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JHnet

Member

Registered: 2012-06-22

Posts: 6

How to replace Epiphany in Gnome Shell ?

Hi there,

when im searching for something in the gnome shell overview it offers me to search for it on the web, if nothing is found on my system.
Unfortunally epiphany is opened,but I want to use chromium.

I selected Chromium in the "Default App" Dialog but that does not take effect:

How can i change this ?

blackout23

Member

Registered: 2011-11-16

Posts: 781

Re: How to replace Epiphany in Gnome Shell ?

Have you tried uninstalling epiphany or do you want to keep it anyway?

gnunn

Member

Registered: 2013-10-21

Posts: 102

Re: How to replace Epiphany in Gnome Shell ?

I believe the Search on the Web is a search provider, it can be disabled in the search settings. To use Chrome/Chromium instead I assume someone would have to create an equivalent search provider for that browser.

Neitsab

Wiki Maintainer

Registered: 2013-12-05

Posts: 32

Re: How to replace Epiphany in Gnome Shell ?

I'm looking for doing the exact same thing, but with Firefox.

Relevant GNOME documentation:  https://developer.gnome.org/shell/stabl … ystem.html and https://developer.gnome.org/shell/stabl … ider2.html.
I also found this commit log that details a bit more which files are involved in the process of making Epiphany's search provider...
Another example with an extension that integrates Wikipedia search in the shell: Wikipedia Search Provider (GitHub page linked).

I tried creating /usr/share/gnome-shell/search-providers/firefox-search-provider.ini based on epiphany's one by just substituting browser names, however while this put a Firefox option in Search settings

of course it doesn't pop up in Shell results... I don't know what I should modify to do so, but it's probably a lot more effort than that

I must add that as soon as a search is done through the Shell that offers you to expand it in Epiphany/Web, a complete Epiphany/Web process (so it is WebKitWebPocess and epiphany) starts in headless-mode and eats up some of your RAM (54MB on my system), even if you didn't follow through in Epiphany (dev blog post about this "feature": https://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2013-10.html). No need to say that those processes don't terminate by themselves either, and if you do it manually it'll crash-restart your session.

As I wasn't happy with this I disabled Web search provider in GNOME Control Center (Preferences > Search) and use the Web Search Provider extension, the only that allows you to search through configured search provider AND respect your default browser choice AFAICT... Let us know if you find something else!

Michael Catanzaro

Member

Registered: 2012-11-04

Posts: 50

Re: How to replace Epiphany in Gnome Shell ?

I must add that as soon as a search is done through the Shell that offers you to expand it in Epiphany/Web, a complete Epiphany/Web process (so it is WebKitWebPocess and epiphany) starts in headless-mode and eats up some of your RAM

In 3.12 it is a separate binary.

See also https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=720245