Difference between revisions of "Epiphany Browser"

Revision as of 17:29, 10 July 2020

Ghome Web, Epiphany Browser, or simply called "Web," this is a very basic lightweight, small memory model web browser that is extremely compatible with most web content including Google apps. It works surprisingly well considering how efficient and lightweight it is. This is a recommended browser are a fall back when the primary browser fails, or for use on and older computer with limited memory.

GNOME Web (called Epiphany until 2012) was based on WebKitGTK, developed by the GNOME Project for Unix-like systems. It is the default and official web browser of GNOME, and part of the GNOME Core Applications. As a component of GNOME Core Applications, it provides full integration with GNOME settings and other components like GNOME Keyring to securely store passwords, following the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines and the GNOME software stack.

GNOME Web was originally named "Epiphany", but was rebranded in 2012. The name Epiphany is still used internally for development and in the source code as well as for installation. Marco Pesenti Gritti, the initiator of Galeon, originally developed Epiphany in 2002 as a fork of Galeon. The fork occurred because of the disagreement between Gritti and the rest of Galeon developers about new features. While Gritti regarded Galeon's monolithic design and the number of user-configurable features as factors limiting Galeon's maintainability and usability, the rest of the Galeon developers wanted to add more features.

Epiphany initially used the Gecko layout engine from the Mozilla project to display web pages. It provided a GNOME graphical user interface for Gecko, instead of Mozilla's cross-platform interface. The development process suffered from major problems related to the Gecko backend. Notably, the release cycles of the two projects did not line up efficiently. Also, Mozilla increasingly disregarded third party software that wished to make use of Gecko, until it became viewed as an integrated Firefox component.

In July 2007, the Epiphany team added support for WebKit as an alternative rendering engine. On April 1, 2008, the team announced that it would remove the ability to build it using Gecko and proceed using only WebKit. The size of the team and complexity of porting the browser to Webkit caused version 2.22 to be re-released with bugfixes alongside GNOME 2.24. In September 2009, the transition to Webkit was completed as part of GNOME 2.28. The last Gecko based version was 2.26.

The underlying WebKit browser engine provides support for HTML 4, XHTML, CSS 1 and 2, most of HTML 5 and CSS 3, and a Web Inspector. Web once supported NPAPI plug-ins, such as Java and Adobe Flash, but support was removed in GNOME 3.34. In the modern web platform, these have fallen out of favor and support has been removed from all major browsers. Flash has been deprecated by Adobe itself. Flash had gained infamy throughout the years for usability and stability issues, incessant security vulnerabilities.

Google Monopoly Marketing

If you do a google search for "Epiphany Browser" the first search result is for the bloatware Google Chrome browser.

Google Chrome is the propritary web browser owned by Google. The browser is based on the free open source Chromium browser. Both Chromium and and its rendering engine Blink are licensed under the BSD-license which includes no copyleft unlike the GNU or Mozilla Licenses.

As Chrome is based on Chromium they overlap in supported features. Chromium syncs between devices, automatically updates, has great built-in developer tools, installs extensions without a restart, includes a combined text bar for entering URLs and searching and has excellent HTML5 compatibility just like Chrome.

As compared to Gnome Web, Google Chrome and Chromium is a memory hog. Chrome and Chromium lack privacy options, as is basically known to be Fat, slow, and another piece of google spyware.

Installation

Despite being a component of GNOME, Web has no requirements on beyond GNOME components, so it can be potentially installed on any system supporting GTK and Webkit. Though the GNOME Project does not list specific system requirements, it states that GNOME 3 should run on any modern computer.

Gnome Web is Available for Linux and Windows 10 with WSL.

Ubuntu/Mint

GNOME Web (referred to on this page by its codename, Epiphany) is the default web browser for the GNOME desktop environment. If you are using Linux Mint with Cinnamon desktop, you will need to install the browser if you wish to use it. In Synaptic it is listed as "epiphany-browser" or you can use apt-get.

sudo apt install epiphany-browser

No fumbling around to install extra extensions. Essential features like ad blocking that are relegated to extensions by other browsers come built-in and enabled by default in Web.

Snapcraft

To install GNOME Web via Snapcraft, simply use the following command:

sudo snap install epiphany