GNOME 43 is Here. What's Working, What's Not?

Thought I would share my latest screenshot of Epiphany.alpha 43. All but one extension working in Web (Epiphany Technology Preview). I guess it’s time put Epiphany to the test, maybe it will be my daily driver in September. Bookmarks work, local passwords store, and Firefox account syncing devices. Could get interesting…

Screenshot from 2022-07-09 18-33-06

Actually I posted on GNOME 43 preview, and mentioned Bitwarden as part of my workflow. I think we will leave it there.

:smiley:

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Yeah. Life in Taka-Tuka-Land, I cannot even fathom, but I think I’d like to!
Smooch!

:rofl:

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Ah! I faced the same issue. Can’t get Bitwarden into Falkon but I guess that’s how the browser rolls, by keeping it simple.

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You are acting as if the passwords are saved as plain text in the server.

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from Bitwarden site:
…end-to-end AES-CBC 256 bit encryption, salted hashing, and PBKDF2 SHA-256. All cryptographic keys are generated and managed by the client on your devices, and all encryption is done locally.

That’s good enough for this old hacker

Update on Epiphany alpha.43 - GNOME Web. It appears in the title as "Web (Epiphany Technology Preview)

I have not tried the Flatpak, as an earlier attempt failed. This is based on the nightly.

The “Web is not responding” dialogs have stopped.

The WebExtension API has been implemented, and I have one extension running fine. See the Bitwarden logo extension

image

It also has this neat option to Install Site as a Web Application.

Of course for anyone who trusts Firefox Sync, you can log in love that it allows
image

OK, it’s not perfect, yet…but its good progress and ideal if you are looking for a for a minimalist browsing experience. I want a browser to stay out of my way and Epiphany is already doing just that.

I am not quite ready to make it my daily driver, so I will wait for the official release. They have some work to do on page load optimization, but it will come over time. If you want to follow the project here is the Gitlab and you can see the dev’s blog here

BONUS: Epiphany has swipe between tabs. I have a touchpad, but I think Epiphany is targeting touch screens. I think every browser should do this, and suspect they will follow.

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Until themes and extension start to receive more official support, I’m definitely not excited about moving to another version of GNOME. That’s just more opportunity to break something I need. I just got GNOME 42 stable, today, with all of the extra functionality I need that vanilla GNOME doesn’t provide.

That being said GNOME Wayland is working extremely well for me so far. Fortunately, all of the applications I use have gotten Wayland or XWayland support recently. I’m still not that impressed with the virtual keyboard size and layout, but at least it works with all applications. I’m also having touch screen input issues in Wayland in some applications like Nautilus, but I got around that by switching to Dolphin.

This is the first I’m hearing of the GNOME team running out of money. I thought they were sponsored by Red Hat, who is flushed with cash. Although being short on cash might explain the reduction in features… I’ve had my issues with the way the GNOME team has handled some things, but I definitely don’t want to see them go under; just humbled enough to start listening to the community again.

The last time I used GNOME Web, it was extremely buggy and missing a ton of the features present in modern browsers like Chrome and Firefox. They had a lot of catching up to do. Plus, a web browser can’t survive in the present if it doesn’t support sites like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, or Apple TV, so let’s hope they don’t get cute with DRM during their updates.

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So far the terms “minimalist … experience” and “stay out of my way” have been used in past by the community to justify the removal of features that others have needed. I’m on the internet at least 6 hours a day with school and leisure. I don’t need a “minimalist” web browser. I need a browser that will support every single thing that my school’s, bank’s, or popular streaming services’ websites need. Hopefully, their “minimalistic” approach to GNOME Web doesn’t follow the trend they’ve done with the rest of their applications. If so, most of us will have to stay with Firefox and Chrome (or Chrome based browsers).

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Thanks for you thoughtful comments. I felt the same way when 42 was released and Wayland broke things. Watching the pull requests, I see they have been working their way through the issues. For me Wayland is rock solid, and I’m no problem with GNOME Files (Nautilus).

That has been talk since 2014 when they had bad finacial management.
These days Red Hat helps out with programming features that will be of benefit to their Fortune 100 and government clients. I don’t think IBM will let them go down. They have far too much invested in them in the field.

I spend time in the Epiphany dev group and they are more concerned with keeping a feature in line with all the other Gnome packages, rather than doing what is trending in other browsers. Since my productivity workflow has qudrupled since Gnome 42, I would say they are on to somethething. But do I agree with their hardline position on development direction, heck no, but I am pretty happy with Gnome 42 as it stands, minor bugs and all.

GNOME Web Epiphany is still in its 43.alpha-23-gc988d8561+ infancy, and it’s still pretty buggy. Vivaldi has become too feature mad and will finish up like Netscape Naigator pretty soon. Firefox Dev. Ed. is still my choice. Epiphany is a curiosity in development. It can finally support YouTube and renders pretty well, since its uses Webkit rendering engine and identifies as Safari, but there is a lot of chatter on DRM in the dev group. https://riot.im/app/#/room/#epiphany:gnome.org

Do you have a touch screen? Right click in Nautilus works well in GNOME Wayland with the touch pad on my Surface Pro 8 type cover, but doesn’t work at all if I press and hold the touch screen. Incidentally, it works great in Dolphin on GNOME Wayland.

I’m trying to use my Surface Pro 8 without the type cover as much as possible, since that’s the way I use it in Windows 11 and it has replaced my Android tablet. I only like to use the type cover for school.

No, unfortunatemy, I have an LCD laptop. I heard there are touch screen issues in GNOME. I know @Scotty_Trees doesn’t have one, but he keeps his ear pretty close to the dev cycle, so maybe he will chime in.

I used Nemo until they got the bugs ironed out. Now Nautilus 42.3 on GNOME wm which is Wayland by default, is very stable.

pretty expensive cover if you ask me. Still the accessories is where make their real :moneybag: Enjoy your Surface Pro 8.

Epiphany implements an almost to the letter webkit browser. If something works in Safari itll work in Epiphany. The web extensions support has been the biggest change to implement something outside of the usual webkit fair and has been a large effort from the epiphany team over the last 6months-1yr to make possible. Epiphany hasnt been particularly buggy for some time, and from my testing when it comes to media playback does better than chrome or firefox because it has solid hardware accelerated playback which to this day chrome and firefox dont do well on in linux. Thats started to change a bit, but its still funky on both.

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I don’t have a touch screen laptop either, and I don’t know if I see myself using one in the future either, it’s simply not part of my workflow. Gnome’s insistence (or persistence), to be mobile touch friendly is in one aspect trying to future proof the DE since they see the future of computing heading more into that direction, (just look at how popular and useful iPhones/Android phones have become) so they want to accommodate both the traditional desktop and a touch friendly desktop.

Developing something on this scale, which even Canonical threw in the towel (remember “Ubuntu’s Convergence”?) will take time and it’s not going to all be fully functional and fully implemented by the next release. There’s always some underlying project that needs to be updated or ported first before actual work can be done sometimes. I can’t personally comment on how well or fast the progress is with touch friendliness, but from the developmental side there is continuing and ongoing work, so users can expect it to get better and better after each new release. People may forget or not even know, but Gnome was originally developed with heavy keyboard use in mind and I’d wager there is more mouse and keyboards in use out there than touch screen friendly devices.

As for Gnome 43, the developmental cycle only just recently started up. Anything Alpha wise is going to be, for lack of a better word, a hot mess. That’s just the nature of an Alpha release. I don’t typically comment on Alphas because of this; it’s expected for there to be missing features or known bugs not yet fixed and they are never meant for an production level machine. My own rule of thumb is to wait for the Gnome Beta release and dive into it then, as that will be a lot closer to what it will be like when it eventually does get released. Gnome 43 in a nutshell should be a few performance tweaks here and there, some noteworthy GTK4/libadwaita ports and a few other long awaited additions and features, but nothing ground breaking this release cycle.

