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Nick over at The Linux Experiment was really crapping on Firefox until he tried to use Gnome Web for a month as his primary/only browser. He now has a much better appreciation of both Firefox and the Chrome variants like Brave. I’m sure Gnome Web will be very usable… by about 2030. 😅

You forgot to talk about how easy it lets you install web apps and integrate it with gnome shell. I like having Reddit docked like this. Nice review btw

I use Epiphany more often than I'd like to admit, lmao. It's a really lightweight browser. And unlike everything else in the browser market it's a gtk app, which ties really nicely with a system theme

"Epiphany" is the name of the program itself. When GNOME sets up the .desktop file, they put a different name in there: "Gnome Web". I understand why-- this lowers confusion for new users, who wouldn't have a clue what "Epiphany" is.

I use Gnome as a daily DE, and I never knew the Gnone Web even EXISTED. I'm not going to get away from Firefox and Brave as my web browsers, but it is nice to know that there more options out there. Great work, very educational!

Iirc 360p by default it's because of Google not caring about WebKit. Any WebKit browser will default to 360p but only on KZfaq.

Falkon is a Qt browser which needs more development by KDE to add more extensions, such as dark websites and KZfaq enhancers. Then it will be a suitable default browser for distros such as KDE Neon and OpenSUSE Plasma.

I like the idea of a simpler Web Browser like GNOME Web, like all I need is pretty much bookmarks, passwords, and adblock, but GNOME Web is just not it. That's why I'm making my own browser in Rust. It's like 3/4 done. Gotta finish bookmarks and passwords. It's been a fun project to work on so far tho. I just have 50 million other side-projects lol It also has support for browser engine extensions as well as app plugins, and in fact, the whole thing is modular. The window is basically a plugin loader. The default browser engine is webkit (with adblock built-in), but it's implemented as a plugin, as is the bookmark sync, so theoretically, you could swap them out for Blink/Gecko and Firefox Sync and stuff like that if you wanted to make the plugin for it. Maybe if I get around to finishing it, other people will enjoy it, or maybe it'll end up in the trash can like GNOME Web :)

It would be nice, if Firefox has the look of the Gnome Web top bar.

One of the great things about Fedora are the "spins" I haven't used Gnome as my desktop in years! My choice is MATE-Compiz, but there are others, from KDE Plasma to LXDE as well as all the other major DE's. And you can always ADD the other desktops with the dnf groupinstall process. So many choices! Find what is best for you and use it. As to my take on Gnome Web? Yeah it's gotten "better" but not something I'd use - just me!

Actually I really like GNOME Web for developing websites because it loads changes immediately and behaves very nice using @media (prefers-color-scheme: light/dark) in CSS.

I know your not an arch user anymore but if you wanna try and use version 43, its in the arch repos so you could try a vm of that to see if it improves the experience at all.

I like the idea behind it, I would prefer to use a more lighter browser that's just trying to be a browser and not an entire OS and it looks nice, integrates well with the rest of Gnome. That beeing said, its just unusable, and the webkit devtools suck which would make me use Firefox anyway.

Last time I tried Gnome Web a few months ago it was not necessarily the load times, but the rendering of the pages. And that is what affects the smoothness of the video playback but also how studdery the scrolling of any page is with a lot of graphical elements. And yes, one of the best (worst) examples is youtube. Just go to the start page and scroll down. You could have had youtube open both in Gnome Web and Firefox in parallel in the video and showed just the scrolling. On Firefox it is very very noticeable more smooth than on Gnome Web. And I think the scrolling issue, because of the rendering, one would also see on pages like msn or yahoo, at least in a direct comparison to other browsers. Maybe Gnome Web is a thing for the retro computer persons, cause using it made me feel like using the internet in the early 2000s. ;) But seriously, the rendering is the one big issue... of Gnome Web and any other alternative to Firefox and Chromium. That is a really hard thing to develop and the reason there are just the two options one has and any other browser is based mostly on Chromium or sometimes on Firefox. But if I am not mistaken, the fundamental open source base of Gnome Web is the same as what Safari is using, but somehow Apple manages to change stuff to make it useable.

After GNOME and Ubuntu I learned to tackle things openminded and unbiased. 💪 And since i cleared my mind this way, I actually came to like GNOME web and GNOME's Evolution 🙏

I'm dual booting Fedora and Garuda. Really liking Garuda

Upcoming 43 release is a major upgrade bringing newer base and extensions support.

i don't really care about that browser, but what browser similar to it that i could maybe use for simple browsing like arch wiki or something is midori

You can right click the youtube video, choose stats for nerds and it will show skipped frames and overall youtube performance. Generaly youtube playback at such quality as 1080p60 requires full gpu acceleration which may or may not work well on vm especialy when actual physical gpu is busy recording a video. Speaking about the youtube shorts, i have the same experience on windows using every single other browser. Edge, ff, operagx, all of them seem to want to scroll more and overscroll the video making me scroll up and down 30 times before it lands on the thing i want. From what i noticed its because 99% of human race have mouse scroll setting to scroll more than 1 line per tick (by default) because its too slow. Official google chrome seem to have buildin optimization which treats entire scroll movement as 1 tick per use while at yt shorts page.

