GNOME WEB / Epiphany 45

Next/GNOME WEB

GNOME 45 is near. In the meantime we can be satisfied with GNOME WEB 45, although still in the alpha version.

I’ve been following for a long time official GNOME browser development which lately has had great improvements in usability and performance.

New version sources are now available on the official GitLab and it is already possible to compile it.

With all necessary dependencies (Webkit etc..) build process will be very fast but it is much more practical go on GNOME Software which automates Flatpak Epiphany Dev version installation.

First time it will be necessary a complete Flatpak GNOME environment install the (several hundred MB) but then everything will be very fast and updates are very frequent.

GNOME WEB 45 NEWS (Prepare 45.alpha):

45.alpha - June 29, 2023
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 * Fancy new tab overview replaces the tab list dropdown (!1190)
 * Use newer libadwaita and GTK APIs (!1302, !1306, !1311, !1338, !1353, !1355)
 * Use header capitalization for buttons on Firefox Sync dialog (!1318)
 * Temporarily remove the bookmarks sync feature due to issue #1118 (!1321)
 * Update to highlight.js 1.8.0 (!1325)
 * Support clipboard access permission request (!1327)
 * Clarify storage access and save password permission prompts (!1328, !1336)
 * Make address bar dropdown use full screen width in narrow mode (#1978)
 * Allow New Window action in web app mode (#2009, two)
 * Hopefully speed up loading bookmarks popover (#2091, two)
 * Updated translations

New tab overview is very nice even if of dubious usefulness in my opinion, it needs improvement and is not very smooth.

There is still a lot of focus on turning Web pages into Web applications that are added to GNOME with their own icon.

I like this project. At the moment, however, I could not live without my password manager autofill. I tried to install it in GNOME Web with experimental XPI addons support but it doesn’t work. It would be nice to one day be able to replace Firefox with GNOME Web or build a GTK4 version of Firefox….

In the meantime I abandoned the experimental bin AUR version (too many problems) to go back to the self updating official Nightly BIN downloaded from Mozilla and it’s nice…

Disable self expanded tab (auto tab resize off) in GNOME Web (Epiphany) browser