Contributor goober99

Unlike Epiphnay, Firefox is not a real GNOME application, even with the enhanced native look which has been introduced by Firefox 3.0.

Epiphany is a very simple browser, more conforming to the spirit of GNOME, which lacks a lot of the features of Firefox. However, I think most people will probably not need Firefox' extra features and plugins. Those who do need Firefox could easily download it when Epiphany becomes the default webbrowser included out-of-the-box in Ubuntu. Ubuntu should aim for consistency, and Epiphany certainly is a better candidate than Firefox if consistency is the goal.

Epiphany currently uses the Gecko-engine for rendering, but will probably feature WebKit - http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/WebKit - soon. WebKit would probably do a better job than Gecko.

Because somehow Ubuntu brainstorm says the Blueprint URL I gave isn't valid, I give it here in the text: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/epiphany-default-browser

In todays computer systems the main bottleneck is not CPU but disk access which is several orders of magnitude slower than CPU and memory. In such circumstances the way to improve application performance is to prefetch data it needs from disk before it even requests it and it is the point of prefetching techniques. This speeds up boot and decreases the time needed to start programs. This replaces and it is faster than the currently used readahead.