[20][21] Gritti explained his motivations: While Mozilla has an excellent rendering engine, its default XUL-based interface is considered to be overcrowded and bloated.

Epiphany addresses simplicity with a small browser designed for the web—not mail, newsgroups, file management, instant messaging or coffee making.

For example: Making people happy that don't have control center installed is not a good reason to have mime configuration in Epiphany itself.Galeon continued after the fork, but lost momentum due to the remaining developers' failure to keep up with changes in the Mozilla platform.

[21] Gritti ended his work on Epiphany and a GNOME team led by Xan Lopez, Christian Persch and Jean-François Rameau now direct the project.

[2] Epiphany initially used the Gecko layout engine from the Mozilla project to display web pages.

[25] The development of Epiphany was mainly focused on usability improvements compared to major browsers at the time.

The new widget supported icons inside the text area and reduced the screen space needed to present information, while improving GNOME integration.

It also featured network awareness using NetworkManager, smart bookmarks improvements, and the option to build with XULRunner.

Additionally, Mozilla increasingly disregarded third-party software that wished to make use of Gecko, until it became viewed as an integrated Firefox component.

[23] To address these issues, in July 2007, the Epiphany team added support for WebKit as an alternative rendering engine.

[29] On April 1, 2008, the team announced that it would remove the ability to build it using Gecko and proceed using only WebKit.

[32] Developers of GNOME Web maintain a complete and accurate changelog in its official repository that shows complete and detailed changes between all the releases,[33] following table just shows arbitrarily mentioned some notable and important changes:[34][35] As a component of GNOME Core Applications, it provides full integration with GNOME settings and other components like GNOME Keyring to securely store passwords, following the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines and the GNOME software stack to provide first-class support for the all new-adopted edge technologies such as Wayland and the latest major GTK versions,[80] multimedia support using GStreamer, small package size (2.6MB)[6] and very fast execution/startup time due to using shared components; other features include the reader mode,[81] mouse gestures, smart bookmarks, praised web application integration mechanism,[82] built-in ad blocking, the "Insert Emoji" option in the context menu for quick and easy inserting of Emoji and Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs into the text boxes, Google Safe Browsing,[83] supports reading and saving MHTML,[84] an archive format for web pages that combines all the files of web pages into only one single file; and consume fewer system resources than the major cross-platform web browsers.

[59] Encrypted Media Extensions support is not a goal, as the standard does not specify a Content Decryption Module to use, all available modules are proprietary even if licensing is possible, and the system imposes digital rights management that hides what the user's computer is doing to make copying "premium content" difficult.

[87] As HTML5test checks for most of these APIs, it artificially lowers WebKit's "score" in points (as does lack of DRM support).

[76] In the modern web platform, these have fallen out of favor and support has been removed from all major browsers.

[88] Flash had gained infamy throughout the years for usability and stability issues, incessant security vulnerabilities,[89] its proprietary nature, its ability to let sites deploy particularly obnoxious web ads,[90] and Adobe's poor and inconsistent Linux support.

Settings are stored with GSettings and GNOME default applications are used for internet media types handling.

[95] Web follows the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines and platform-wide design decisions.

[102] Since GNOME 3.28, Web has support for Google Safe Browsing, to help prevent users from visiting malicious websites.

Sending them the user agent of Apple Safari causes fewer broken websites than others (due to sharing the WebKit engine), but also causes caching servers to deliver JPEG 2000 images,[106] of which Safari is the only major browser to support.

Michael Catanzaro explained that having websites open Evince to display PDF files was insecure, as it could be used to escape the browser's security sandbox.

Since Evince was the last user of NPAPI, this allowed the remaining support code for the obsolete plug-in model (where additional vulnerabilities could be hiding) to be removed.

Using WebKit will help differentiate Epiphany from Firefox, which is shipped as the default browser by most of the major Linux distributors.

"[108] In March 2011, Veronica Henry reviewed Epiphany 2.32, saying "To be fair, this would be a hard sell as a primary desktop browser for most users.

"[118] Henry criticized Epiphany for its short list of extensions, singling out the lack of Firebug as a deficiency.

[59] In April 2012, Ryan Paul of Ars Technica used Web as an example to his criticism of GNOME 3.4 design decisions: "Aside from the poor initial discoverability of the panel menu, this model works reasonably well for simple applications.

[...] Having the application's functionality split across two completely separate menus does not constitute a usability improvement.

In an October 2016 review, Bertel King Jr. noted on MakeUseOf, "Later versions offer the best integration you will find with GNOME Shell.

Like Mozilla's container feature, this helps prevent sites such as Facebook from seeing what the user is doing in the main browser.