Time for my annual retest of Gnome Web, or as I prefer to call it, Epiphany (even though IMHO it hasn’t yet attained its namesake). It does however look to be so much more stable than when I last looked at it. YouTube is not great and quite jittery, but I mostly use FreeTubeApp.io these days and that is perfect without all the telemetry.
I am on Bookworm, so is it preferable to install through the Debian repo or is flathub better?
The Debian repo went ok and I enabled the webextensions with:
gsettings set org.gnome.Epiphany.web:/org/gnome/epiphany/web/ enable-webextensions true
Confirmed with:
gsettings get org.gnome.Epiphany.web:/org/gnome/epiphany/web/ enable-webextensions
true
The extensions option appears in Preferences menu, so now all I need are some .xpi files that will work? I recall there was a preliminary list being circulated by the Epiphany matrix group a few year back, but I can’t seem to find it now.
Overall, the browser experience was surprisingly fast and smooth, and I had no crashes or freezes reminiscent of my last test. I realize many use proprietary GPUs these days, but I have a CPU: Intel(R) Core™ i7-3770 (8) @ 3.90 GHz
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 4000 @ 1.15 GHz [Integrated] and It renders faster than my other browser, although my further research taught me this is more about the web sites’ not following standards rather than the browser. I am on Gnome Web 43.9. Powered by WebKitGTK 2.46.0 and I use default Gnome with zero custom theming. (I like Gnome just as it is) Until recently I had an in Intel iMac and used Safari without any issues, so the WebKitGTK rendering engine can’t be the problem or Apple would have ditched it long ago.
@mcatanzaro told us not to hold our breath for webextensions progress, back in November 2023. Any updates on the ETA?
It’s an impressive achievement getting Epiphany keeping the installed size to just 12.8MB. Compare that to Firefox’s installed size of a whopping 280MB plus dependencies.
Gnome Web has the potential to be the star of WebKitGTK engine browsers, and I really want to like it, as I only use Gnome desktop with no tweaking and Gnome Web could fit well into my workflow with a few basic extensions: Bitwarden, DeepL and maybe Toby.
For now, I tolerate bloated Firefox, even though it is the ESR 
But Epiphany’s major advantage remains over all the other browsers. I do understand that a lot of websites are at fault for not being up speed with WebKit, but I guess that’s for another discussion.
Firefox Sync gives a spinning wheel.
I got the same message yesterday.
Care to weigh in on any of these ramblings of an old Gnome-head?