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Add to SafariWhen comparing GNOME Web vs SRWare Iron, the Slant community recommends GNOME Web for most people. In the question“What are the best desktop web browsers?” GNOME Web is ranked 19th while SRWare Iron is ranked 50th. The most important reason people chose GNOME Web is:
Since it is a GNOME app, you get all the benefits of the GNOME desktop. It's easy to use, Epiphany just works out of the box. It stores your web site passwords in the secure GNOME keyring, and uses your existing desktop settings to launch applications and access the network, so you don't need to configure everything twice.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Fits in perfectly with the GNOME desktop
Since it is a GNOME app, you get all the benefits of the GNOME desktop. It's easy to use, Epiphany just works out of the box. It stores your web site passwords in the secure GNOME keyring, and uses your existing desktop settings to launch applications and access the network, so you don't need to configure everything twice.
Pro Excellent alternative to the most popular web browsers
Sometimes my workflow involves using separate browsers. I like mail in app tabs, but some jobs are well suited to a lighter, simpler web browser.
Pro GNOME integrated
Includes features specific to GNOME like turning sites into apps that are managed with GNOME software and the ability to install GNOME extensions.
Pro For Linux and Windows
Available for Linux and Windows 10 with WSL, see here.
Pro Lightweight
Epiphany is pretty lightweight and doesn't require much memory to start up.
Pro Best touchpad navigation
Pinch to zoom, smooth bidirectional scrolling are still far beyond other browsers.
Pro Default in many GNOME versions
Epiphany has been the default browsers for many distributions that use stock GNOME for a long time now (although it's being replaced by the much more popular Firefox lately).
Pro No useless bloating garbage
For example, no crypto, embedded blockers, spyware, or ads.
Pro Faster than US, Chinese or Russian products
Pro Can extend privacy configuration by extensions
With right extensions well configurated can be at high privacy level, even better than Brave, because it doesn't have its bloatware.
Recommended: uBlockOrigin + uMatrix + Trace + Font Fingerprint Protection.
Pro Is really and 100% European
Cons
Con Crashes often
Epiphany can crash on a heavy load or when closing/opening tabs. While this only happens every few days, it still happens more often than in most other browsers.
Con Not much room for configuration
The choice for extensions is very limited, although there are decent extensions for the most useful activities and features it still cannot compare to the extensive collections that other browsers may have access to.
The number of tweaks that can be done to the browser from the options menu is also very limited since Epiphany follows a philosophy of "less is more". While this can be enjoyable for some it still hinders a lot of functionality and removes the ability to personalize the browser the way you want it to be.
Con Becomes messy on highly graphical pages
Sometimes struggles to handle complex graphical pages such as Facebook. In these circumstances, it becomes 'messy' - text and graphics get mixed up - and will eventually crash. Even so, this is a light and useful browser.
Con Tends to lag on large pages
Open this page in Epiphany and start zooming/scrolling quickly to see what it.
Con Limited UI
Con Not keeping user settings, very unstabile, posible backdoor behaviour
After any browsing session after you exit the app and use a cleaner tool [CCleaner or other] when you start the browser next time, all setting inclusive search engine and security-privacy related is reverted to default... I tested for 2 weeks and don't find any other cause than that is from app internal, is programmed deep in core scripts.
