Thank you for tracking that, that would not have been easy to have an idea on the issue without that since that's probably few people are working with a misconfigured avahi on they server ;)
Upstream has reassigned to gnome-vfs with that comment: "Epiphany uses the async gnome-vfs functions for this, which shouldn't ever block our UI. So this is either a gnome-vfs problem or an avahi problem." I'm updating the package according to that ** Changed in: epiphany-browser (Ubuntu) Sourcepackagename: epiphany-browser => gnome-vfs Importance: Medium => Low Status: Unconfirmed => Confirmed -- Consistent 15-second hang with no window painting at launch https://launchpad.net/bugs/52722 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs