The launch of the new Ephemeral 7 web browser version has been published which is developed by the Elementary OS development team specifically for this Linux distribution.
By default, the browser runs in incognito mode which blocks all external cookies set by ad units, social media widgets and any external JavaScript code.
Cookies set by the current website, local storage content and browsing history are saved until the window is closed, after which they are automatically deleted.
the interface it also has a button to quickly delete cookies and other information related to the site. DuckDuckGo is offered as a search engine.
Each window in Ephemeral begins in a separate process. The different windows are completely isolated from each other and do not intersect at the level of cookie processing (in different windows you can connect to the same service with different accounts).
The browser interface is very simplified and it is from a window (tabs are not supported). The address bar is combined with the dashboard to submit search queries.
The interface has a built-in widget to quickly open a link in other browsers installed on the current system. There is a button to quickly enable and disable JavaScript.
Main news of Ephemeral 7
This new version of the browser comes with many changes, which many of them are focused on developers and it is that within the most important novelties stands out for example implementing the ability to call developer tools based on the WebKit standard Web Inspector and similar to those used in GNOME Web and Apple Safari.
To inspect elements on the page, The "Inspect Element" button has been added to the context menu.
Another change that stands out is that added keyboard shortcut Shift + Ctrl + R for a page reload complete with a cache reset.
Besides that This new version of the browser guarantees compatibility with the development version of Elementary OS 6 including support for dark style preferences.
It is also mentioned in the announcement that the list of domains used to display a recommendation to continue writing at the beginning of writing has been expanded.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- The new version offers a selection of Linux and Elementary OS related sites.
- Added files with translation of interface elements into Ukrainian.
- Transitioned to the latest version of the WebKitGTK engine.
Finally if you want to know more about it about this new version, you can check the details In the following link.
How to install Ephemeral in Ubuntu and derivatives?
As such, the browser is designed for Elementary OS and the users of the distribution will be able to find the browser within the system's application store, so its installation is quite simple (as you will know in the system there are paid apps and in this case the recommended price is $ 9, but arbitrary quantity can be chosen, including 0).
In the case of other distributions, it is possible to install the browser to test it. Only they must get the source code from the browser and perform the compilation on your system.
For this we must open a terminal and in it we are going to type the following command to get the source code:
git https://github.com/cassidyjames/ephemeral.git
In case you don't have git installed, just type:
sudo apt install git
And you run the above command again to get the code.
Now we must install some necessary packages so that the browser can work and also avoid having problems with the compilation process:
sudo apt install elementary-sdk libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev libdazzle-1.0-dev
Once this is done, we can compile the browser with the following commands:
cd ephemeral meson build --prefix=/usr cd build ninja
Once this is done, we will be able to install the browser by typing:
sudo ninja install com.github.cassidyjames.ephemeral
And voila, with this you can start using this browser.