Web browser released!

Update: Marco Barisione, who led the browser work at Collabora has written a blog post about it.

Back in December 2013, we discussed our plans to develop an improved web browser for Raspberry Pi. The browser is based on Epiphany (aka GNOME Web), as a replacement for the rather venerable version of Midori in Raspbian Wheezy.

Eight months and a lot of hard work later, we’re finally ready. As you can see from the video below, Epiphany on Pi is now a plausible alternative to a desktop browser for all but the most JavaScript-heavy sites.

Epiphany brings a host of neat features to Raspberry Pi, including:

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

Future releases of Raspbian and NOOBS will include Epiphany as the default browser, but the necessary packages are already in our repository. To install, type:

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

Epiphany for Raspberry Pi was produced by our friends at Collabora. ARM assembly language optimisations were provided (as always) by Ben Avison of RISC OS Open.

250 comments

Alex Eames (RasPi.TV) avatar

Yay. Brilliant. This is going to have to be tried straight after lunch :)

Andrea Giammarchi avatar

Pretty impressive work there but I wonder how it would run under pure Wayland and GTK3 only. Is this an ongoing effort too? Thanks!

Emanuele Aina avatar

At the moment Wayland support is *very* experimental but some of the improvements done should already work well under it.

Daniel avatar

Finally! Great news, this makes my day!

neil avatar

Excellent!

Does that mean it can run WebGL?

Emanuele Aina avatar

Unfortunately no WebGL for now, but there’s hope once Eric Anholt’s work on Mesa will get completed.

Peter Jones avatar

Any chance of Flash support?

I may be wrong here (and apologies if I am), but Raspbian seems to be developed by one guy (I very much appreciate the work he does for the community), but its a pity there is not more investment put in by the foundation.

Peter

Eben Upton avatar

Raspbian is developed by Peter Green and Mike Thompson as a “pure” armv6hf port of upstream Debian, so there’s not much scope for us to invest directly in Raspbian.

Where we do invest (a lot) is in developing applications like this one which we include in the Foundation’s Raspbian-based distributions.

FotL avatar

Abode do not support Flash on the ARM architecture, so you need to ensure anything you wish to play is a HTML 5 Video

Matt avatar

Really? So why have we been using, and continue to use Flash Player for ARM on Android? I have a Moto G, and it runs Flash Player perfectly, and my past tablets and phones have also run Flash Player perfectly, on ARM CPUs.

You may like to read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Player

Thanks :)

hunternet93 avatar

Adobe discontinued ARM support a few years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Availability_on_mobile_operating_systems They never released an ARM binary besides the Android app, either.

Clifford avatar

Your link says they dropped support on mobile platforms rather than ARM specifically. Works in ChromeOS, and I believe WindowsRT.

Arjan Vlek avatar

Flash for Android worked solely on ARMv7+ CPUs (like Cortex Ax series) and therefore never worked on ARMv6 CPUs (like ARM11xx series) that are also used in the RPi. That makes it impossible to port flash from Android (or Chromebooks) to RPi architecture. The *Only* Flash Player that i have ever seen running on ARMv6 is called “FlashLite Plugin for Android”, it runs on my old HTC Wildfire with ARMv6 / ARM11 CPU. Unfortunately, it is extremely slow / limited and therefore not worth the effort to port to RPi.

Clifford avatar

Flash Player 14.0.0.177 is running fine on my Samsung ARM based Chromebook.

Yroark avatar

Chrome has flash support baked in without the need to install the Flash binaries on the system. Windows 8 RT also does this with Internet Explorer 11. So its not as simple as adding Flash to Rasbian / Rasberry PI ARM6 the web browser would need to be programmed to include a flash interpreter. I imagine the reason for this not being done is that even Adobe has seen the end of Flash and is pushing for those who develop sites and apps with its development suite to use HTML5.

Ben Nuttall avatar

It’s not just one guy. We have a number of software engineers working on the Linux kernel, and several contractors working on specific projects like Scratch, the Web Browser and wayland/weston, plus all the stuff we’ve previously funded like the port of PyPy to ARM.

Peter Jones avatar

Thanks Ben, This was not a criticism more just a plea for more resources on the OS. I have raised bugs regarding using Testing and the just don’t get answered. People do this out of the goodness of their heart on there spare time, but perhaps it needs more? Thanks

James Hughes avatar

If you are talking the Linux kernel when you say OS, there is a github page to report bugs to – lots of people working on those issues.

If you mean the entire distribution, then that is maintained by the guys mentioned above, BUT, that’s a packaging exercise on the whole – for specific bugs in specific applications, that needs work from the maintainers of the applications itself.

Peter Jones avatar

Hi,

I log issues on:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/raspbian/

Peter

Peter Green avatar

I take a quick look at most of the bugs filed on the raspbian bugtracker but I don’t have the time for deep investigations.

We (which practically means I) could really do with help in determining what bugs need dealing with by raspbian, what bugs need pushing up to debian (after testing they happen on a plain debian system) and what bugs are best handled in cooperation with the programs upstream authors.

We also need a place to report bugs on packages in the raspberry pi foundation repository, a few of the packages have corresponding github projects where issues can be reported but many don’t.

Liz Upton avatar

Eben says you should drop him an email!

Bob Davies avatar

You can safely assume flash will stop working everywhere year on year, as everyone moves away and adobe stop supporting edge cases. Get used to flash not working and start adjusting your tools/workflow to deal with it.

Peter Jones avatar

That’s a bit of a broad brush comment Bob. What about BBC iPlayer which is still using Flash for now.

winkleink avatar

Amazing the performance from this little computer.
Must try it with gmail and google docs.
If good then could be a useful as a desktop for connected schools.

zoel avatar

Excellent ;-) and goodsounds
I hope can replace midori

Syed Anwaarullah avatar

Wondering if it comes with Kiosk Mode option? Does it also play native HTML5 (mp4, ogv and webm) videos? Has anyone tried those yet?

Emanuele Aina avatar

Yes, HTML5 videos with suitable codecs are already hardware acceletated. In fact, support for YouTube and Vimeo is done by explicitly requesting the HTML5 version instead of Flash.

As far as I know Epiphany does not provide a kiosk mode, but since most of the improvements are in libwebkitgtk you can use another application or develop a customized browser yourself which just instantiate one or more WebKitWebView.

hunternet93 avatar

For kiosk browsing, try WCGBrowser, a lightweight WebKit browser written in Python: https://github.com/alandmoore/wcgbrowser It runs pretty well on the Pi, although won’t have all the improvements put in to Epiphany (unless they’ve been backported to WebKit).

Emanuele Aina avatar

WCGBrowser uses the old Qt port of WebKit (Qt moved to Blink and the Qt port is no longer upstreame) so no, it won’t benefit from the WebKit improvements as they only apply to the GTK+ port. If you happen to know another kiosk application using WebKitGTK+ then it would benefit from the work done as for the most part it applies to underlying libwebkitgtk library rather than to Epiphany.

BruceR avatar

How about kweb

http://steinerdatenbank.de/software/kweb_manual.pdf

I have not used it, I just remembered it from a forum post.

TXSiPi avatar

Can kweb be launched into full-screen kiosk mode from command line or at boot?

Michael Horne avatar

Congratulations to all concerned! Will definitely give it a try tonight!

The Raspberry Pi Guy avatar

I have been playing around with the web browser this morning and I am very impressed!

Great work!

Matt

Jason Bramwell avatar

A Raspberry Pi and a kiosk-mode browser (To pretty much lock the Pi to a web-browser and nothing else would (I believe) be very popular.

