With so many web browsers out there to pick from, many of them really aren’t very different from each other, and few take the time to work like the other applications on your desktop.
In Windows, nobody notices this because none of the applications (even from Microsoft) or system settings menus are consistent. They duplicate functionality, have different GUI conventions, and the entire thing is a usability hell. GNOME tries to be a bit “cleaner” than this.
In Windows 11, in fact, Microsoft tried to steal from Chrome OS, GNOME, and the Mac’s “clean” interface design, but reverted to form and immediately crapped it up with the usual junk and ads and trialware, and a store that nobody wanted to use to begin with because there’s still time to repeat that disaster again.
But the point, here, is that GNOME (and to a lesser extent) KDE for various *nix operating systems (they’re portable), try not to confound the user and present them with a giant headache of pointlessness and redundancy and bugs. Which is nice.
That’s where GNOME Web comes in. The development name is Epiphany, because that was the application’s original name, when it started as a project to build a web browser around the Mozilla rendering engine, Gecko. In the late 2000s, Mozilla decided to make it difficult to use their engine in anything but Firefox, forcing the GNOME Web developers to go a different way.
Today, GNOME Web uses the Webkit rendering engine, with GTK toolkit bindings. In practice, the browser behaves much like Safari and even identifies itself as “Safari on Linux” to websites to minimize websites that go “What the hell is this? Oh screw it. Send him to the get another browser page.”. There’s overrides internally for a few sites that break, and to silence Google’s Get Chrome spam, but for the most part, think of it as a Free Software “Safari on Linux”.
Underneath the hood, it’s more similar to Safari on an iPad in functionality, with the bonus that WebkitGTK supports more media codecs, and WebkitGTK has a much more powerful security sandbox to keep you safe online.
If you’ve never heard of GNOME Web/Epiphany before then that’s probably because very few distributions bother to include it or make it the default, even though its footprint, if you already have GNOME, is very small, thanks to WebkitGTK, GTK, and many other components already being there and being shared with the browser. In fact, clocking in at only 2.5 MB of space, everyone with GNOME should probably install this if they haven’t already.
Over at Mozilla, the CEO, Mitchell Baker, is being paid millions of dollars to ruin the company, fire the developers, get rid of their coveted office building, stuff it full of ads and DRM, and turn the company into a thrall of Microsoft and Google (which it was all along), and many users can obviously see where this is going. It’s a fake-left wing political party (Woke Crapitalism…..Not Progressive..) full of sleazy lawyers, and a browser program that was yesterday’s news.
I’ve tried to get away from Firefox, although the alternatives range from worse to much worse in the “from a big company and every website supports it” category.
The last time I tried GNOME Web, I believe it was on version 3.34.something, and I was using Fedora. At the time, the browser just wasn’t where it needed to be on stability, performance, or power efficiency. Regardless, I decided to do some major updates on its Wikipedia article, because I could tell that major work was underway and this was a program to keep an eye on.
But, thanks to the Free and Open Source process, I was able to file bugs requesting features or to report crashes, and attach debugging information. In about 6 weeks I managed to crash the browser or find enough wrong with it to post over 40 bugs between GNOME Web and Webkit, and the developers at Igalia (mostly) were very interested in fixing them. Some were even memory corruption issues, and others were annoyances about the password manager crashing due to the way pages would interact, or not finding password fields in many cases. Others were more dramatic, such as hardware acceleration heating up my laptop and the WebkitGTK engine pretty much dying while I tried to infinite scroll Reddit or something.
The old adblocker code was pretty nasty too. That one was actually a very nice fix because they got to delete the entire thing and write a smaller one around Webkit Content Blockers, which also brought the per-tab memory footprint of the browser down by 50-60 MB!
Developing software is a process, and while Firefox makes very little progress in a positive sense in each release (so little that at this point you may as well use the ESRs so that at least you only have to figure out how to disable new garbage every year and a half or so), GNOME Web has gotten much better.
I’m really only down to two complaints about GNOME Web as it pertains to Debian 11 GNU/Linux.
- Debian has a packaging issue that prevents videos from playing properly if you have an Intel graphics adapter in your computer. It turned out that to comply with Debian’s Free Software Guidelines, the Debian people split up the video acceleration package into one that was DFSG compliant but not fully functional, and one that was fully functional that they stuck into the (disabled by default) “non-free” repo, which you can activate in Synaptic Package Manager (and if you like access to more software, might as well do contrib while you’re there). After you do this and refresh your software sources, search for “intel-media-va-driver-non-free” and install it. It will either want to remove intel-media-va-driver or that and its i386 counterpart (mostly pertains to people who use Wine or Steam and have enabled the 32-bit compatibility packages). Just go ahead and let it. Then just restart GNOME Web.
- Firefox Sync seems to be the only way to import my passwords in bulk. I looked around and couldn’t find a way to import them in CSV format, which other browsers let you export and import them in. (I may post a feature request.) The upside is that it will keep them in sync with Firefox’s servers (I believe Fennec F-Droid will be in your Sync chain as well. I don’t know of anything else for Android browsing that I can even stomach to use.).
- I know I said two, but Youtube has a lot of ads and the ad blocker in this version of GNOME Web doesn’t block them. But the ads don’t seem to appear watching them in DuckDuckGo and VLC can usually play from a network stream. This issue is fixed upstream in GNOME Web 41. (They changed the versioning scheme when GNOME did. It’s really only two major versions ahead of 3.38.)
