Ephemeral
Version: 3.1.0 Web: https://github. com/cassidyjames/ephemeral
Web browsers are generally judged on their essential features, such as tabs, a history manager, password management and such. But imagine a browser that doesn’t have any of that, and deliberately so.
Ephemeral is a new privacy-focused application from Cassidy James Blaede, co-founder of elementary OS. This new app is a beautiful example of elementary’s design guidelines. It looks great and offers a very limited set of features, which makes it very friendly and easy to use.
It doesn’t really behave like classic web browsers that you’re probably familiar with. For example, it opens each site in a separate window and runs a separate process for it. No cookies are stored, and no anonymous statistics are collected while you browse the web. Ephemeral simply does not leave any traces after you close its window – something of a dream for privacy-aware users.
Of course, there is always a trade-off; for instance, the need to type your credentials each time you visit a site to which you want to stay logged in. But that’s a matter of habit and only slightly off-putting, rather than being truly annoying. Ephemeral’s developer says his source of inspiration was Firefox Focus, a mobile, incognito web browser.
So in other words, you can think of Ephemeral as pretty much a desktop-class analogue of Firefox Focus.
The only extra feature it has is a special toolbar button that lists other web browsers installed on your system and lets you instantly open the currently loaded site with another application. The browser is indeed very compact and simple to use: it has less than 1,000 lines of Vala code and acts like a basic GTK3 wrapper over the Webkit engine.
We recommend this app for anonymous surfing and testing custom-made websites. Ephemeral is available via elementary’s Appcenter, but also works in other flavours of Linux, provided they have GTK3 and Vala.