FotL avatar

I have been using the BETA version and this latest release is still BETA, it can lock up if going back several pages, especially when multi-tabs are open.

Though I have not experienced, this latest update to the libwebkit dependency has affected other software, this is due I would surmise to dependencies which are from Debian Stable.

On the plus side it can play HTML5 videos from Youtube and has support for the forthcoming HTML5 standard…

So 8 out of 10 and look forward to this Browser with Jessie !

Eben Upton avatar

Can you provide a detailed description of how to lock the browser up, so we can take a look?

FotL avatar

Hi, after reading some other posts, I decided to create a new Raspbian Wheezy imstall, as a fair test. Anyway it does not now freeze, it just goes into a temporary halt while it sorts out what it is trying to undertake.

I was being impatient, so profuse apologies………..

Eben Upton avatar

Really not a problem. Please don’t apologize. We know there are going to be issues, and precise bug reports are very helpful in determining where we allocate our effort.

Marco Barisione avatar

The only cause of freezes I’ve seen is JavaScript. When a single block of JS is executed it cannot be stopped in a single-process browser. On a lot of pages there’s quite a bit of JS executed on load, so maybe you are going back, some JS is executed and the browser freezes for a second or so.
WebKit2 solves this problem in the Chrome way using multiple processes, but the multiple processes would be too much for the Pi.

Alex Bradbury avatar

We’re also very interested in any regressions to other software. Please share them here or http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=85773&p=606620

Muximize avatar

This update is not without its problems:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=85773

Has anyone tested CSS3 animations yet?

Raspberry Pi avatar

A lot of 404 errors. Not working for me. :(

Eben Upton avatar

Hmm. Can you share anything about your network environment? Can you navigate to any pages? Can you ping the servers that give you 404? Are you behind a proxy server?

Raspberry Pi avatar

“sudo apt-get update” and “sudo apt-get upgrade” is done ok but still getting some 404 errors. when i browse with midori it says “nginx/1.6.1 404”

Connected by Wifi, navigation to any website is ok. No proxy, no firewall, no antivirus, still 404.

http://s24.postimg.org/qfuib7ggl/Sin_t_tulo.png

Emanuele Aina avatar

Weird. Maybe you got unlucky an the mirror redirector choose a broken mirror?

If that’s the case you may try again to see it the broken mirror has been removed from the pool.

Trying one of the URL from my system I correctly get a 302 Redirect:


$ curl -I http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/pool/main/g/gnome-desktop3/gnome-desktop3-data_3.4.2-1_all.deb
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
...
Location: http://mirror.internetone.it/raspbian/raspbian/pool/main/g/gnome-desktop3/gnome-desktop3-data_3.4.2-1_all.deb

Trying the destination URL I get a successful response:

curl -I http://mirror.internetone.it/raspbian/raspbian/pool/main/g/gnome-desktop3/gnome-desktop3-data_3.4.2-1_all.deb
HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Raspberry Pi avatar

I will try. Thanks a lot for help!.

Peter Green avatar

I’ve just removed some bad mirrors from the list

If you are still having problems can you try

wget http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/pool/main/libv/libvisual-plugins/libvisual-0.4-plugins_0.4.0.dfsg.1-7_armhf.deb

and post the complete output.

andrum99 avatar

Congratulations on the new browser! I’m sure this will be a big boost to the platform. Having a modern, usable, stable browser on the Pi really does feel like a big improvement.

Mike avatar

10/10!

Adrian Rhodes avatar

Trying to use the following code.

.strikethrough {
position: relative;
}
.strikethrough:before {
position: absolute;
content: “”;
left: -10;
top: 50%;
right: -10;
border-top: 4px solid;
border-color: red;

-webkit-transform:rotate(-5deg);
-moz-transform:rotate(-5deg);
-ms-transform:rotate(-5deg);
-o-transform:rotate(-5deg);
transform:rotate(-5deg);
}

Works perfect on IE to give me a diagonal strikethrough but doesn’t work on Midori.

Will this work on the new browser?

Emanuele Aina avatar

Yep, it should work as long as it works on Safari/Chrome as the new browser is based on a more recent version of the WebKit engine.

AndrewS avatar

Very nice :)

Does this use hardware-accelerated JPEG decoding? Viewing the results of a google images search takes quite a while to display…

AndrewS avatar

Hmmmm, and clicking on one of the image results doesn’t actually do anything! Are google using javascript features that Web doesn’t support?

Liz Upton avatar

Now you, of all people, should know how to file a proper bug report!

Emanuele Aina avatar

Ufortunately there’s no hardware decoding of JPEGs for the moment.

That said, I just tried and clicking the first cat image (or any other) correctly opens the preview. Can you specify the exact URL you got and the image that are you clicking?

AndrewS avatar

Whoops! Just tried again and it’s working fine. So I either had a temporary network glitch, or I was just being impatient and trying to click while the page was still loading other images.
Apologies for the false report!

Emanuele Aina avatar

Ah ah, no worries! :D

Adrian Rhodes avatar

Doesn’t work as well as Midori. All my css images don’t display.

Liz Upton avatar

Can you send us an example please?

Marco Barisione avatar

Do they work in Chrome and/or Firefox on your computer?

Average Man avatar

I’ll be doing this as soon as I get home! Will be fun to see what the various Pi sites look like on it. Nice work RPi Foundation

ghp avatar

Looks good.
How do I get my scratch scripts to auto-open ? I have some tutorials with links to scratch code *.sb, which are downloaded but not executed automaticallay (works in midori).
Sample: http://www.heppg.de/ikg/box/adapter/adapterplatine.actor.html#N10D66
look for the link ‘Beispielcode’.

and another observation: on the side mentioned above, there is an embedded svg labelled “Motor-Platte, Microschalter und Nockenscheibe”. This svg is an overlay of graphics with some texts and lines. When loading the page for the first time, only the overlay is displayed. When loading this in a separate tab, it displays nicely. Then (obviously as data are cached, it is updated correctly when refreshing the page.

regards, Gerhard

Emanuele Aina avatar

Thanks for the reports, we’ll look at them asap. :)

Marek avatar

Hi!
Will it work at same speed on model A ?
Do I have to setup something special on model A?
All Best :D

Eben Upton avatar

It should work, but you may find you run out of memory easily. We’re planning to update it in future to dynamically unload background tabs under memory pressure (the current version just keeps 3 tabs loaded), which may help.

Bill Stephenson avatar

This is awesome news! Installing it now.

You know, I click on this blog every morning now to see what might be new and cool. I realized last week that I feel that same kind of appetency and excitement I felt about Apple’s stuff years ago and it’s nice having that feeling back.

You guys rock!!!

Eben Upton avatar

Thanks Bill!

Tiago avatar

Hi, I’m having a problem with epiphany… Actually, I’ve had this problem when I first tried out the beta version: after installing epiphany, both midori and epiphany either can’t load webpages at all or take like 20 min to partially load page as simple as google.com (they never load 100% of the webpage even after 1 hour). It seems like a network/proxy error or a lost connections issue but I’m not sure since file transfer and apt-get get work fast as usual (and chromium also loads pages pretty fast). (I’m running on wifi but if I connect by LAN it behaves exactly the same) With the beta, I’ve tried 3 different fresh installs of raspbian and experimented a lot with network configurations but never figured it out so I just did a last brand new install (latest downloadable version) and forgot about it. But now, wanted to try this final version, only to find out I’m running into the same problem, can you guys give a thought on this? Thanks

Diogo Santos avatar

I have the exactly same issue. Today after updated my system by doing sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade, without installing epiphany, Midori stops working just like Tiago said. It becomes very slow and some pages dont even load.