Gnome 42 got off to a rough start, but after the first month of bugs and about 2 point releases, things are fine again on my end. I expect Gnome 43 to not be as rough a start since a lot of what was implemented in Gnome 42 will already be there in Gnome 43. And lately a lot of independent devs have created apps like Black Box terminal and another dev is working on some libadwaita type theme config. aka AdwCustomizer, but it’s still very much a work in progress at the moment. It’s not in the AUR or a Flatpak yet, so I’d advise not using it unless you know what you’re doing or want to test it out in strictly a VM until it’s more stable. But it’s something most users, myself included, want. So expect it to receive significant progress in the coming future. Aside from the Github I linked, there’s also a great Reddit thread with some excellent screenshots showcasing what this customizer is capable of here: AdwCustomizer - Reddit

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Helpful input as usual Scotty. I would only add, the GNOME Web dev team are very committed, so I expect that is the same dedication to the mission in Nautilus, etc.

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from what ive seen the biggest feature for G43 is Epiphany Web Extensions, which is also what im most looking forward to. The support of Web Apps in Gnome Software sort of ties into the Epiphany improvements.

The only thing keeping Epiphany from being my daily was extensions, remains to be seen if 43 changes that but it just might.

Nautilus only has 2 maintainers, Epiphany has 5 or 6 last i remember so just keep that in mind. Several aspects of Gnome only have a single maintainer that handles them and sometimes multiple projects.

you can see the maintainers for some of them here https://apps.gnome.org/

Calendar for instance is maintained by Georges Basile Stavracas Neto who also went out of his way to make support for streaming better on wayland with OBS for about a year of his time developing pipewire plugins and such for it.

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Unless Gnome Web has feature parity and equal or better performance to the likes of Firefox/Vivaldi, I don’t see myself switching over to it as a daily driver. Though that may never be the case if that is not the direction of the project.

Web doesn’t have a great track record with me every time I’ve tested it performance has been an issue and some websites wouldn’t even load, but I think it is a good idea they give Web some much needed improvements as it will make the overall package of Gnome that much better.

I do look forward to testing it, but with my own bias, I think I’d much rather wait for a stable release to warrant, if any, criticisms. And with @HMS_Endeavour love affair for Gnome Web, I just may have to be more open-minded than usual when it does get released :wink:

Here is the Flatpak with Web Extension support enabled . It’s hidden right now by default.

flatpak run --command=gsettings org.gnome.Epiphany.Devel set org.gnome.Epiphany.web:/org/gnome/epiphany/web/ enable-webextensions true

Call it a hunch Scotty, but I see the team are well organised and working through the list. I leave the group in a tab all the time, so I see progress as we march toward Sept 6 release date.

That calendar has been very thoughtfully designed and I fell in love with it when I saw it had everything in one place.

Gnome’s design principles of “do something simple, but do it well” (which I generally agree with) however I don’t think fully correlate well to the needs of a modern web browser (I could always be wrong of course), which needs to meet a variety of various use cases and support a wide range of things such as add-ons, codecs, syncing, theme support, extra tab features, extensions, etc. For myself, based on that metric, a browser has to be somewhat feature packed or bloated as you might say, but essential nonetheless as a majority of computing work is on the web. I just don’t see myself using Gnome Web in any meaningful capacity, but I will reserve any further judgments on release.

I’ll be happy to test it and report any bugs or issues I may find to help the project out. I’m in no way devaluing the ongoing work of Web, I’ve only stressed that in the past it was not the most useful or functional browser at the time. Gnome Web may have the potential to be used in a quick pinch for a search here or there if performance is great, but like I said I’ll really have to wait and see. Right now I’m just blowing a lot of hot air outta my “porthole” :wink:

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