Farewell Odysseus!

Its been too long since I last worked on Odysseus, or have written to this blog! But looking at the state of elementary’s builtin browser (codenamed “Epiphany”) in Jolnir I have to say I feel Odysseus has less of a reason to exist. Epiphany is a nice enough browser that I’m happy to contribute what I consider to be some of Odysseus’s most important features to it, so that I can focus on other projects I consider more important. Namely my own browserengines exploring the potential of the web without JavaScript to be perfectly suited to viewing on absolutely any device! Show how versatile text is as a medium!

I learnt a lot from developing Odysseus! I learnt how trivial it is to get started in browserdev thanks to the immense effort of projects like WebKit and Blink (wish I could say the same about Gecko…), and how hard it is to develop all the navigation aids expected of a browser. Especially if you’re attempting to innovate. I formed more solid opinions about these navigation aids. I learnt that SQL probably isn’t the best base to build the UX I had in mind for Odysseus.

And my drive to be responsible and study the dependencies I’m asking users to run led me to comprehend & question the sheer amount of code required to support everything expected of the web. Which is pretty much everything! Leading to my subsequent projects.

I will be seeking to contribute features to Epiphany I consider important, namely:

• reopen closed tabs
• recommend apps to install to support as-yet unsupported links
• search bookmarks by multiple tags
• autodiscover webfeeds

Other more experiemental features of Odysseus will make their way into chrome (which I now have time to consider implementing!) for my own browserengines. And just maybe one day I’ll get far enough to implement a similar desktop browser “Iris” with WYSIWYG editting capabilities running on my own engine!

In the meantime look forward to “Rhapsode” being released to the elementary AppCenter & FlatHub, it’ll be something special!

This has been an incredible odyssey I’ll never regret!