I even tried a fresh install of the latest Raspbian, 20 June, just to check if it was my current install. Did an update and upgrade and Midori stops working. Then i do a dist-upgrade and install Epiphany and it doesnt work either.

I think there is a broken package in last upgrade or some missing one(s).

No relevant errors in the terminal output while running this 2 browsers. Chromium and Netsurf work just fine.

I can give you some logs if you want, you just have to tell wich ones.

Hope you can fix this soon.

Emanuele Aina avatar

That’s very weird. Can you try to launch the command below to see if the problem lies in the HTTP library or somewhere else?


gst-launch-1.0 -q souphttpsrc location='http://www.raspberrypi.org' ! filesink location=/dev/stdout

Tiago avatar

Hi! Thanks for the reply!

After installing gstreamer, I ran that command and the source html code showed up just fine on the terminal after a few seconds…

Emanuele Aina avatar

The HTTP library (libsoup) seems to work fine, but this also means that I’m not able to say what causes your problem. Does it happen on all pages?

Can you try to set a different nameserver (eg. 8.8.8.8) in /etc/resolv.conf?

How much RAM do you have? The application stays responsive and only page load is slowed down?

Tiago avatar

Hi again Emanuele!

“Does it happen on all pages?”
> yes it happens on all pages. After 15min or so after pressing Enter the pages load at about 50% (no images, just text) in a split second. Then stay like that and never load at 100%.

“Can you try to set a different nameserver (eg. 8.8.8.8) in /etc/resolv.conf?”
> I believe I tried this in my previous setup and it didn’t make a difference but I’ll try again tonight (I’ve just did a re-format on my card to start fresh again)

“How much RAM do you have? The application stays responsive and only page load is slowed down?”
> the last few attemps I was running turbo mode and 64mb video ram on a B+. On previous installs I tried to increase the video mem but had no improvements. It’s only the page load that is slowed down, the app continues very responsive. I believe it’s an update that breaks midori and somehow epiphany is also affected.

Marco Barisione avatar

Tiago, can you please try not in turbo mode? All my eperiments on an heavily overclocked Pi lead to stuff randomly not working (including apt-get corrupting some debs).

Tiago avatar

Hi Marco,

I have started again from the clean raspbian image, no overclock and not even locale/internationalization changes… just set my wifi password and performed a system upgrade with apt-get. Before the update, Midori was working. Right after updating, Midori was broken. It’s probably some package that’s affecting both Midori and Epiphany. I have also noticed an error with apt-get and tried:

$sudo apt-get install libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev
$gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders > /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders.cache
$sudo apt-get update
$sudo apt-get upgrade
$sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
$sudo apt-get epiphany-browser

But even after a reboot it didn’t load pages until the first 15/20min pass. It’s like that every time you type an URL and Enter. Also tried to enable cgroups, extending video ram up to 192mb and setting google dns in /etc/resolv.conf but had no luck. Please, if anybody can actually experiment with a clean raspbian image from the downloads section, he/she will be able to verify this for certain. I’m out of ideas at the moment, but something is clearly broken with the latest updates (just don’t understand why it only seems to affect the latest raspbian factory image).

Marco Barisione avatar

Tiago, it’s really weird because for me it works fine with a freshly flashed image :-/

Tiago avatar

Really? Then I really don’t understand what’s going on here…
Can it be a problem about the B+ only?

Diogo Santos avatar

Its not a B+ issue because i have the B version and it happens to. Just like Tiago said. In a fresh raspbian install.

I tried all sugested fixes in here but withou success. And i know more ppl with the exact same problem.

Any more ideas?

Horacio Caceres avatar

I have the same problem with Epiphany, using Raspberry Pi B+ fresh several times, now from Raspbian image also. I use it with Wifi gadget. But, I made it work if it’s connect, direct to a public IP. So My configuration is WIFI to LAN, so I can use SSH and eth0 to connect TightVNC direct to the router and uses DNS provided by resolv.conf, which are different if I disconnect the eth0 connection. With direct public IP, Epiphany works, if not, it doesn’t. Let me know if this helps to understand the problem. Thanks.

Horacio Caceres avatar

I am using now a VPN client connection, and Epiphany works.

Hiro avatar

I don’t tend to much web browsing on my Pi but thought I’d take a look as I’m usually amazed by what the foundation manages achieve.
I was impressed, I opened some fairly content heavy sites and scrolling was nice and smooth and it played videos nicely even full screen.
Just one thing I noticed though, Youtube looks different to how it looks on my other computers. They use a mix of operating systems and a mix of browsers but the Youtube page always looks the same on all of them.
On Epiphany when a video is opened it plays fine but the comments below the video aren’t there nor are the links to other videos that are normally just to the right of the comments.
I have to admit I’m not much of a Youtube user so this may just be a silly settings issue my end but I am curious if it should be like this in Epiphany or do I have an issue?
Keep up the good work guys.

Eben Upton avatar

Yes, it should be like this. We have a number of site-specific hacks in place to improve performance on very JavaScript-heavy sites:

– Twitter and Facebook default to the mobile version
– YouTube doesn’t load comments
– Gmail defaults to HTML-only mode

Alex Eames (RasPi.TV) avatar

I tried it on G+ hangouts just for a laugh. It almost worked, but when you click a specific hangout, it doesn’t pop out and display the chat window. But you can see live updates of the comments people are making – well, just the last line – in the right sidebar.

I was pretty stunned it worked at all though :) I deliberately tried something I thought wouldn’t work.

Alex Bradbury avatar

Let’ face it, not loading Youtube comments should be a standard browser feature.

Liz Upton avatar

Sometimes I wish we could +1 comments here…

Hiro avatar

I couldn’t agree more:). Also noticed that on some sites, Hexus.net and IMDB for example the backdrops don’t appear. Again I think of this as a bonus, it just means quicker loading and less data transfer and I never look at the backdrops anyway.

Emanuele Aina avatar

Indeed, to save resources we enable the advertisment blocker included in Epiphany and this is the reason you get no backdrop on hexus.net.

I need to check IMDB though.

Marco Barisione avatar

YouTube comments take about 10 seconds to load on my fairly recent laptop and they use one of the cores completely during that time.
All of this to display mainly rubbish to be honest :P
That’s why we block them.

beta-tester avatar

fantastic news!
is its source code open?

Eben Upton avatar

Yes. There are source debs available. We’d like to see it ported to run on other ARM-based SBCs. Everything apart from the VideoCore-specific video acceleration should work fine on other platforms.

oliver avatar

where is the source-code?
i cannot find it anywhere..

Emanuele Aina avatar

You can get the exact sources used to build the epiphany and libwebkitgtk packages with apt-get:

apt-get source libwebkitgtk-3.0-0 epiphany-browser

The patches will be in the debian/patches subfolder of the extracted source trees (note that dpkg already applies them automatically).

Anon avatar

Will it get to the stage where it will render sites like http://acko.net/ or the javascript port of State of Mind (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6873971/data/mind/canvas.html )?

Emanuele Aina avatar

Since the WebGL support is disabled you only get the static image banner on acko.net, and that works perfectly. ;)

“State of mind” seems too intensive for the ARM CPU and doesn’t play, which isn’t totally unexpected since it often stutters with firefox on my Intel i3 laptop. :)

Dave avatar

For me it just seg-faults :(
(rasbian/testing running headless over a ssh tunnel)

pi@raspberrypi2 ~ $ epiphany-browser

** (epiphany-browser:24944): WARNING **: Couldn’t connect to accessibility bus: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-5BO7Og2IdP: Connection refused

** (WebKitWebProcess:24967): WARNING **: Couldn’t connect to accessibility bus: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-5BO7Og2IdP: Connection refused
Segmentation fault
pi@raspberrypi2 ~ $

James Hughes avatar

Running over SSH you are not going to get most of the accelerated features anyway….

