The other day I was looking at Gnome Web a little and made some comments about the lack of options and features, and problems with distros not keeping it up to date and secure. However it does do some things well.
I have not done any proper benchmarking but it appears to be light on resources for the sites it supports, particularly for videos. I have also noticed that that the web apps implementation is really quite nice.
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To expand on that last point. The profile (and with that, the cookies) for each web app is kept entirely separate by default (doable in Chromium browsers but it requires an extra step [make a new profile just for that web app and then generate the web app]). A feature like that is handy as another simple way to isolate sites, particularly those popular sites made by big tech, like Facebook.com, Messenger, Gmail, Youtube, etc. By having each such site as a web app you can use them standalone without making it easy to be tracked across the whole internet (any 'external' links for them will just open in your default browser). This low barrier to creating separation is always a nice thing.
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Additionally, while Gnome Web lacks comprehensive settings elsewhere, the web app settings are pretty good. On creation you can easily tweak the name, and after launch there are a whole bunch of "per web app" settings, e.g. setting custom locale/language support, enabling/disabling spell checking, enabling/disabling JavaScript, defining custom JavaScript or style sheets, tweaking zoom and/or fonts, redefining which URLs are considered part of the web app, etc. You can also see and clear history on a per app level. Perhaps most interesting is that you can also set apps to run in background (again on an individual level), so that when you "launch" (well… relaunch) them they are instantly usable. The few I tested consume very little resources when idling in the background but without cluttering your desktop or the tab bar of your main browser. Certainly there are things here that Chromium (and with it Vivaldi) could learn from.
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Sadly there is a minor complication for many. The most up to date copy of Gnome Web is most likely to be the Flatpak version, hosted on Flathub. To ensure you are secure, this is the one you likely want to run, at least on Ubuntu (I know modern Fedora is up to date).
However in recent copies of Ubuntu (e.g. 24.04) apparmor rules will prevent Web Apps created by the Flatpak'd Gnome Web from running. You will therefore need to write a new rule to work around this. A file named /etc/apparmor.d/flatpak-bwrap with contents such as the following should suffice:
abi, include profile flatpak-bwrap /usr/bin/bwrap flags=(unconfined) {userns,}
After restarting the apparmor service (either manually or via a system reboot), you should then be able to create web apps.
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Ok, I see that the following day after I posted the above (2024-12-09), Ubuntu finally updated WebKitGTK to 2.46.4.
On the one hand great. On the other hand this was the version with the fix for the zero day that Apple announced on 2024-11-19. Put another way, they provided their own fix 2 weeks and 6 days later. Also note that WebKitGTK already had their fix for a while and both the Flatpak and other distros (e.g. Fedora) had had fixes for a while.
Again, this was a zero day already being exploited in the wild.
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