Web (web Browser)

Web (web Browser)

Web (originally called Epiphany from 2003 to 2012) is a free web browser for the GNOME desktop environment. The browser was forked from Galeon after developers' disagreements about Galeon's growing complexity. Since then Web has been developed as part of the GNOME project and uses most of GNOME's technology and settings when applicable. As required by the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), Web maintains the clean and simple graphical user interface with only a required minimum number of features exposed to users by default; however, the browser's functionality and configurability can be extended with official and third-party extensions.

Instead of developing a custom web browser engine Epiphany originally used the Gecko layout engine until version 2.28 and WebKitGTK+ starting with version 2.20. This approach allows the relatively small developer community to maintain a sufficient level of modern web standards support. The features of Web include reuse of GNOME configuration settings, smart bookmarks and web application integration into user desktop. Web extensions add support for ad filtering, Greasemonkey user scripts support and other smaller, yet useful, options.

Web's source code is available under the GNU General Public License from the GNOME project. The binary builds of the browser are available in the package repositories of most Linux distributions and BSD releases.