GNOME Web (aka Epiphany)

★★★☆☆

GNOME Web is one of the few WebKit-based browsers built for a non-Apple system. It handles the basics: displaying websites, autofill, multiple tabs, bookmarks, and reading mode, plus you can install portable web applications to your desktop.

It’s only really designed to run under GNOME, and while it can run under other desktops, I’ve found Falkon to be more flexible. And more stable. “Web” has crashed a lot in the weeks I’ve been trying to use it as my main browser.

There’s some built-in ad-blocking and tracker-blocking, but they’re just on/off switches. There’s no way to see how it’s deciding what to block, whether it has a list that needs to be updated, etc.

There’s no extension support. It can’t even manage GNOME Shell Extensions, which means you need to keep a Chromium– or Firefox-based browser around even on GNOME. This also means it can’t connect directly to external password managers (so I’m using autotype as a workaround, same as on Falkon), though it looks like KeePassXC can act as the “secret” service, replacing gnome-keyring. That’s not something I’d considered.

Bookmarks management is only through a sidebar, and it’s the kind of thing that works fine if you only have a few bookmarks, but if you have too many, it’s a pain to deal with. And there’s only limited bookmarklet support. On-page changes seem to work, but anything that loads a new page doesn’t so far. And while you can import and export, there’s no sync capability.

Font smoothing goes too far on my old 1x monitor and text looks blurry.

Installing Web Applications

You can install progressive web applications (PWAs) to the desktop, which will show up in GNOME’s application list. Since PWAs don’t need all the missing features for navigating around the web, and since Epiphany is lighter than, say, Vivaldi and will open external links in whatever your default browser is, I’ve been using it for stuff like Phanpy.

Tip: If you sign into an app using a different website (ex: social networking front-ends like Phanpy), go into the web app preferences and add that other website to the Additional URLs section (at least temporarily). Otherwise it’ll open the login form in a regular Web window that’s not connected to the webapp session.

GNOME Naming Notes

The browser was originally called Epiphany, until the GNOME practice of simplifying names got to it and called it Web…but the packages are still called epiphany. I remembered it had originally been built on Gecko, and that there was some connection to Galeon. (It’s long since been discontinued, but I used it as my main browser on Linux in the early 2000s because it was so much faster than Firefox, which at the time was still drawing all its own buttons and toolbars and such with the web engine). Apparently, Epiphany was started by the original Galeon developer after a split over whether to simplify the UI or not.

It is kind of amusing that it’s running on an engine (WebKit) based on one (KHTML) originally written for KDE, though!