Emanuele Aina avatar

As James said most of the accelerated features wouldn’t work over remote X, but it shouldn’t crash either.

To be honest it’s a rather untested usecase and I wouldn’t be surprised to find issues when using a browser from an headless machine through a tunnelled connection, as I guess accessing the web servers from your local browser would work much better. :)

Hiro avatar

Just for fun i logged in remotely with vnc over my wired network and ran Epiphany.
Real content heavy sites were a bit of a handful for it but it was usable for most stuff. Certainly it loaded up raspberrypi.org quickly and scrolling was fast although a little jerky.
Never felt to need to surf remotely but it’s possible if you really need to.

Emanuele Aina avatar

Btw, which URL caused the segfault?

Dave avatar

no URL, it was still starting up …

Dave

tomek avatar

For me it seg-faults as well. I’d need it to run Google Music as I found no working plugin for Kodi for Google Music.

Jeff avatar

Most appreciated.Thank you very much!

Matt avatar

Thank you, Liz :) – I am trying it out now.

No need for three lines and multiple keypresses, just do:

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

Matt avatar

I’m gonna go and plant some tea bushes, water them a bit, wait for them to grow, pick the leaves, dry them out and shred them, then make a cup of tea, drink it, wash the cup up, dry it and put it away… and by the time I get back, apt should have installed it…

^__^

Matt avatar

More lag than an overdue tax refund. Are you SURE you tested this thoroughly? YouTube has NO video, stuttery audio.

Back to the drawing board for you.

James Hughes avatar

Or, back to the instruction for you perhaps. Lots of comments above saying all works fine. Sure you haven’t got something wrong or setup badly?

Worthwhile trying on a new install on the OS if you have a spare SD card.

Emanuele Aina avatar

Mh, weird, it sounds like you’ve got no acceleration. Can you paste the output of `apt-cache policy epiphany-browser` here, please?

yehnan avatar
Emanuele Aina avatar

Indeed, thanks for the report!

Flo avatar

Hi :)
very nice browser and damn fast! :D
But I’ve found an error.
It has the same CSS problem as Chromium with MS SharePoint-Sites. The formatting doesn’t fit.
Iceweasel is slower, but it displays it the right way.

But nice work so far! :)

Ben Nuttall avatar

Can you provide a link or screenshot?

Marco Barisione avatar

This browser uses WebKit and Chromium’s engine is based on WebKit as well.
If something doesn’t work with both Epiphany and Chromium then I would say that it’s the website not supporting the browser.

Craig Van Degrift avatar

Thank you for all the hard work. The speed is impressive and HTML5 works nicely with U-Tube.

paddyg avatar

Not relevant to the epiphany-browser but
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
on a fresh raspbian SD card takes several hours so maybe worth letting people know. Presumably there’s an updated image in the pipeline and it may be better (quicker?) to wait for that.

PS also, I had a very recent raspbian that I had added jessie to the /etc/apt/sources.list (in order to get python-pil NB please, please put this in wheezy soon!) and after dist-upgrade (which took even longer than several hours!) several things seemed to be broken. $ startx
produced a message that /usr/bin/X no longer existed and calls openegl.eglCreateContext() (in pi3d) failed to create a context.

Marco Barisione avatar

Wow, do you have a particularly slow SD card? On my class 10 SD card it takes quite a bit to instal, but not hours.
You can also try using eatmydata to get apt to be faster. This program will avoid costly syncs to disk for the program you passed on the command line (for instance do “eatmydata apt-get install foo”) with the small risk of actually eating your data in case something goes wrong. (So use only on a card you don’t mind reflashing in case of problems.)

FotL avatar

Hi Eben will this be fixed to run on Raspbian Jesting Testing ? Presently have dependencies issues. Ta

Eben Upton avatar

Good thought – we’ll stick that on the list.

Noah avatar

Could this browser run http://bellard.org/jslinux/

Emanuele Aina avatar

In theory, yes. In practice I guess it would run so slowly that it would probably require hours if not days for a full boot.

Note that the optimization focus for the browser has been to keep it as responsive as possible even when running very CPU intensive tasks, to render pages in tiles to keep scrolling smooth and to use hardware acceleration when playing video contents: just don’t expect to see JS code run faster than on an old Pentium. ;)

Matthias avatar

Something does not work:

framebuffer_depth = 32
framebuffer_ignore_alpha=1

Caused false colors!

video element No ✘
DRM support No ✘
MediaSource extensions No ✘
subtitle support No ✘
Poster image support No ✘
codec detection No ✘
Support MPEG-4 No ✘
H.264 support No ✘
Ogg Theora support No ✘
WebM VP8 with support No ✘
WebM with VP9 support No ✘

???

Emanuele Aina avatar

Interesting. Where did you get these messages?

Matthias avatar
Emanuele Aina avatar

I get a 25/35 in the video section, support is detected correctly and so do all the video codecs.

Can you paste the output of the command below?


apt-cache policy libwebkitgtk-3.0-0

sam avatar

Works great. However I noticed that the user agent is set to
“Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; ARM Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/538.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/538.15 Version/6.0 Debian/7.6 (3.8.2.0-0rpi14rpi1) Epiphany/3.8.2”
Does that mean that it is pretending to be (and being count as in statistics) a ipad or iphone?

Emanuele Aina avatar

Due to the long deprecated practice of browser sniffing user agent strings tends to show the whole lineage of the Web. “Epiphany” is clearly indicated in our string, and so does the fact that we’re using WebKit, the engine that Apple derived from KHTML, which in turn presented itself to be “like Gecko”, the Mozilla engine when it still was Netscape.

sam avatar

Looks like even the standard version of epiphany on Linux (tested on fedora) claims to be a Mac.

Emanuele Aina avatar

Yep, albeit it doesn’t really claim to be a Mac, it just says it is using the same engine as Safari.

From that point of view, Safari claims to be Netscape too and Epiphany does the same. :)

sam avatar

It says “Macintosh” and “Mac OS X”. Anyone trying to work out visitor statistics or offer an appropriate download of a file is going to count that as a Mac. The only way you can see that it is Linux is if you explicitly search for “Debian”.

sam avatar

A bit more research: It is fixed in webkit 2.5 to report Linux.

Lainey avatar

Hahlalujel! I needed this-you’re my savior.

Matthias avatar

HTML5-Video works now, some GStreamer 1.0 modules were missing.

But why does framebuffer_depth=32 & framebuffer_ignore_alpha=1 not correct?

I see blue alien faces!

Marco Barisione avatar

I think we broke something when optimising to avoid useless format conversions. I will try to get this fixed next week.

Matthias avatar

Have you found the Bug?

DavidF avatar

Very nice! Can you point us to any info on how to set things up beyond what’s in the settings dialog already, e.g. the search engine? The instructions on wiki.gnome.org assume that “gsettings” is present…

Emanuele Aina avatar

The gsettings tool is shipped by the libglib2.0-bin package:


apt-get install libglib2.0-bin

Kai Hendry avatar

Would be nice if you updated the latest Raspbian (at the point in time) 2014-06-20-wheezy-raspbian.zip with this milestone.

I have 3.8.2.0 installed and the performance is still pretty dissapointing. :/ I wonder how much an extra 512MB of RAM would make.

