GNOME Web (also known as “Epiphany”) is a minimalistic web browser for your Linux desktop, and is great for those of you that want a simpler browsing experience. In this video, Jay will give you an overview of this browser, as well as his thoughts.

GNOME Web Overview

Intro

• First I’ll give you a sneak peak, then we’ll install it, and finally I’ll give you a quick overview
• Today I’m going to give you an overview of GNOME Web
• What it is: Simplistic browser… “Safari” of Linux (basically)… Simple feature set

T-shirt ad (do it completely in b-roll, to make the entire thing re-usable):

We’ll get started shortly, but first I want to take a moment and mention the official Learn Linux TV shop.

If you like Linux and fun T-shirts, you’ll feel right at home there. There’s some awesome designs, like ‘Mona Tuxa’ — that’s Mona Lisa re-imagined as a Linux penguin, because of course it is. Or ‘The Hash Bang Theory,’ perfect if your idea of a good time involves /bin/bash and quantum physics.

You’ll also find the classic ‘apt install coffee’ tee — for those of us who try to sudo our way through mornings — and the ‘Blue Screen of Death’ shirt, which is oddly comforting once you’ve escaped Windows.

Running a channel like this comes with a lot of costs — gear, hosting, coffee… lots of coffee — and every dollar from the merch shop helps keep Learn Linux TV alive and independent. Heck, it might even help me finally pay off my student loan debt. One day.

So if you want to support the channel and look cool doing it, check out the shop — link in the description.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s check out GNOME Web!

What is GNOME Web

(over b-roll, either record later or record during the screen capture)

So, what exactly is GNOME Web? I mentioned earlier that it’s a web browser, so let’s start there.

There’s a more than a handful of web browsers available for Linux, some of them being cross platform while others are exclusive to our platform. GNOME Web is a browser that’s specific to Linux, and it’s one of the simplest browsers available. Both in terms of ease of use, as well as its featureset.

In GNOME Web, you can do most of the browsing tasks you’d expect. Open a web site, bookmark a web page, switch between tabs, you get the idea. Its performance is really good, and it’s very reliable.

As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that I have an entire video that goes over the details of common Linux browsers, so check that out if you haven’t already.

Back to GNOME Web. Perhaps the biggest difference is that it’s part of the GNOME Desktop environment. If you use GNOME as your GUI of choice, it’ll will fit right in. GNOME Web uses the same design aesthetic as GNOME itself, and is considered to be GNOME’s official web browser. However, you don’t have to be a GNOME user in order to install it. Even if another desktop environment such as Plasma is more your flavor, it’ll work just fine.

But, should you install it?

Well, GNOME Web is a browser that will appeal to some people more than others. The thing is, it has a more limited featureset when compared to other browsers like Firefox or Chrome, so if you’re used to a browser with a ton of bells and whistles, you might not like GNOME Web. On the other hand, if you prefer to keep things simple, then you’ll absolutely love it. GNOME Web is extremely simplistic, it focuses on browsing, and not much else. It’s probably for this reason that most distributions default to Firefox and not GNOME Web, considering that Firefox checks more boxes.

That said, even if you don’t think you’d enjoy using GNOME Web, you may as well check it out – you can always uninstall it if you end up not liking it. But even then, it might make sense to keep it installed as a secondary browser, just to have something else in your back pocket.

Installation

Alright, so if you want to check it out, how do you go about installing it?

Well, there’s two methods – you can install GNOME Web from your distribution’s package repositories, or you can go for the Flatpak version.

In most cases, you can simply use GNOME Software, or whatever your distro’s software manager happens to be, and search for GNOME Web. Depending on your distribution, you may see a drop down that gives you a choice between the distribution package and the flatpak version, but not everyone will see this.

For those that prefer to use the commandline, you can install the package for GNOME Web via your distribution’s package manager. I’ll show some example commands on the screen right now for some of the more popular distros. If you’re curious why packages often refer to the browser as Epiphany, that’s because GNOME Web used to be called that, before they changed it. But distribution’s are still referring to it under its old name, for some reason.

Before you install it though, I just wanted to mention that whenever possible I recommend using the Flatpak version. Flatpak versions of software are usually more up to date when compared to what distribution’s themselves offer, and a web browser is definitely something you want to keep up to date. You’ll want to benefit from important updates to ensure a browser is compatible with everything, and not all distribution’s do a good job of keeping it up to date. For example, the version offered in Debian stable is a whopping five major versions behind current as of the time I’m recording this content. And sure, you can make the case that it’s better to not have the latest version of everything, but that doesn’t apply to browses. These need to be up to date. Always.

For those of you that plan on heeding my advice and plan to use the flatpak version, you may need to install Flatpak support within your distro. You only have to do this once, and then you’ll have access to any flatpak, GNOME Web or otherwise. You can check out my Flatpak video for a tutorial on how to set this up. It’s pretty easy. Once you do that, you should see that you’ll have access to the Flatpak version of GNOME Web within your distro’s software manager.

Once you install it, you’ll see an icon for GNOME Web within your installed applications. All you have to do is open it.

Usage tutorial

Show:

• Tabs
• Tab overview (four squares)
• Bookmarks
• Webapps
• Changing the start page
• Preferences