I challenge you to use Epiphany for a week!
When Edge died, I got worried about loosing competition to the Blink engine and as such, I went exploring other alternatives to realize.. there's not a whole lot, there's blink, gecko and webkit.
So with that, I decided to try epiphany - Gnome's web browser. It uses Webkit which is what Blink was forked from so it's not terribly different in theory but the years apart has made that more apparent. It's fairly elegant in my opinion and it lacks some features, sure.
Anyways, to get to what I wanted to do this week, well, I'd like to challenge you all to use it for a week, mostly for bug hunting purposes and possibly to throw ideas at the project. Worth mentioning, I'm not affiliated with the project, just a user.
So to make sure we're all on the same page, we'll use the development Epiphany flatpak, this way we can be sure that the problem is in the current codebase. So, to install it :
Let's install the gnome-nightly repos as per instructions here :
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists gnome-nightly https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome-nightly.flatpakrepo
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists gnome-apps-nightly --from https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome-apps-nightly.flatpakrepo
Then, let's install the development version by doing so :
flatpak install org.gnome.Epiphany.Devel
Then just launch it and have fun with it!
if you run into any bugs, look at the contribution guide here and report the bugs in the repo after checking that the bug is not already present of course!
I want to enjoy using Epiphany, I do. I use Pop!_OS as my daily OS on desktop and laptop, and it's built on Gnome. The thought of using a browser that is more tightly integrated into my desktop of choice is appealing.
However, minutes after firing it up, I realized a critical feature of Firefox (for me): containers. I make extensive use of the Containers add-on. Without it, I feel like I'm going backwards in my web browsing experience. Its absence makes Epiphany feel more like a toy for me and less like a viable replacement for Firefox.
Which, again, is a shame. Not only because of Epiphany's integration with Gnome (and Firefox's lack of such integration), but also because competition is good in the web browser market.
It's something they do plan on doing as per here but it's not exactly their priority at the moment. You should still try it even if with a backup browser for those times you feel it's not enough.
That's fantastic that it is something under consideration for development. If it were implemented in a manner similar to its function in Firefox, I think I could switch in a heartbeat.
I am concerned about Michael Catanzaro's suggestion that an "easier solution" would be using app mode for a website. That seems to betray a misunderstanding of the feature request. I get that refactoring Epiphany's codebase to allow for multiple web contexts is likely a huge hurdle, but taking a shortcut to the answer isn't always a great idea in the long run.
Well, it wouldn't be wrong to say that app-mode which puts one website in its own world wouldn't be easier but yeah, it's not what people are asking for.
And here I was hoping I could use it on my Mac 😔
I mean, you could do Safari Technology Preview, it uses Webkit just like Epiphany but it's not quite the same.
It can also use Firefox Sync, if I'm not mistaken. Elementary OS's Midori, which I think was a fork, can too. Be careful tho, when I tried it on Midori it ate my javascript bookmarklets, IIRC I had to recover them from a backup.
I'm fairly sure eOS doesn't use Midori, they use a modified Epiphany.
But yeah, as we're using the development version of Epiphany here, it's of course important to not use it for critical information.
It didn't die: it just went bionic.
Well, I meant more so the Edge engine.