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Comment by JonChesterfield | Hacker News Reader

Or one guy running all that stuff was so horrendously oversubscribed that keeping them running at all was an achievement?

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That also fits into "bad management" part. Besides, in this case I'd be happier to have no "default" media player in Gnome than knowing it is maintained by some oversubscribed guy who deserves some rest.

Gnome always had this problem of spreading thin instead of focusing. Lots of little tiny irrelevant apps just to have something to stamp a Gnome branding on. But even people who are really hardcore about using a Gnome desktop don't use those apps.

I've never met a single person who uses Gnome Web (Epiphany) instead of Chrome/Firefox/Brave/Vivaldi/whatever. Or Totem (instead of mplayer, mpv and its various frontends, or VLC). Or Boxes instead of virt-manager. Or gedit (instead of the trillion text editors that exist on Linux. The thing the platform lacks the least? Text editors.). Oh wait, it's not gedit anymore, they wrote a new one from scratch called "Text Editor".

I use Gnome Web to test websites with the WebKit engine from Linux. I'd be curious if there any other good WebKit browser options: I wasn't able to find anything else that I could easily install. (Nyxt apparently supports WebKit, but installing it is a pain, and I actually don't understand how to use their browser.)

I will say that I wish they had stuck with the Epiphany name. It was much easier to search for, either in web search engines or in order to launch it in Gnome with whatever their Spotlight clone is called.

I like to use the WebKit mini-browser for that. If you have WebKit installed on Debian/Ubuntu, it is at these paths:

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/webkitgtk*/MiniBrowser

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