The Pi Wire
Raspberry Pi gets a new browser and new VGA support. Also, Raspberry Jams, Shellshock, and Eben talks A+.
Lead Image © Sujono sujono, 123RF.com
Raspberry Pi gets a new browser and new VGA support. Also, Raspberry Jams, Shellshock, and Eben talks A+.
Things move quickly in the Raspberry Pi ecosystem – so quickly that sometimes it can be really hard to keep up! This regular column rounds up Raspberry Pi and open hardware news to keep you up to date on the latest developments, projects, products, and events.
Late last year on the 23rd of December 2013, as a lovely little gift for all of us Raspberry Pi enthusiasts, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the new web browser they were working on in partnership with Collabora in order to bring a smoother Internet surfing experience to the Raspberry Pi. The new web browser would be a Raspbian port of the very confusingly named "Web" web browser, which was formerly called Epiphany and originated from the Gnome project. At the time of the initial announcement, the new web browser was in its early stages of development and was released as a beta with many features still missing; however, it already looked like a welcome improvement to the standard Midori browser included with Raspbian. The official release of the new browser (which is based on the WebKit 1 layout engine) came on September 1, 2014 and brought with it all of the improvements that had been promised last year. These improvements include full support for the JavaScript JIT (just in time) compiler, improved HTML5 video support, hardware-accelerated video decoding enabling playback of 720p videos at 25fps, better scrolling and interactivity during page loads, and a whole host of other features. Eben Upton from the Raspberry Pi Foundation says in the release video [1] that "it is another good step in making the Raspberry Pi useful as a general purpose computer," and I can add that, after subsequently using the browser in an operational setting for a number of hours, that is definitely true. The Epiphany browser is included by default in all new versions of Raspbian and NOOBS from September 15, 2014 onwards, but if you want to just download it without a full update, you can do so using the following code from a terminal session:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser
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