Hi, I want to install WhatsApp as GNOME Web (Epiphany) installable Application. But when I access web.whatsapp.com the browser is detected as unsupported Safari and link to UPDATE SAFARI is displayed (with message WhatsApp works with Safari 11).
I tried to change user-agent in dconf editor to other user-agent strings but no difference.
What is the difference between GNOME Web in desktop PureOS and librem 5 PureOS? What information could be faked in GNOME Web to make WhatsApp web think that another browser is in use?
strange gui component disappearance when I click on installed Firefox extension
I installed Firefox user-agent switcher and set mobile version, this helped but some pages skip user-agent
Then I found out there are similar solutions which use web versions of popular services (WhatsApp, Telegram, Gmail, …):
However they are not open-source. Purism could develop open-source version of GNOME Web App manager / Singlebox / Webcatalog / Shift and deliver popular web services as PureOS apps (with desktop icons). And solve many problems at once. What do you think about this?
Did you try out uninstalling the preinstalled GNOME Web and installing it as Flatpak? Flathub has a much newer version available afaik.
Also as a hint: WhatsApp For Linux is an unofficial WhatsApp Web client for Linux using WebkitGTK (as GNOME Web). They have a hint in the linked wiki page that they were not be able so far to trick the WhatsApp Server to assume another user agent as Safari.
Maybe WhatsApp for Linux could also be an alternative for you? Unfortunately, I was not able to launch it as the application crashes on start on my Librem 5. So I also cannot tell you, wether it is scaling better than the Web Version itself (with help of any CSS hacks or so).
Help, please!!
Following this post (I’m trying to install webapp whatsapp using gnome web) I uninstalled “sudo apt purge epiphany-browser” and then “flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo” and then “flatpak install flathub org.gnome.Epiphany” now:
I’ve installed epiphany but it crashes during launching
please see screenshot attached
What could I do? Please, could you help me?
Thank you so much
PS: It’s my second time I take screenshot and it’s upsidedown! Please, could you tell me how take screenshots properly (or how can I rotate it?)
Thank you again
Since epiphany-browser is a dependency of essential package librem5-gnome, you have broken your system by doing so. apt warned you that “you are about to do something potentially harmful” and you had to type “Yes, do as I say!” in order to continue, yet you did.
Thank you, Dos! So, please, what you suggest? Reinstall gnome-web and librem5-gnome?
And after did it, how can install a more recent gnome-web from Flathub as suggested? Maybe I can have both installed without conflicts?
Thank you
Yes, you should at the very least reinstall librem5-gnome. It’s also worth verifying in logs (/var/log/apt/history.log and /var/log/dpkg.log) whether nothing else got removed as well.
Epiphany from Flathub should be able to simply coexist with deb version. If it doesn’t work, that’s something you should probably report upstream.
