When comparing Polarity Browser vs GNOME Web, 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 Polarity Browser is ranked 40th. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Fast and lightweight
According to their own tests Polarity takes up more than 10x less memory than IE, FF or Chrome.
Pro Multi-session browsing with Parallel Sessions
Parallel Sessions allows users to browse the web with different profiles with separate cache, cookies, and history. This enables users to login to multiple accounts to different websites like Facebook.
Pro Built-in privacy features
Polarity browser comes with ad block and Do Not Track built in.
Pro Customizable UI
It allows you to customize many things from window color, tab color and text color to window transparency and border size. You can set Background image or use Shuffle from Bing. You can also save the theme, import and export it.
Pro Custom Developer tools
Polarity comes with the standard Inspector for Blink based browsers along with its custom client that works with both Trident and Blink.
Pro Great HTML5 support
Polarity scores 512/555 on the HTML5 test. It is just a couple of points shy of Google Chrome.
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).
Cons
Con Few annoyances left unchecked
The browser has a couple of bugs such as where extensions are not actually ran after installation despite a notification stating that they are.
Con Windows and Android only
No Linux, OSX or iOS version available.
Con Unstable and frequent crashes
Though the browser is really lightweight and lightning fast, it crashes many times and is clearly unstable.
Con Uninstallation problems
Polarity browser can only be uninstalled with a built-in deinstallation tool. This is very impractical.
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.