How to install WebKit based Epiphany browser on Ubuntu Hardy

Epiphany is a default browser of the GNOME Desktop (and my favorite one). Traditionally it used Gecko HTML Rendering backend to display web pages. Recently WebKit renderer got a lot momentum and Epiphany got support for it. (There is a long lived desire in Epiphany community to replace Gecko with something that does only HTML rendering and nothing more.)

WebKit is not the default backend yet. It’s stable, but has much usability quirks. It’s not supported by popular distributions yet. But you may want to try it yourself now…

First you need to add ‘misery’ repository:

sudo echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/misery/ubuntu/ hardy main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/misery.list
sudo apt-get update

Then update your epiphany to latest version if you have it installed already:

sudo apt-get update

Next install webkit based backend for Epiphany:

sudo apt-get install epiphany-webkit

Finally make it your default browser:

sudo update-alternatives --set epiphany-browser /usr/bin/epiphany-webkit
sudo update-alternatives --set gnome-www-browser /usr/bin/epiphany-webkit

This instruction was written using Epiphany running WebKit backend. :-)