Liz Upton avatar

Unfortunately nobody makes 1GB RAM packages that you can stack using POP. (Search this site for a LOT of discussion about that.)

Matt avatar

I think they do…

http://www.nanya.com/NanyaAdmin/GetFiles.ashx?ID=1225

“4Gb/8Gb LPDDR2-S4 SDRAM
NT6TL128M32AI(Q)/NT6TL256T32AQ
NT6TL256T32AS/NT6TL128T64AR(3/5)”

Liz Upton avatar

That’s not compatible, but nice try!

Alex Bradbury avatar

A new Raspbian image will be up Real Soon Now.

Lee Wilkin avatar

Congratulations on passing a major milestone! :-)

Raspberry Pi just keeps getting sweeter… :-)

(I will wait for it to appear in the next Raspbian image before trying it out.)

It’s astonishing what you’ve achieved (in hardware and software evolution) with this little computer – well done for all your hard work! :-)

Liz Upton avatar

Thanks Lee – much appreciated!

Gcelea avatar

I got my first Raspberry Pi a few hours ago. I just downloaded Epiphany Browser and started watching HD YouTube videos. Now I’m leaving this comment. I’m still in awe of all of this.

Stefano avatar

Hi,
yesterday I decided to try it! Fresh install of latest release of raspbian on my Model B, installed epiphany BUT I couldn’t see any “desktop-like” web browsing: most youtube videos didn’t run smoothly, facebook is almost as slow as before, and normal web browsing was not as fast as I expected.

I was wondering if the “failure” (which is not, as it’s a bit faster than before!) of my test is because of one of the following:
1) I didn’t use a class 4 memory card (but a class 2 should slow things down only with heavy data writes, I believe)
2) I didn’t set any overclock parameter

Thanks!

JCDenton avatar

no. those things don’t make much difference.
i tried running a freshly installed, overclocked, raspbian from both a usb 3.0 stick and class 10 sdcard, but still experienced those problems you mentioned.

if you want buttery smooth, HD youtube playback on the Pi, make an openelec image, download the youtube addon and run that.

can someone also explain why openelec/raspbian/xbmc is better at video playback than raspbian/epiphany? is it the additional operating system overheads?

Marco Barisione avatar

“facebook is almost as slow as before”

This makes me think there’s some installation problem. With the new browser it should load the mobile version of Facebook instead of the incredibly slow full version.

Neil avatar

Meh. Maybe ok via HDMI but behind XTightVNC it’s just as crappy as Midori and Iceweasel. And no marks at all for configurability- very “agricultural” as they say in the cricketing world. Does anyone actually use video output of the RPi?

Liz Upton avatar

If you’re using VNC, no browser’s going to be very whizzy – there’s compression and decompression going on, and you may not be able to take advantage of the hardware acceleration. Why are you using a browser over VNC?

Neil avatar

Hi Liz. I have a PC and two RPis and … and … on my desk. They can’t all plug into my monitor, but they can all plug into my router. Enough said?

FotL avatar

Not a complaint to be levelled at the RPF / Epiphany Browser, it is a VNC limitation.

Why not just use a HDMi Switch ??

Cancelor avatar

If you want to watch HD then use the device connected to the monitor!

ghp avatar

Hello, could be useful to open a category in the forum for this browser. In addition to this, a bug tracker could be useful ?
With this, the discussion would be more structured.

Thank you !
Gerhard

Devin Frioud avatar

I followed the instructions above, and installed epiphany, but it won’t appear in the applications menu, and when I try to start it via terminal, it says it failed to create directory “/home/pi/.config/epiphany”

Emanuele Aina avatar

The fact that it’s not able to write to your home directory makes me think that something is wrong with the filesystem.
What’s the output of the commands below?


mount ; df

M.S.M avatar

The Acid2 test does not pass on the new browser. Please remove the gcc-4.7* packages from the archive.raspberrypi.org repo as you currently broken GCC 4.7 so I can’t compile kernel modules.

FotL avatar

Checking my installation I have GCC4.8 (4.8.2-21~rpi1rpi2) installed ..

Emanuele Aina avatar

Indeed it gets stuck on the checker pattern the first time I run the ACID2 test, even if reloading the page “fixes” the issue and rendering is correct.

We’ll also try to make sure that gcc-4.7 stays parallel-installable with gcc-4.8, sorry for the annoyance and thanks for the reports!

Phillip avatar

Wow!!! Awesome!! Another browser… wait… another browser? Hmm… ok.

Stephen Scott avatar

Wow, great work people. Can’t wait to try it.

Has anyone attempted to run Matthew Godbolt’s JavaScript powered BBC Micro emulator? Amazing piece of work.

I think *that* should be the Pi equivalent of the Acid2 test :-)

yann avatar

Yess!! ready for html5 features.Good job

Vidhya avatar

wow i was trying this … i am using chromium. however it was slow.. eager to try this today. ? Can i play candy crush online game.. facebook app. ?

Rob avatar

Just ordered a Raspberry pi on the strength of Epiphany! :)

Are their any plans to do a NodeEpiphany (a bit like NodeWebkit?)
https://www.npmjs.org/package/nodewebkit

Thanks,
Rob

ghp avatar

Hello,

I miss an ‘open image in new tab’. In my school workshop tutorials, there are a lot of 50% sized images and I have told the kids to ‘open in new tab’ when needing better readability. With this browser, ‘open image’ just downloads them to bottom line. When opening these iconized views, they get opened by ‘netsurf’, another browser in raspbian world.
Are there improvements planned in this area ?
Similiar topic for scratch applications. As mentioned above, I have links from my web pages to sample solutions in scratch. These are “scratch.sb” files, which open in scratch application nicely in midori, but not in this browser.

For speed, I would prefer this new browser, but usability for the workshop is an argument for midori.
Regards
Gerhard

OS1 avatar

Hi All,

Just done a complete update but I’m not convinced my Pi is really using H/W decoding for playback. When I first go to YouTube Epiphany looks for Flash. After a couple of refreshes it manages to convince YouTube to use HTML5, however, even in the standard YouTube playback window the CPU maxes out at 100%. Moreover, there are no new kernel modules being loaded. I have an Acer Aspire One with a CrystalHD card in it. When this card come into play it is obvious. I also have a small dock widget that shows me when this module is being used. I don’t get the same “feeling” on the Pi that anything “new” is happening. How can I determine the system is behaving in the “new” way. Also the video of all this in action shows the video on the main Pi site being played, all I get is a message telling me the video can’t be played with my systems current setup.

Thanks,

Marco Barisione avatar

Have you followed the instructions including the dist-upgrade?
Have you disable automatic installation of recommended packages?
It sounds like you are missing some packages.

OS1 avatar

Hi Marco,

Yes I agree, something hasn’t installed or doesn’t run correctly. Basically I did:
sudo apt-get update
sudo rpi-update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

I have rasbian wheezy, collabora web and collabora rpi in my sources.list

OS1 avatar

I assume there’s a kernel module loaded which I should see with lsmod? Or is it built into the kernel? Am I running the right kernel?

Emanuele Aina avatar

No new module is shown because Epiphany uses the support that was already built in the kernel.

