WebKit-based[edit]
Epiphany 2.26.1 (left) showing its larger user interface chrome area than in 3.2.0 (right)
The development process heavily suffered from multiple problems, related to the Gecko backend.[6] To address these issues in July 2007 the Epiphany team added support for WebKit as an alternative rendering engine for Epiphany.[15] As the backend development advanced, on April 1, 2008 the Epiphany team announced that it would stop using the Gecko rendering engine and proceed using just WebKit.[6]
The size of the development team and the complexity of porting the whole browser to a new backend caused Epiphany to re-release version 2.22 with bugfixes instead of the actual development code,[16] so browser development remained stagnant until July 1, 2009, when the project team announced that Epiphany 2.26 would be the final Gecko-based version.[17] Eventually, in September 2009 the Webkit-powered Epiphany 2.28 was released, as part of GNOME 2.28.[18]
With GNOME 3.4 release Epiphany was renamed Web.[1