GNOME Web (aka Epiphany)
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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.
Itâs only really designed to run under GNOME, and while it can run under other desktops, Iâve found Falkon to be more flexible. And more stable. âWebâ has crashed a lot in the weeks Iâve been trying to use it as my main browser.
Thereâs some built-in ad-blocking and tracker-blocking, but theyâre just on/off switches. Thereâs no way to see how itâs deciding what to block, whether it has a list that needs to be updated, etc.
Thereâs no extension support. It canât even manage GNOME Shell Extensions, which means you need to keep a Chromiumâ or Firefox-based browser around even on GNOME. This also means it canât connect directly to external password managers (so Iâm using autotype as a workaround, same as on Falkon), though it looks like KeePassXC can act as the âsecretâ service, replacing gnome-keyring. Thatâs not something Iâd considered.
Bookmarks management is only through a sidebar, and itâs the kind of thing that works fine if you only have a few bookmarks, but if you have too many, itâs a pain to deal with. And thereâs only limited bookmarklet support. On-page changes seem to work, but anything that loads a new page doesnât so far. And while you can import and export, thereâs 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 GNOMEâs application list. Since PWAs donât 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, Iâve 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 itâll open the login form in a regular Web window thatâs 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 WebâŠbut the packages are still called epiphany. I remembered it had originally been built on Gecko, and that there was some connection to Galeon. (Itâs 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 itâs running on an engine (WebKit) based on one (KHTML) originally written for KDE, though!