScript-heavy sites.”

Upton says the new browser offers the following features:

  • Much-improved HTML5 support
  • A JavaScript JIT
  • Hardware-accelerated video decoding
  • ARMv6-optimized blitting functions
  • Better interactivity during page loading
  • Faster scrolling

Marco Barision, who led the development effort, offers a little more detail on his blog where he writes that Epiphany is based on Gnome Web, relies on Webkit 1.1, and has several new features to play videos – thank you gst-omx – and load them more quickly. He's also posted the video below explaining some of the browser's features.

Future versions of Raspbian and the NOOBS environment will include Epiphany. If you want to add it to your Pi today, cut and paste the following into a terminal window:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser

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