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I recently decided to try out Epiphany for real after the umpteenth time Firefox went haywire when my gtk theme changed. As a base browser, the only things it has going for it are the ability to drag tabs around, and the tag-based bookmarks system.
On the downside, using that tag-based bookmarks system means starting over when you have hundreds of poorly categorized bookmarks like I did. I'm still not sure if I like it, but it's definitely neat.
On the plus side, Epiphany can be tweaked with Python extensions. In particular Stefan Stuhr's Only One Close Button is a blessing to those of us who don't like scrolling through tabs.
With this in mind, I set out to fix a problem I've been experiencing. One of the sites I visit takes user submitted content, including a link and a comment. Lots of submissions include a link in the comment field. However in order to preserve their table layout without having it overflow, the site embeds U+200B Zero-Width-Space characters into the shown text. When I select the text and paste it to a new tab, the url will contain a '%E2%80%8B' substring (URL-escaped UTF-8 encoded U+200B) which invalidates the destination, and tends to yield either a 404 or a redirection.
I wrote up a simple extension based on the tutorial, but debugging it was a real pain. My initial session of epiphany was running somewhere with no stdout or stderr. My first draft of my extension had several errors which resulted in thrown exceptions. A bug with Epiphany causes it to fail to exit properly when Python extensions throw exceptions. It was not only failing to reload my extension, but when I thought I was running Epiphany in a terminal, it was really resuming the existing session. Let this be a lesson to Epiphany Python extension developers: be willing to kill your running Epiphany process!
After figuring that out with the help of jfr on #epiphany, I was then able to complete the extension handily. It's not ideal: it causes a second automatic page load to happen, and going back to the page with the zero width space in the URL will again trigger the redirect. But it's good enough for me. If anyone else wants it, either to use or to fix, you can get it from EpiphanyExtensions.