To be really sure you’ve got the right packages, can you paste the output of the following command?


apt-cache policy libwebkitgtk-3.0-0 gstreamer1.0-omx libpixman-1-0 libcairo2 | grep '\*\*\*'

The video on the raspberrypi.org homepage is currently affected by a change in the Vimeo infrastructure and we’re already working on it. :)

OS1 avatar

Hi Emanuele,

Your post doesn’t have a Reply button! Here is the output to
apt-cache policy libwebkitgtk-3.0-0 gstreamer1.0-omx libpixman-1-0 libcairo2 | grep ‘\*\*\*’

*** 2.4.1-1rpi23rpi1 0
*** 1.0.0.1-0+rpi12rpi1 0
*** 0.33.1+git20140627-c37ff5-rpi1rpi1 0
*** 1.12.16-rpi1rpi2 0

Mikael Murstam avatar

I can’t get video to work. I get a message saying “Bohoo! The video can’t be played with your current setup”
I ran the update and the distro-upgrade first.

Thomas Lord avatar

I have the same problem as Mikael Murstam. I tried this on a from-scratch, fresh install of raspbian via NOOB offline installation.

Emanuele Aina avatar

Unfortunately the video on the raspberrypi.org homepage and all the other video hosted on Vimeo are currently affected by a change in the Vimeo infrastructure: we’re currently working on it and we hope to push a fix shortly.

Thomas Lord avatar

About this:

> “Unfortunately the video on the raspberrypi.org homepage and all the other video hosted on Vimeo are currently affected by a change in the Vimeo infrastructure: we’re currently working on it and we hope to push a fix shortly.”

I don’t think that is the only problem. I was unable to find any video at all, anywhere that would play via epiphany. In some cases there is an error message about being unable to play with the current configuration. In other cases playing the video brings the system to a crawl and has a frame rate (with display glitches) of ~1 frame / second (with little bursts, sometimes, of playing a little bit faster).

Is there some test video, somewhere, that really should definitely work and that I can try?

Emanuele Aina avatar

Here’s a simple test page. It should play with low CPU usage (less than 50%).

Thomas Lord avatar

Holy cow! Thanks! Sorry for the mostly false alarm.

That works. Full screen doesn’t work for it. If I try to replay it without reloading the page that seems to not work (pegs the CPU, hyper-low frame-rate). (Maybe the replay problem only happens coming back from full screen mode?) But it does play and I can similarly play some videos on other sites with similar limits.

Again, sorry, I was convinced I had a reproducible case of “just doesn’t work” but I don’t.

FotL avatar

http://www.videojs.com can just about play smoothly in windowed mode, it is amazing it plays at all !!

OS1 avatar

Around 80% here

Jesseo avatar

I wonder with Netflix transitioning to html5 (I can run it natively in chrome now with User agent spoofing on Ubuntu), if we could run it on the pi in the near future. Anyone care to enlighten me?

FotL avatar

The biggest hurdle is DRM not whether Flash or HTML5…

Georgio M avatar

Looks like something funny is happening when cgroup-bin is being installed:

Setting up cgroup-bin (0.38-1+rpi1rpi2) ...
[info] Initializing cgroups.
[warn] Kernel lacks cgroups or memory controller not available, not starting cgroups. ... (warning).

The same message comes up on boot, now. Tried reinstalling cgroup-bin, but no dice.

Also, Epiphany didn’t launch in Maynard. I decided to start over and begin with a fresh Raspbian install, but now Maynard won’t launch.

Kevin Moore avatar

Hi Georgio,
This is not a problem.
If you put cgroup_enable=memory in to cmdline.txt this warning will go away, I believe it allows programs to handle memory more efficiently. Unfortunately for me it causes Epiphany to crash occasionally.
Regards,
Kevin.

Georgio M avatar

Kevin,

Thank you for the help, sir. Some good news for you, it looks like the fine folks at Collabora pushed out a fix for the video and crash issue. After one more apt-get update & dist-upgrade plus following your advise, I’m on about hour two of tooling around in Epiphany without a single crash.

If anyone else is wondering where to find cmdline.txt, it will be in /boot.

You can edit it by opening LXTerminal and typing in:

sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt

In my case, everything had to go on the same line in order to work properly so put cgroup_enable=memory on the same line after everything else.

Kevin Moore avatar

Hi,
Web browser a massive improvement thanks for all your work.
I’ve been using it since December & have always had and still am having an occasional crash (I assume, Epiphany suddeny vannishes after 10 to 20min, not doing anything unusual) if, as suggested in the December announcement, I have cgroup_enable=memory enabled, without it the browser seems pretty stable, this happens on the 3 differently setup pies that i have. Any ideas?
Thanks again.
Kevin.

Igor avatar

When I installed this browser Raspbian were working a pretty long time and installed a lot of packages. During deletion the only browser were deleted. How bad is this in terms of perfomance or space? Is there a way to clean the system up after deletion?
Thanks. Igor.

Arin Sime avatar

I’m curious if Epiphany supports WebRTC (or will in the future)?

FotL avatar

Current HTML5 capabilities: http://html5test.com

Emanuele Aina avatar

Currently there’s no WebRTC support but upstream is already busy working on it.

Marek avatar

Hi! I can`t make distro-update.
sudo apt-get update worked ok
After sudo apt-get dist-upgrade i`m getting a list of downloads but when it comes to wolfram engine, speed drops to 6000 bytes/second and after 2,5 hours it downloaded 1,5% and shows over 3 days to end.Is it something wrong ?. All done on fresh image on model A .Just wanted to try epiphany,but can`t. ALL best

Jarle avatar

Impressive work, always used Netsurf on the Pi before but with this ‘Epiphany’ you’re opening a new portal to more efficient development, coding etc – Well Done :P

Ian avatar

The git repo of its source code is here: http://cgit.collabora.com/git/raspberry-pi/
Is there a chance to run it on x86 Ubuntu desktop?

Emanuele Aina avatar

Epiphany is already packaged for Ubuntu and most of the patches are really specific to the Raspberry Pi hardware.

For those patches which would still make sense on other platforms we’re trying to push them upstream as much as possible. :)

Alexandre Rousseau avatar

Curious to see if it will pass this simple audio test (one of many to come as I am trying to turn my rpi into an html5 game console).

http://gamecubate.com/labs/html5-audio-test

Cheers.

Scot avatar

Wow, it runs better than my laptop now! And I don’t have to worry about setting my pants on fire either! (I have an infamous Hp dv6000)

Mike avatar

I have had 2 goes at installing this to RaspBMC and both times it has corrupted my card.
I am absolutely new to Pi’s so please excuse my ignorance.
Is this made for the RaspBMC OS?

Thanks
Mike

FotL avatar

Compiled for Raspbian Wheezy

Diego ZoracKy avatar

Good news!

Kiosk mode is on the plans for next releases?

Jeff Haddow avatar

Many thanks for writing an excellent piece of software.

For the first time I find that I can use the RPi browser for web searches, instead of jumping back and forward between my RPi and my laptop!!

Keep up th good work.
All the best
Jeff

Patrick avatar

Is it possible to run some commands in the command line to change the url?

will avatar

Hi,

Loving the new epiphany-browser. Not loving its password storing function. Doesnt seem to save any passwords according to the preferences/personal data menu option. Google services (YT/Gmail) curiously unaffected even through browser/board restarts.

I am using the September 09 2014 Raspbian image with epiphany-browser 3.8.2.0-0rpi14rpi2 on a 512Mb Model B.

Beyond that, not bad! :)

Derek Dickerson avatar

No webrtc? its not a modern browser or html5 compatible

FotL avatar

http://html5test.com will show what HTML5 features are so far implemented. Though HTML5 is not a fully ratified standard as yet, so it is unfair to a feature is missing!

Paul avatar

Hi,

Someone who is using Epiphany just let me know that my WordPress site doesn’t work very will in Epiphany. I suspect that has to do with Java issues. Are you planning to do any work arounds for WordPress sites?

