Key Takeaways
- GNOME Web, formerly known as Epiphany, is a simple and minimalist web browser that focuses on speed and staying out of the way.
- It incorporates features for privacy and security, such as sandboxing, ad blocking, and tracking prevention.
- While GNOME Web has a clean interface and performs well in terms of speed and memory usage, it currently lacks support for extensions, which may be a dealbreaker for some users.
GNOME Web is the default GNOME web browser, formerly known as Epiphany. Is it ready to be used as your daily go-to browser on Linux? I used it for a week to find out.
What Is GNOME Web?
The GNOME web browser is one of the official GNOME core applications. GNOME core applications are sometimes bundled with GNOME installations. They let you perform some common tasks right from the get-go, once you’ve installed GNOME. Things like the System Monitor and Calculator are core apps.
GNOME Web is one of the long-standing members of the core group, it’s been around since 2002, when it was forked from another—now defunct—project called Galeon. Until 2012 it used to be called Epiphany. You’ll still see this name in use here and there, like the names of the installation packages.
GNOME Web conforms to the GNOME human interface guidelines, and it’s written using the GTK toolkits. This delivers an authentic native GNOME appearance and behavior. GNOME Web reflects your current GNOME theme, and it looks and feels like an integral part of GNOME universe, not an add-on.
Underneath the hood, GNOME web uses Apple’s WebKit framework as its browser engine. This is the layout and rendering engine used in Apple’s Safari browser. It was ported to GNOME as WebKitGTK.
GNOME Web’s guiding principle is simplicity. It doesn’t try to be everything a browser can possibly be. It focuses instead on speed, and an uncluttered and almost minimalist interface. It wants to stay out of the way as you browse the web, not be in your face.
The only way to really assess a browser is to use it exclusively for a period of time. I tried GNOME Web for a week. If GNOME Web wouldn’t let me do something I really needed, I’d hop over to another browser, preform that task, then move back to GNOME Web to carry on with the experiment.
Installing and Starting GNOME Web
Although GNOME Web may be bundled with some GNOME installations, it had to be installed on our Ubuntu 23.04, Fedora 38, and Manjaro 22 test machines.
On Ubuntu use this command:
sudo apt install epiphany-browser
On Fedora you need to type:
sudo dnf install epiphany
The command for Manjaro is:
sudo pacman -S epiphany
GNOME Web is also available as a Flatpak and as a Snap.
To start GNOME web, press the “Super” key and type “web”. You’ll see the GNOME Web icon.
Click it to launch GNOME Web. On Manjaro and Fedora the icon was the default GNOME Web “faceted globe”, but on Ubuntu 23.04 (with the default theme) it was a compass.
Privacy and Security
GNOME Web incorporates a number of features to help with online privacy and security.
GNOME Web used to integrate with Google Safe Browsing, warning you of dangerous or malicious sites before you actually landed on them, in the same way that Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari do. Changes in the Google terms of service and the requirement for a Google API key mean that this feature is not present on standard builds of GNOME web.
It is present, however, in the Epiphany Technology Preview nightly builds, which are available as a Flatpak flatpackref file from the GNOME Web development page.
To install the nightly build, click the “Download Tech Preview” button to download the flatpakref file. In a terminal window change into the directory you downloaded the file to and run this command.
sudo flatpack install --from name-of-the-downloaded.flatpakref
The dangerous website option is in the “Preferences” menu.
GNOME Web incorporates a form of sandboxing. Processes running in a tab cannot affect other tabs, nor can they access the operating system nor your home directory.
GNOME Web incorporates ad blocking by default, leveraging the “Content Blockers” functionality of WebKitGTK. It periodically downloads updated exclude lists from EasyList to maintain its effectiveness. Tracking prevention is also enabled by default.
Because “Newsletter” was written in white on very pale background it was difficult to see what was obscuring the text.
Using GNOME Web
Unobtrusive User Interface
The GNOME Web interface is clean and uncluttered. At first glance it looks like there isn’t really an interface to speak of, just a window displaying a web page.
Look closer and you’ll spot some subtle icons in the title bar. At the right-hand end there’s an icon that looks like books on a shelf, and there’s a menu icon beside them.
