Recently, I’ve been trying out Gnome-web(epiphany) these days.
Considering that the Gnome Org is probably much smaller that Modzilla, I assumed it wouldn’t be as good as Firefox and the other web browsers. I was wrong.
Particularly, in common web app benchmarks,(html, javascript stuff) it seems like Epiphany out performs Firefox(though Chromium outperforms Epiphany as well).
I also like how Gnome-web handles web applications. You can turn any website into a web aplication from the top right kebab menu. These applications will then show up on your system as statndard application. They are also sandboxed, so cookies, trackers, passwords etc will be seperate from your main Web browsing.
As it is built with Webkit GTK(the GTK fork of webkit), it integrates with Gnome based desktops beautifully. It uses Webkit so no Blink(Chromium engine) so it’s great for net diversity as well.
The only things Gnome-web is missing is DRM support(which is a pro or a con depending on how you look at it), Gnome shell Extensions support, and addon support(which isn’t strickly necessary).
Particularly, I miss DRM support as having web apps to Spotify, Hulu, Netflix, etc would make it convenient. That being said, it’s not a huge considering how bad DRM is and I can use Firefox for those.
All in all, if you haven’t tried Epiphany in a while, I definelty recommend you should. It’s a fast, easy to use web browser that deserves to get more recognition.
I tried it recently actually and did not liked it because it’s a very bland browser. It lack’s many features and has no extension support and I need at-least more then 10+ extensions on Firefox or Chromium to make it usable.
I use Epiphany for my finance related browsing, it complies with web standards, no extension that could track me, and every single government website I go into just works,
Trust me, mexican government knows about web design as much as they know about governing
It is either epiphany (gtk) or Falkon (qt5) what I use for those situations, oh Konqueror (qt5) is also a good one.
I don’t like the fact it uses WebKit engine. It’s too apple-y, and it does not support the entire HTML5, CSS3 specification.
It’s a pity that Mozilla has entangled the Gecko engine so much with Firefox. It’s a terrific engine, but the browser is crap. This pretty much leaves Chromium as the only engine for alternative browsers, which is really sad, because it’s Google and Google is Evil.
I wish we had a minimalist, modular, basically featureless out of the box browser built around the Gecko engine. Something like Suckless Surf, but that utilises Gecko (so that it is actually useful for browsing the web in the current year). Unlikely to ever happen… Maybe one day on the GNU Hurd…