Thanks!

Paul

Ben Nuttall avatar

Well http://www.raspberrypi.org is a WordPress site and that works perfectly well in Epiphany.

roses avatar

Well excuse me everyone, but this all-singing/all-dancing “new” browser doesn’t cut it for me.

Forgive my innocence, but isn’t one of the first things a noob wants to do with his/her Raspberry Pi is play You Tube videos??

I followed the install instructions carefully (update, dist-upgrade, install epiphany-browser, reboot) but when I go to ANY You Tube video it says (albeit very briefly and usually only on Page Reload) a plug-in is missing. Sure, the first frame as a still picture shows, but on pressing ‘Play’ the screen goes black and the progress bar doesn’t move.

I go to youtube.com/html5 to activate HTML5, but no difference. Even worse, I cannot find ANYWHERE in the Settings menu of Epiphany where I can install a plug-in or where to download that file from.

Sorry to all you guys, but I feel you’ve been wasting your time developing this if it doesn’t work OUT OF THE BOX and first time for all those of us who have no or very limited Linux experience.

It doesn’t even play the video on the main page of the raspberrypi.org website but instead gives the message ‘Aaargh, this video cannot be played with the current setup”.

Just as info, I have a brand new Model B-plus, connected via an HDMI-DVI adaptor into a Dell monitor. It’s a fresh install of Wheezy Raspbian, all updated, firmware updated, rpi-updated.

Since I’ve had my Pi during the last two weeks I’ve tried Midori, Chromium, Firefox (aka Ice Weasel) but NONE of them can play You Tube videos.

I’ve tried the same browsers in fresh installs of other distros, all with the same end result: YT does not work.

Sure, the R-Pi can play high definition videos from a USB stick or streaming from the internet, but personally I don’t see the point of it if it cannot pass this one basic test and playback a video from YT.

Perhaps I have something wrongly set up or there is a fault with my Pi – in which case I apologise and -I retract my rant. In which case, please point me in the right direction and show me what I’m doing wrong.

Bryan Snow avatar

I love this new browser. I just wish there was a fullscreen or kiosk mode! I have been running chromium for my kiosk system for the last year or so and want to take advantage of all the video acceleration work you have done. Please, just enable a command line option to open epiphany-browser without any toolbars or buttons!

Bless you.

Nitin avatar

I connected r_pi B+ (raspbarian installed)with hdmi to vga convertor to my DELL E series E1914H 18.5″ monitor.The display is scrolling continuously.Tried pressing “3” & “4” didn’t work……?? Any suggestions please.

Clive Beale avatar

Best to ask this in the forums as this is an old post.

Sid avatar

I tried install right away.but had done update and upgrade(not dist-upgrade) in the mornin’.now it’s taking a lot of time to install.Is that supposed to happen?

franz/vienna/austria avatar

i like this fine thing very very much.
and it would be easter, birthday and Christmas together, if someone could give me a hint how to make Flash running with this fine browser.

kindest regards to all here
franz

rh avatar

Hello guys,

I installed Epiphany web browser according to the instructions. It was installed straight after the Raspbian (no other programs were on). And I must say that I was dissappointed. It is slower than Midora and also Chromium works better than Epiphany. Basically it cannot be used as a browsing program at all.
Where the problem lies? When I start Epiphany, RPi gets overloaded (status bar shows over 60% load of the Rpi) and the status bar of the page loading is fast until 70%, then it almost stops and it takes about 2-3 minutes to load the page completely. Then I try to load another page and it takes even longer to lad. What could be the problem?

Thanks for replying.

bellduck avatar

This browser is extremely slow on the Pi i’ve tested it on. Could it be because it is a rev. 1 with 256MB RAM?

Elliot Fekete avatar

It is GREAT in speed but, the top icons in mine such as the home button are all just cancel signs. Can someone comment on how I can fix the problem? Ty, Elliot.

Elliot Fekete avatar

Oh, I forgot to mention as a heads up to people who help me solve the problem, while it was installing i notice the word warning came up. I don’t know if it has anything to do with it but it could do.

Elliot Fekete avatar

I also just noticed that if i remove it the icon stays but it does not open. If I download it again and open it it works but the cancel signs are still there.

Horacio Caceres avatar

I am using on my new RPi B+ the Epiphany Web Browser, from NOOBS, installed twice from scratch, on silent mode, using TightVncServer, connected by WIFI, and using SSH.

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 3.12.28+ #709 PREEMPT Mon Sep 8 15:28:00 BST 2014 armv6l GNU/Linux.

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ apt-cache policy libwebkitgtk-3.0-0
libwebkitgtk-3.0-0:
Installed: 2.4.1-1rpi31rpi1
Candidate: 2.4.1-1rpi31rpi1
Version table:
*** 2.4.1-1rpi31rpi1 0
500 http://raspberrypi.collabora.com/ wheezy/web armhf Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
2.4.1-1rpi24rpi1 0
500 http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/ wheezy/main armhf Packages
1.8.1-3.4+rpi1 0
500 http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ wheezy/main armhf Packages

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ apt-cache policy libwebkitgtk-3.0-0 gstreamer1.0-omx libpixman-1-0 libcairo2 | grep ‘\*\*\*’
*** 2.4.1-1rpi31rpi1 0
*** 1.0.0.1-0+rpi12rpi1 0
*** 0.33.1+git20140627-c37ff5-rpi2rpi1 0
*** 1.12.16-rpi1rpi2 0

When I run Epiphany from terminal I get this message:

**Message: Remote error from secret service: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.SeviceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.secrets was not provided by any .service files

** (epiphany.browser.22852): WARNING **: Error caching from data: The name org.freedsktop.secrets was not provided by any .service files

When I load it, it starts but overload the CPU a few second an then depending on my network load, the SO will drop it out after a few seconds, or after a couple of hours it will load the URL, for example http://www.google.com. Once it is completed, if I run again another Epiphany session by terminal, I do not receive the DBus error, but still remain very slow.
If I try to open, once a page is completely loaded, 2 or 3 more tabs it will use 100% of my CPU usage, and it will never open the new URLs, even if I try to open the same URL opened on my first Tab.

I am using Chromium, NetSurf, Dillo working OK.

Is there anything I can do, or I dump Epiphany away?

Please let me know. Thanks.

Horacio Caceres avatar

Well, I cannot even access to my router, it has the same delay, it will take hours. Please let me know. Thanks.

Horacio Caceres avatar

It was my fault, Epiphany Browser works great, better than Chromium, thank you.

Horacio Caceres avatar

I am using a VPN Client connection, and Epiphany works.

Guy avatar

I have tried Chromium, Midori, and now Epiphany on Pi model B. All 3 are very slow loading and very slow loading web pages. My goal was to use my Pi to listen to internet Radio from Pandora. Prior to Epiphany when trying to access Pandora I was getting the message need to install Adobe Flash. With Epiphany I don’t get that message but I do get a message saying it can’t load the song due to the browser. When I go to Youtube and try and watch a video with Epiphany it is also very very slow but does work although the video is very choppy (I am sure due to speed). Am I asking to much of the Pi? Are there settings in Epiphany that may speed up things?

Another guy avatar

Have you tried downloading Gnash

Guy avatar

Yes. I tried gnash with Midori. It solved the Flash issue as does Epiphany without gnash but playing Youtube videos or trying to connect to Pandora is not usable. It surprises me in one respect this is the case as there are pretty good HW assist engines on the Arm processor. It appears to me to be just the overhead in processing requirements. I was hoping I was not optimizing or setting something up incorrectly but I can seem to get it to work.

