Whew, right on the heels of Epiphany 1.5.1 (with Christian and my new Extensions Manager Extension -- lets you load/unload extensions on the fly!) comes Evolution's Plugin Manager Plugin. Coincidence? Maybe. But I'm tempted to strive for some UI consistency among them.

First of all, the naming scheme is different. We use "extension" because "plugin" is already used for Flash & co., and because Mozilla uses "extension" (for the same reason, no doubt). I guess that makes us screwed from Step 1.

After that, I noticed in Evolution that the name, id and path are displayed alongside the extension. We on #epiphany figured that was unnecessary detail.

Lastly, the plugin information is displayed on the same window as the treeview. I coded the extensions manager to show plugin information on double-click. I don't know which is better, but we should certainly put information on the bottom of the treeview instead of the side.

And in case anybody actually reads my blog: you must realize that Epiphany is now great. The extensions manager work has been truly fantastic and we have some great extensions to complement it (sidebar, error viewer, mouse gestures, ...).

Not only that, but all our extensions can be loaded or unloaded at any time. We enforce this by simply not allowing extensions to work any other way ;). This presents problems with some aspects of Mozilla: the sidebar extension has had some problems, and my adblock extension simply will not load or unload properly while Epiphany is running. In my opinion it's better to fix these problems where they exist instead of working around them with a "deferred load/unload" solution.

Evolution 1.6 will be great. I really hope it'll become default browser on Ubuntu or Fedora Core 3: while it doesn't have the same publicity as Firefox, it really does cater to these distributions' target users better than Firefox does.