 There were times in the past where I was an absolute hater on the GNOME desktop environment and that You know dislike has mellowed over time. I'm not a GNOME fan I would probably refuse to use GNOME if there were other options But I'm not as opposed to it as I once was now all of that is true Another thing that I know is true is that I use fedora and I'm a big fedora fanboy now And it is a fantastic distro I also know that the fedora distro is the premier place for the GNOME desktop environment It is like these two teams work very close together and they're basically You know some of them are both on the same team, right? They inner work very often So it struck me as odd that the fedora distro does not use GNOME web as their default web browser Now for those of you who don't know GNOME develops their very own web browser and it has been around for a very long time and I Used it not as a daily driver, but I have you I last used it probably about two years ago It was god-awful. It was so bad It made me wonder why they even continue to develop it because it's just not a good experience So I thought it was high time that I sat down and used GNOME web again Now if you are wondering what GNOME web is it's the same thing as epiphany Those two things seem to be interchangeable. I'm not actually sure if there's a difference there But they seem to go by the same name So I have been using GNOME web in a VM over the last couple days Now the reason why I'm using in a VM is simply because when I installed it on my main hardware It took over everything Okay, so I didn't want not want to use it as my full-time browser I was not going to dedicate myself no matter how much I wanted to do this video I was not going to dedicate myself to using it full-time, but I wanted to use it so I installed it on my main system and It set itself as the default browser without asking so every time I opened up a link for it like from discord or something like that It opened and that was annoying, but it also just randomly popped up every once in a while Like it was always running. I could not kill it. I don't know what was going on there I think that was a flat pack issue. It was very weird Anyways, I installed it on my main system installed in a VM in case it decided to get rogue again And I've been using it there for a while now I do most of my work in VMs when I do this kind of stuff and less I'm reviewing a distro, which I try to do on hardware. Anyways, I've been using GNOME web for a while and I have Decided to ask this question is GNOME web good, but also is GNOME web usable? So let me actually show you GNOME web so you can kind of see what this thing is all about So this right here is GNOME web right here in front of you We can make it full-screen so it's you know, you can see it but we can move this around and Out of the box the look and feel of it is actually pretty good It's very very minimal has a bar along the top if you close one of the tabs here the tabs actually go away, which is very nice and It just leaves you with a single bar along the top So if you're into minimalism when it comes to your browser Chrome, this is very nice It looks very very nice now and outside of how it looks and feels It does have a surprising number of options for you to customize. So if you go into the Preferences you will see that it has the ability to block advertisements block pop-up windows Which are at least the pop-up window thing is pretty standard But built-in ad blocking is really nice and it works Fairly well if you're just on a regular website like say you're on its faucet, which I think has advertisements I'm gonna actually sure but if you just navigate around the web to places, you know is going to have webs advertisements it does a fairly good job of blocking ads now it does leave blank spaces where ads are supposed to be which is Not the greatest thing in the world So but you don't see the ads which I suppose is what you want now Obviously when a site like MSN has a ton of advertisements on it It looks not great, but again at least you don't see the ads now where it doesn't work very well is on YouTube Now this is not Good on web's problem like this is a almost a universal problem when it comes to built-in ad blockers Braves doesn't do a very good job of blocking YouTube ads Cute browsers doesn't do a very good job of blocking video ads and get on webs Will built-in ad blocker does not do a very good job of blocking video ads So that's not something that I'm all that surprised about so if we go back to the preferences It's continue taking a look here it does allow you to set your default search engine which is good you can change where your stuff is downloaded and It allows you to easily start an incognito mode which it does have incognito mode, which is good It allows you to restore your tabs on startup and it has mouse gestures Now I have not been able to test these because I'm assuming what it really means there is trackpad gestures I do not have a trackpad so I can't test that out and it has built-in spell checking So you can also change the font style You can use a custom style sheet I'm not sure actually what that affects whether it's the Chrome on the outside or if that's for websites itself I didn't test that out at all and there are some privacy settings now the one thing that is missing here that is coming later on is extensions and I want to take a small moment to talk about that because as I'm testing this right now Extensions as a deal breaker because there are certain extensions that I would need in order to actually use this as a daily driver If I were going to I'll talk about the reason why I wouldn't here in a few minutes things like bit warden I'd want that to be an extension. I use usually use that as an extension instead of an app Things like you block origin so that I can block the video ads on YouTube and other websites Something like dark reader so that I can actually have dark mode in all the websites You kind of get the idea there are extensions that I need and that's not here now What's weird about all this is that it is coming so supposedly in Genome or in Genome web 43 It will have the option to Use web extensions from the what I believe to be the Chrome web store. So you're gonna have a vast selection of Extensions. Oh, I misspoke. It's actually the Firefox add-ons web portal that is going to be used