Use Enhancer for KZfaq... you can take the video to automatically use whatever resolution you want. Plus a lot more.

Brave never shows me any video ad. Not once in 1 year. One ad occasionally is displayed on the main page that's it.

I generally like it personally, but I understand why for others it could be deal-breaker

It's not bad for what it is. It's gnomes explore or safari. It has come a long way and it's better then the alternative that was Galeon. I can't find the version number but I been on fedora since the core days and yes there was a time when it was called Epiphany we shipped with it. This was when Firefox had there issues with distro shipping Firefox by default. When Debian opensuse all shipped with IceWeasel fedora for a very short time shipped Epiphany be for coming to some agreement with Mozilla.

Here I am watching this vidéo on "Gnome Web".

The thing i love about gnome web is touchpad gestures

If you like the UI but don't like the browser, there's a custom Firefox UI that replicates it.

I am using Gnome43 on Fedora 37 Beta with no problems but wouldn't use Gnome Web as it is not very good but at least it's improving each release.

I use Epiphany sometimes but the only reason for that is that Epiphany is a modern browser and Chromium and Firefox are intentionally broken on CPUs without SSE2 instructions extension. And, yes, I know that a 20+ years old computer is not fit for modern web.

OK, after watching this I just had to check out Gnome Web for myself. After running it on real hardware today, my first-hand experience is that it is unusable with KZfaq. My system specs: AMD Ryzen 5900x CPU, 32 GB RAM, NVME M.2 SSD, and an NVIDIA 3080 TI. I am running Zorin OS 16.2 with a gigabit connection to the Internet. Trying to watch KZfaq videos with the latest version of Gnome Web out of the Software store is a major fail. Loading the KZfaq home page took about 5 seconds, on Chrome it is nearly instantaneous. (Yes, I do run Chrome). Click on a video to watch in Gnome Web gave me from a 10-20 second black screen with a looping circle while it loaded the page. On Chrome, videos just starts playing. Once it is playing, it does an OK job. HOWEVER, if you rewind a video on Gnome (like back up 5-10 seconds) the video ended up frozen at the point you back it up --but the audio would properly start playing again. I tried to stop, go forward, back up several minutes, and several other things and the video just stayed on the frame it was on. Again, the audio would work great, but video was a no go. So, the laggy performance is not because it is in a VM. On my real hardware it is a miserable experience and I uninstalled it.

1:04 - Little harsh... they are slowly improving 4:27 - Brave does a great job at blocking youtube ads for me, it doesn't make a great job at blocking twitch ads Is webkit fault for gnome web being slow?

KZfaq is the only reason why I can't use it, somehow the experience is even worst under NVIDIA.

I use Vivaldi ... So you're saying there are ads on youtube? Who knew?

Playing videos on a vm is not really indicative of the real performance. Did you try youtube on chromium browsers or ff inside a vm to see if they behaved better? Either way, even if the perf of gnome web is “decent” I wouldn’t recommend anyone actually use it. Sure it looks really good and native, but the security implications of using it just isn’t worth it. There’s a reason why people use chromium as a base. Not to mention, making a browser requires lots of resources which I don’t think an unpopular open source projects has.

I use ungoogled-chromium 🤠

Kind of unfair review because epiphany got a lot faster in 43.0, though it's still not perfect. The scrolling issue I've heard will be solved with the gtk4 port that got merged 3 weeks ago. And extensions are unfortunately not ready in 43, it's an experimental feature that you have to enable manually.

My possibly spicy take, wipe out all of the internet and start from scratch. Design and implement a purpose built language for web usage, standardize it, and make a reference browser for everyone else to fork and customize. Obviously it should have a way to markup pages and style them without requiring programming, but it should have programming built in from the start. And it should use a targetable VM for that programming aspect of it so that people can use any language with any syntax to make web apps in that way. You might ask, why wipe everything out only to replace it with something similar, and the answer is because you'd delete all of the cruft a streamline it. Getting rid of HTML, which has seriously weighed down the web, would be a good start, JavaScript too to make a more efficient and sensical language.

I think Gnome Web would be much better if it were a custumized firefox or chrommium. I love the look of it, but it's just no usable at all

Right now, no, it's not usable; too many issues. Tried to love it, always misbehaved, not using it anymore.

Internet explorer is better than gnome web

If only it was actually good... like i would switch instantly.

Yo first comment. I ended up liking gnome if i am going to use floating wm. I prefer it over KDE for a backend when im building a tiling desktop

OpenSUSE is way better for Gnome. First of all it is completely Vanilla Gnome and second you will get a new Gnome Version as soon as it releases.

using epiphany for most of my quick searches, same way as i used vimb/viem in a twm. it's decent and clean, works better in my 2016 thinkpad than in your VM for heavy websites like youtube it's either electron/flutter apps or dedicated PWAs. for everything in-between or rarely used it's librewolf

Gnome rocks!

Not worth it. Stick to Firefox or choose one of the Chromium browsers.

gnome web is impressive so far. have only used it for a month or so. FF is my go to, but Web is an up and comer i believe. very lean and pretty much covers all the important bases for a web browser. less is often more.