KEV avatar

There are some factors to slow loading webpages and choppy online video streaming. One, use Raspbian for R-pi O.S. and Epiphany or Google Chrome for web browser, obviously. Two, overclock R-pi to the max (which is 1.0 GHz). Three, get the most fastest SD card available to date. After that, you will see much better improvements than before.

P.S. Regardless of all these steps taking, there will be some websites that are just JavaScript-heavy sites, embedded advertisements, loading images and gifs, etc. which will hinder the performance. And online video streaming can only be up to 720p at the moment.

Coding Dad avatar

Great work team Pi!

Has anyone had success with the childrens’ learn to code sites at hourofcode.com / code.org?

I had partial success with the Ana / Elsa Frozen Scratch course – sometimes JS hangs / pegs the CPU to 100%, and no YouTube for Education video within an iframe at all. HTML5test says iframes are supported.

Regular YouTube works on my Pi. I ran all of the apt-get and rpi-updating posted above.

I did not modify the cgroup setting, hoping to keep Epiphany more stable.

I am able to download the videos and play them manually from the command line using omxplayer, but that is too much overhead for my 6 year-old daughter to manage.

qainat avatar

I did as instructed writing the 3 commands at the command prompt for the Epiphany browser. Now I am stuck in a perpetual reboot loop.

Tony L avatar

I installed Epiphany on my Raspberry PI B and it’s working like a champ!! Thanks for your efforts. However, I have two quick questions:

a) How do I set the Home page?
b) Is there a way to search for text in a page?

pr8706 avatar

Great!, but what’s the terminal command for it?

Derek avatar

I’m still waiting to get my first Raspberry Pi, but this looks great and I can’t wait to try it out.

I’m wondering though will it be able to handle web application sites that run a lot of JavaScript and also some HTML5 Canvas elements?

Cyrus avatar

Hello Experts,
Kindly help me on this, I am a newbie on Rasbean.
I have Raspberry Pi B+ installed with Raspbean NOOBS OS. The raspberry pi is connected to TV Screen and it autostart epiphany browser on boot time with a specific url. The problem now is, How do i make the browser to be in full screen and again make the TV screen not to go to sleep mode after 15 minutes as it is now.

Your prompt help is highly welcomed. Thank you

Seb avatar

Hi. Is there any browser (not chromium) with the ability to go full screen? Thanks!

Brian avatar

Hi Seb,

The Epiphany Web Browser for Raspberry Pi can go full screen. When you are at the page you want, just push the F11 key and the page will go full screen, hiding the desktop menu bar and the browser URL bars. Another press of F11 brings the menus and bars back to normal.

Brian avatar

Hi Cyrus,

These two links should help guide you to changing that aspect:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=43932
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=18200

There’s a small tweak to stop screen save/blanking mode if you’re in the console mode (links show various methods).

Installing xscreensaver is a very easy way of doing it if you’re in the X Windows environment (the graphical icon based desktop you get with Raspian :] ). Once installed the settings are in your start menu to tinker with to your satisfaction!

Good luck.

Alan avatar

Hi everyone,

I am using the raspberry pi B+ and I have a problem. I have a website and I would like to make this site to refresh automatically could it possible be done ?? can anyone help me please.

Thanks
Alan

navneeth avatar

Can i control the browser through terminal commands? Example: Uzbl browser can be controlled by shell commands.

Is there any special mode where we can write commands to stdin of browser process by spawning?

jhony avatar

Many thanks for writing an excellent piece of software.

For the first time I find that I can use the RPi browser for web searches, instead of jumping back and forward between my RPi and my laptop!

jhony

jj avatar

I have an raspberry pi 2 which I’ve been using as a desktop replacement for a few days now. Epiphenny is nowhere near ready or stable. Sorry, but it’s unusable. It crashes every 2 minutes.

I’m typing this out on w3m. As far as I can tell, text mode browsers are the only stable option.

James Hughes avatar

Sounds like a power problem to me. Post on the forums for help.

jj avatar

Thanks, I will try that.

rod young avatar

You say it so well

we are all eager to get youtube running on pi 2

seems that is the only stumbling block to a great 500,000 sale launch of the Pi2

hope you get your stability soon

I am happy with berryboot and then load on ubuntu with chrome on it. very very good system

recommend berryboot over noobs

sorry but it is so much smoother

berryboot can be searched on goggle and then put on to card SD

Mat avatar

I tested all versions of Raspberry on Raspbian distro, after new kernel compilations. The standard Linux browsers are lazy. Just try xxxterm browser.

Martin Peters avatar

I am trying to work with Pi in my secondary school. I need to be able to enter a proxy address to run a browser, Epiphany included. Some kind people have explained that I can do it through Gnome but that isn’t an obvious part of the new Noobs. Please can you tell me how to enter a proxy address and port for Epiphany? Thank you.

Liz Upton avatar

Not a good place for tech support questions (people won’t be reading all the comments in this thread) – please post your question in our forums!

matthew avatar

Great….. this command “sudo apt-get dist-upgrade” broke my installation of raspbian on my SD card. It was updating ok until it threw up loads of ” no space left” errors towards the end and now I cannot boot into raspbian. Am using the element 14 8GB card with noobs. Not Happy. Surely an easier way to just downloading the browser? Am new to PI and Linux, just trusted that these instructions would work.

James Hughes avatar

Please post tech support issues on the forum where people may be able to help.

rod young avatar

I have just tried ubuntu with chrome on it and got into my gmail and google account. Uploaded a video to youtube with the pi 2

but when i went to play the video just uploaded it would not and showed a black static screen

Feb 2015 what we do?

Tim avatar

Been using web browser on pi2, works well, but has some bugs.

Ctrl f which brings up the find option sometimes hangs browser after one character entered.
Youtube video fast forward rewind crashes browser.
Wish the vertical scroll bar on right was thicker

Using my pi2 as a pc, can run youtube and iplayer in openelec, have libre office installed, can print to my wifi printer, auto detect of wireless keyboard and usb dongles is seemless. Impressed so far

Glenn avatar

My new pi2 is awesome! Epiphany is awesome too but lacks some important ssh stuff. I found out looking up superfish for my daughter’s lenovo (not a problem for her lenovo as it turns out!). The problem is that the site on my pi explained that I was not secure. So I dialed up Calomel.org and it will not even talk to me because my pi2’s epiphany’s software is not doing security at all! Calomel is hard over about security like the EFF.org but on geek terms. Calomel works on dillo and the other one. I hope Epiphany is fixed soon.
When it is fixed how do i upgrade?

Glenn avatar

Somehere i learned that class 4 is the highest supported by my Pi 2B. Somewhere I learned that SD cards go backward compatible to class I if you use a class not supported by your machine. If this is true it might explain the problems with the faster is better using class 10 when class 4 is what works best and gives the fastest results. That having been said Does raspberry PI sell 64 GB class 4 SD Card with noobs installed?
Or is there a rom upgrade that fixes this problem?

If I am wrong please delete this post.

Thanks!

Glenn avatar

I forgot that i am running 16GB and 3 OS’es raspberian, boot to scratch which is a waste of memory since scratch is in raspberrian, and Elec.
That gives me 3 gb clearance. The browser is very nimble as long as i do not give it too many tabs/windows to keep track of. It sitll works as well as IE or chrome or FireFox but handles fewer browser tabs. And the SSH problem i mentioned before.

GOOD WORK ALL!

ara avatar

Despite javascript support, my RPi still can’t handle Flightradar24.com (which is 100% javascript) with that browser….
any idea ?

Comments are closed