so not Chrome but Firefox still very good selection of Extensions but again, this is not here. So so like I said This is coming, but it's only coming in Genome 43 now. I don't have Genome 43 yet This is still Fedora 36 and from what I can tell epiphany 43, which is Genome web is still an alpha So I'm not sure if this is going to hit for Genome 43 or not or if people who already have Genome 43 are Experiencing the awesomeness that is extensions. I'm not sure all I know is that I don't have it yet on this version of Fedora So I haven't been able to test that out. Hopefully that will make Genome web just a little bit better But to be honest with you even with extensions Genome web is unusable and the reason why is because it's slower than You know what it is a very very slow web browser Now if you're just navigating to a regular website like we did earlier, we navigated to MSN Let's go to the other big homepage of the internet from yesteryear. So we'll go to yahoo.com. Yes yahoo.com still exists now That is not a Horrible load time if you're just navigating to a website just a regular website MSN looked like it was a little bit slower Whatever it's not so slow as to be unusable where it is so slow as to be unusable is When you start to mess around with YouTube. So if you go to YouTube So let's just go to a YouTube channel that I know and love like so We'll just go here and yeah, well that is quite a slow load time not horrible But it's when you start to play a video now watch it make a liar of me because I've been using this for like I said a few days Every time I go to YouTube. I get this like very slow look page load time and then I hit play and It will start playing right away And then it will get up to the point where it started It stopped buffering and it will then or where it has buffered ahead and then it stops And I don't know if you guys noticed this but the frame right here is really low now Some of that is that is playing in 360p automatically, which is a little odd given the fact that you know I even though I'm in a VM. I should be able to see 1080p 60 by default But it chose 360p by default and again as you can see it's very I don't know if it comes through on the video or not because of all the YouTube impression and the fact that I'm only recording in 30 frames per second but it looks Jari like it's skipping frames and that's not a fantastic thing now It did load faster now that I'm recording because of course it did but I've noticed Really slow load times on YouTube Over the last two days. It's not been a good experience and some of the Default experiences that you use on YouTube. So for example, if you go into the short section here and you try to use your scroll wheel to scroll down It scrolls down like a I don't know if you can see how weird that is Like usually when you use the scroll wheel on YouTube short just skips the next one This one does it sometimes but sometimes it's like stuck between two of them Which is slow like you see kind of how it's kind of janky there. It's a little weird Now if you just use the arrow keys to navigate between shorts, it's fine It works just like you'd expect it to it's when you use the scroll wheel on your mouse where it gets a little weird So that was another thing that I experienced and like I said the two biggest areas that I have a problem with is the Slow load time on YouTube. It's really slow and it also Relatedly has a big problem with dropping frames and looking like it's buffering all the time But the other problem that I have is the build an ad blocker is not so good when it comes to video ads And like I said, that's not really a good numb web specific problem But it is something that I noticed now it does block some ads on YouTube it just doesn't block the ones that are like pre-roll ads and that's annoying So there are a few things that I like and that I want to kind of close this out on so First I like the minimal aspect of the the chrome around the windows So the fact that it's just one line. I like one line browsers I think they're fantastic. It's usually the way that I use my Firefox is just in a one liner set up And this is really nice. I like that the if you're only using one Tab the tabs go away. So you're very minimal when it comes to the stuff that's around the web content That's very nice. It has very good bookmark support So if you want to use this you can have bookmarks You can also use Firefox syncs to sync your bookmarks, which is really nice So if you are a former Firefox user and you would want to switch to get on web You can at least bring some of your stuff along. It's not going to be everything But it'll be some of the stuff which is nice again It does have some keyboard shortcuts and it has all of them laid out really really nice One of the things that I kind of just like about Firefox is that they have Good guides to their key bindings, but you have to go search that stuff out It's not a great experience it unless you go do that So the fact that this stuff here's right right front center and it's very well laid out is really nice So that is another good thing the last thing that I really really liked about it is Simply that it is fairly lightweight. It doesn't seem to take up a lot of resources Now I haven't pushed it to its match max like trying to put in a ton of tabs or whatever But it seemed to work fairly well in terms of resource usage. So So to answer the question is going on web usable kind of if you're just going to use it for just web browsing It's not too bad It's when you try to push it into like watching YouTube videos or anything that has like heavy JavaScript and stuff like that. It's it just slows down. It's a little bit too slow for my tastes and Until those extensions come out those extensions are also missing and that's just kind of takes away from the experience So that's going on web if you use going on web or or have used it in the past and you like it I'd love to hear from you in the comment section below You can follow me on mastodon or Odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash Linux cast just like all these fine people Thanks, everybody who does support me on patreon and YouTube you guys are all Absolutely amazing without you the challenges would not be anywhere near where it is right now So thank you so very very much for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time