No, you risk operating system instability if you attempt to remove Epiphany, among other tightly integrated system packages.
Not that I know of yet, but @francois-techene addressed developing Epiphany in their roadmap for 2023:
Relevant quote:
Currently there is no roadmap for 2024.
I found that apt discourages from unintalling epiphany-browser because librem5-gnome depends on it. I also still need it to add and manage web apps because the flatpak version does not have such an option.
The Purism version has the “swipe right to go back” gesture disabled. But I find it usable either way.
Thanks again everyone. It is good to know that the Flatpak version doesn’t have web apps. Problems with web apps is the main reason I was interested in an update to begin with, so I doubt I’ll bother with the Flatpak version, I have other browsers. Learning about the vulnerability, however gives me pause, because I mostly use web apps to compartmentalize my interaction with commercial websites.
More broadly, why isn’t there more interest in developing web app features for other noncommercial browsers (ie., not Chrome, Safari or Edge)? Does it interfere with the browsers’ business models in some way? Or is it just that businesses/sites that would lose money if people compartmentalize their personal data are making it technically difficult to implement?
I am using PureOS because it’s what came on my Librem 13 v4, and it generally works pretty well. I can execute things in command line, but don’t know a lot about it, so I tend to stay in the GUI space most of the time. If not PureOS, it would probably be Ubuntu.
I really like the web apps feature of the PureOS version of Epiphany. Is there anyone else adding web app features to their browsers out there?
There is at least an extension that apparently adds the ability to Firefox and Firefox forks such as LibreWolf.
My suggestion to you then is to use another linux distro because pureos is a terrible distro.
Will you set that up for me?
There are many videos that can teach you how to install any linux distro.
I was able to update Epiphany up to 43 (bookworm) by rebuilding a lot of related stuff (mentioned here), but it is still not enough for some sites. At the same time I’ve got the problem with hardware acceleration our gpu driver does not support GLES3 which is required for the new GTK… However, it works in case I force GLES version but a segfault should be expected anytime.
I was desperate enough to go against the good advice of not mixing PureOS and Debian repositories and installed the newer versions of xdg-desktop-portal, xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, and flatpak from bullseye-backports. Installing the newer portal fixed another issue for me and enabled the installation and management of web applications in the flatpak version of GNOME Web. I removed my older web applications in the local version of Epiphany and added them anew with the flatpak version. There must be some side effects but I noticed only the good ones so far.
It is really strange dependencies… Could you confirm that only the packages have to be installed from bullseye to make WabApps work? In this case I will try to rebuild them in the native environment to nave no issues with foreign repository.
I’ve also tried to install Epiphany from snap (after update the last one), but it not started by some problem with net module… I think it is due to some missing config options in the kernel.
Here is a quick check.
$ apt list --installed 2>/dev/null | grep bullseye
bubblewrap/bullseye-backports,now 0.8.0-2~bpo11+1 arm64 [installed,automatic]
flatpak/bullseye-backports,now 1.14.4-1+deb12u1~bpo11+1 arm64 [installed]
xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/bullseye-backports,now 1.14.1-1~bpo11+1 arm64 [installed,automatic]
xdg-desktop-portal/bullseye-backports,now 1.16.0-2~bpo11+1 arm64 [installed,automatic]
$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb https://repo.pureos.net/pureos byzantium main
deb https://repo.pureos.net/pureos byzantium-updates main
deb https://repo.pureos.net/pureos byzantium-security main
deb http://debian.volia.net/debian bullseye-backports main
$ flatpak list --columns=app,version,origin | grep Epiphany
org.gnome.Epiphany 46.0 flathub
I’ve rebuilt flatpak in byzantium environment and upload the files to google drive. So, everyone could update it using apt install ./*.deb.
You were right, no additional packages needed except bubblewrap. Also I believe that updating flatpak is the best solution of this topic.
p.s. I’ve also managed to rebuild Epiphany 46, but you have to update almost tree hundreds of packages… The good news that phosh, geary and some other apps became also up to date 
google drive???
I do not hate google so much, sorry
But I can upload to any other service that if you recommend one.
For me you do not need to use another service since I don’t use flatpak software.
I’m sure there are enough ppl here that would not use Google, so it’s up to them if they would like to use something else or not.
I downgraded those four packages to see whether I could install them with GNU Guix instead. However, it seems that Pure OS ignored those in favour of its own. So, I just rolled them back for now.
While on that, I checked whether upgrading all four of them (with apt) was necessary. Upgrading xdg-desktop-portal was not enough, but it is upgraded anyway when upgrading xdg-desktop-portal-gtk. Upgrading Flatpak (and bubblewrap) does not seem necessary.
I also tried Epiphany in Guix. It is currently at version 44.8. It shares an obvious issue with other GNOME applications from Guix: missing icons. Which component provides those icons? In Pure OS, it seems to be adwaita-icon-theme.
$ dpkg -S /usr/share/icons/Adwaita/96x96/actions/bookmark-new-symbolic.symbolic.png
adwaita-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/Adwaita/96x96/actions/bookmark-new-symbolic.symbolic.png
But its installation through Guix does not fix the issue with missing icons in the interfaces of GNOME applications.
The version of Epiphany in Guix does not allow adding and managing applications unless xdg-desktop-portal-gtk is updated (with apt because the Guix version is still ignored) similarly to the Flatpak version.
A possible advantage of Epiphany installed through Guix over Epiphany installed through Flatpak is that it recognizes passwords in the login keyring. In Flatpak, Epiphany seems to store passwords elsewhere.
As a side note, the web applications installed with different instances (apt, flatpak, and guix) of Epiphany can be managed only through that instance.
By the way, I was surprised that chromium also support webapps! Some sites work better with it. One problem for me, version 120 can not get the gps location through geoclue. May be no one version of chromium can get at al…