To help ensure that untrusted web content doesn’t spill out of the browser and harm your computer’s operating system, every major browser has some sort of sandbox.
In GNOME Web, the Webkit Processes are isolated from your system using the lightweight “bubblewrap” sandbox system. It scarcely uses any resources and while I’m not an expert on this, it does seem that it is mostly well received in the developer community. One of the reasons why sandboxing was eventually added is actually because of the Safari user agent that I mentioned earlier.
See, back the late 90s, the JPEG committee tried standardizing a replacement for the JPEG image standard that we’re all familiar with. In practice, however, it turned out to be a major disaster for them where everyone tried stuffing it with patents that they intended to license, and the web and web browser makers responded by refusing to use or implement it. That is, everyone but Apple. Apple is a major patent holder in many of the major patent troll pools, and even though everyone else moved on by creating more efficient ways to use JPEG and make the best of it, Apple implemented JPEG 2000, and if you say you’re Safari, some cache servers will hand you JPEG 2000 files.
Since software patents are dangerous for 20 years, and it’s been more than 20 years now, the danger has gone away, although it’s ironic that the people so eager to profiteer off of unreasonable license fees managed to kill their own format and get nothing.
As such, GNOME Web had to have some way of dealing with these things, because the alternative is a broken image box on a web page. So it implemented the reference JPEG 2000 decoder, which has been notoriously full of security vulnerabilities. So, not having the resources to fix the mess in JPEG 2000 all at once, GNOME containerized the Web Processes with bubblewrap.
GNOME Web is one of the few remaining browsers that is fully Free. It has no Widevine module.
While this means your Hulu and Netflix won’t work, it does mean you don’t have a proprietary program from Google in your browser, representing a security threat while it’s at it.
Some websites call Widevine and then don’t use it for DRM. They’re just gaining another bit of data in a fingerprinting attack. Turning it off probably makes you more unique, but leaving it on means a proprietary application from Google is running on your computer even if it is in some sort of a sandbox.
Even if Google was interested in licensing Widevine to GNOME, GNOME isn’t interested (and it took Brave almost a year to get a license and their browser is far more widely used), and the license of GNOME Web makes it legally impossible to put Widevine in and redistribute it because it’s under the GPLv3.
Never has the Free Software community been so betrayed as when Mozilla lobbed Widevine in and then shrugged it off when people were upset. It was the beginning of the end of Firefox as Free Software and my respect for it.
While GNOME Web is simple, and simple is usually better, this is not a browser for power users who need a lot of extensions.
The good news is that ad blocking works well, and will get better in GNOME 41 when distributions pull that in. The bad news is that there is no extensions store. The good news is that no extensions store keeps the browser simpler and removes ambiguity over what’s Free and Open Source and what’s not. Google doesn’t even make extensions declare a license, so even if you use ungoogled Chromium, you still need to be careful what you install in the browser.
Another reason most users will need to keep another browser on hand is that there does not appear to be any webcam or microphone support in GNOME Web.
I was kind of stunned by this, but whatever. It’s something I use very infrequently. It’s just something to take note of. Obviously, I had to use Zoom last month to take care of traffic court (and I beat the ticket), but I wasn’t about to install their desktop software, so I opened a tab in a browser. I don’t think that GNOME Web can handle things like that. So you may infrequently need another browser to handle this.
The upside is that many users who worry about browsers turning on their camera, and who would normally need kill switches or to turn them off in the advanced configuration of their browsers are not susceptible to this attack on GNOME Web, because the functionality isn’t there.
Finally, as GNOME Web is built on the same Webkit foundation as Safari, implements or inherits some of the decisions Apple made about privacy.
GNOME Web, by default, has Intelligent Tracking Prevention turned on and doesn’t implement the APIs that Google created, which Apple feels are privacy hazards.
Since Safari is one of the major browsers, most websites work regardless, even though they may not like being able to spy on you less. Since GNOME Web masquerades as Safari, that should let us get away with this too.
Final Thoughts:
As I said before, GNOME Web is a simple wrapper around functionality that already exists in GTK and GNOME. The downside is that this is a browser for GNOME and you may get it working elsewhere, but don’t count on it working as well as it could, and it may have more dependencies if you bring it in.
It is improving at a relatively rapid pace while Firefox is stagnant and Chrome is a proprietary mess from an advertising company.
GNOME Web’s minimal additional requirements practically beg for it to be installed since it’s basically “free”. I mean, what is 2.5 MB of disk space these days? Just be aware that due to weird packaging issues like the one I mentioned in Debian, you may need to install a couple packages elsewhere to make it work correctly. And, I suppose, those missing video acceleration profiles will benefit me elsewhere too. So, since I decided to check out GNOME Web, I learned an important thing about Debian 11 on the desktop.
License: GNU GPLv3 (browser) Various Open Source (Webkit)
Rating: 4/5
EDIT:
So, I went ahead and installed the Flatpak version of GNOME Web 41 in place of the one from Debian (and deleted all of the cache and config folders from the Debian version to clear some disk space.
Turns out Flatpak isn’t as horrific as it looks. It only grabs the files it needs out of the dependency packages.
Anyway, no more Youtube ads. Very nice! Make that 4.5/5!
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