In the normal builds it’s a hamburger menu, in the technology preview builds it’s a three-dot icon. In both cases it displays a menu of options. One of them is “Preferences”, where you can set your home page, choose what a new tab should display, pick your preferred search engine, and so on.
Toward the left end of the tool bar there are icons to go backward and forward a page, to reload a page, to go to your home page, and to open a new tab.
You need to set a home page in your preferences for the home icon to appear. The new tab button creates a new tab. Once you have more than one tab open, the tab toolbar appears.
Tabs
The tab toolbar only appears when you open two or more tabs.
Tabs work as you’d expect them to. You can click to move between tabs, and close tabs using the little “x” symbol in each tab.
Right-clicking a tab drops a context-menu that lets you perform actions such as reloading a tab or all tabs, closing all other tabs, or closing tabs to the left or tight of the current tab. You can drag tabs to position them as you like.
In the technology preview, pressing Ctrl+Shift+O showed an overview of open tabs.
Bookmarks and Tags
GNOME web uses tags to group and organize bookmarks, rather than folders. Tags serve the same purpose and give a little extra functionality. Pressing Ctrl+D or clicking on the star symbol in the URL address field bookmarks the current page.
A small dialog appears that lets you edit the name of the bookmark and select or create tags. Clicking a tag button highlights it and applies it to the bookmark. You can create new tags from this dialog too.
When you want to find a bookmark, click the “Bookmarks” icon in the title bar. You’ll see a list of all your bookmarks. You can scroll through this list to locate your bookmark.
If you’ve used tags, click the “Tags” tab in the dialog. You’ll see a list of the tags that have been used. Clicking one of the tag names shows the bookmarks that tag has been applied to.
The advantage of this method over folders, is you can have multiple tags on one bookmark.
The first time GNOME Web starts it looks for other browsers and offers to import your bookmarks. I did this from Google Chrome. It worked, but they came across as one large, flat list. It would have been neat if GNOME Web had created tags from my folder names in Chrome, and applied those to the imported bookmarks. It didn’t take long to do this manually, and it gave me a crash course in GNOME Web’s tags and how they worked.
Firefox Sync
You’ll find the “Firefox Sync” option in the “Preferences” menu.
Logging into Firefox Sync lets you sync your bookmarks, passwords, active tabs and so on between GNOME web and Firefox, across all of your devices. It simplifies the migration from Firefox, and gives a consistency across all your instances of GNOME Web.
Performance
Usually, GNOME Web opens pages just as quickly as Chrome does on my computers. I say usually, because three or four times it didn’t open the page at all, and I had to force the issue by clicking the reload page icon.
I didn’t see any of the widely reported issues with video playback though. Embedded videos in webpages played without a problem, and YouTube presented no difficulties with playback or sound.
There were some oddities here and there in rendering webpages, which was a surprise. As it happens, this affected the How-To Geek site. Each page on our site has a black menu bar at the top of the page. It has an orange block in it that should read “Free Newsletter.”
In GNOME Web it only said “Free.” The word “Newsletter” was displayed beneath the orange block, obscuring some other text.
When the page was scrolled and a darker background moved into position, you could clearly see the word “Newsletter” in white.
As far as memory usage went, GNOME Web was an improvement over Google Chrome by a large margin. No real surprises there. With a single tab displaying the same website in each browser, Goggle Chrome used 87.8MB, while GNOME Web used 32.7MB.
GNOME Web did a great job of integrating with the GNOME desktop and using the appropriate themes and colors. On my laptop it hooked into the GNOME touchpad events and I could move forward and backward through web pages using two-finger sideswipes.
An Upcoming Contender
GNOME web continues to improve, and shows great promise. But I couldn’t recommend it as a daily driver yet. The page rendering issues I saw were inconveniences rather than showstoppers—but other pages might have bigger issues.
The real problem for me was having no support for extensions. This is reputedly in the pipeline but it’s not here yet. That was the showstopper for me. Without my VPN extension, password manager, and note clipper, I felt like I’d been hamstrung.
I can imagine a day where I could use GNOME Web as my main browser, but that day hasn’t come yet.
