> Helium is based on Chromium
> Best privacy by default
Even with un-googled Chromium I do not think these statements are self-consistent. We need browsers that do not allow Google to control the ecosystem. We need legitimate competition. So what, our choices are Firefox (Gecko), Safari (WebKit), and Ladybird?
Personally I go with Firefox on most devices and Orion (WebKit) on my iPhone and iPad.
> Helium anonymizes all internal requests to the Chrome Web Store via Helium services.
I really would be curious to have some breakdown comparison with something like the Mullvad browser (Gecko). I have a lot of trust for both the Mullvad and Tor teams. They have a much longer history working with this kind of stuff and have been consistently updating it since release. Launched in early 2023[0] and last update was last week[1].
[0] The Mullvad Browser (mullvad.net) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35421034
[0.5] Mullvad Browser (torproject.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37159744
Why did we ever bothered with the IE lawsuit, for a newer generation to give the Web on a plate to Google?
> Why did we ever bothered with the IE lawsuit, for a newer generation to give the Web on a plate to Google?
Don't forget Servo. People are actively working on it, and it could use more help.
But even if that existed, I also think a practical Chromium browser is important to have access to. I'm a developer and I use the web, so sometimes I just need Chromium. I think that will continue to be necessary for at least 10 years.
And I think the landscape of Chromium browsers is very bad. As a minimum, I want adblocking, low- or no-telemetry, timely security updates, no forced arbitration clause in its ToS, and support across platforms.
Right now, I think that makes Brave the best Chromium browser. That is not an accolade, I deeply dislike Brave, for dozens of reasons. It's just the best of a bad bunch. (But credit where it's due, I do very much like its "Shields" control.)
I only learned about Helium from this thread, but it checks almost all of my boxes. I was really excited to see a new browser that hits my checkboxes... But it's MacOS only :( Alas
It doesn't look like you do.
Firefox has worked for me across 7 different employers in the last 15 years with no problems, and yet you haven't switched to it.
Actions speak louder than words. There is a viable alternative. You aren't using it.
Similarly, firefox is fine. I switch between it chromium and safari for dev work, and (unless you go out of your way to find a counterexample) they’re completely interchangeable in terms of compatibility and real-world performance.
Firefox runs fine on android, so there’s not even a platform where chrome is the only choice (other than chromebooks).
When can we get a new kind of browser that doesn't use html/css/js...? Build one from scratch with a common design language (but modifiable by the user)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
2019? (gemini)
Firefox on the other hand is better in this respect and even has a setting explicitly for resisting fingerprinting.
Is Google actively sabotaging Mozilla or is Mozilla a genuine competitor that just hasn't figured out how to build a browser that'll actually challenge Chrome (and Chromiumy browsers) beyond ideologist users?
I say it's the latter. Google's money doesn't actually negatively impact Firefox's competitiveness.
Chromium: Entirely dependent on Google, a $3T company who's entire business model relies upon invading your privacy and currently has a >70% global share of browsers
WebKit: A closed source browser with ~18% of browser share and run by a nearly $4T company who forces all browsers on their mobile devices to be reskinned versions of their browser and probably wants to do the same on their other devices
Gecko: An open source browser with ~4% of the browser share, run by a non-profit with a mission of to preserve privacy but is struggling to find funding.
So what... we're going to let the internet get screwed because a bunch of dudes making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year can't toss some beer money over to the little guy?
You paint this as a hopeless picture, but seriously, have you considered donating? Every time I see these types of threads I see comments like
> I would happily pay a small monthly subscription fee for a browser if it has strong legally protected privacy guarantees.[0]
Do you really think your browser provides to you less value than your Netflix (160%/360%/500% more expensive) or Spotify (240% more expensive) account? Seriously? If literally 30% of FF users gave to Mozilla what they are willing to give to Spotify, then the problem is solved. Or 15% of users did it through their company's matching program. If instead of discouraging people, you got more people to convert then the percentage of necessary contributors decreases!
It's even tax fucking deductible so it isn't even that <$5/yr...
I found an announcement in Italian on Apple website. It's from June 2007 https://www.apple.com/it/newsroom/2007/06/11Apple-Introduces...
The original plan with the iPhone was to have web apps, not native apps. That's why they needed to run the rendering engine of the iPhone on Windows. Then they went native and Mac only with the dev environment.
I don't think that Apple would earn one single dollar by porting Safari to Windows again.
"MiniBrowser" opened after installing AppleMobileDeviceSupport64 from iTunes and VC_redist.x64, and it appeared to be making network requests, but it never rendered any web content I could see.
If you fork Chromium, Google doesn't control the ecosystem, it controls a large part of it. But you're able to build on top of that ecosystem. So you can have the best of both worlds, all the extensions and ecosystem from Chrome but with more. That is called true competition.
I also suspect Brave would take offense to your claim you can't have privacy on a Chromium fork.
(Sent from orion on ios, with firefox’s ublock origin, etc enabled)
Orion is the only alternative, because as you said, it's built on WebKit, but I had trouble it working with extensions that I need for my work.
There are also sometimes compatibility issues with Firefox because web developers only test on chromium and webkit. Anyone opinionated enough to put up with that is just going to use Firefox.
Which is unfortunate, or fortunate, depending on how you look at the situation.
So from Mozilla's point of view, they must be continually worse alternative. They'd shoot themselves in the foot if they looked like the better alternative.
I'm posting right now with it here.
Helium does not have to be the destination. But it is a good step when Chromium is the standard (try using Safari and quickly websites seem uncharacteristically janky)
Quoting GrapheneOS developers[1]:
> Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
IronFox (an FF fork) developers[2]:
> While we do as much as possible to improve the situation, it should be noted that Firefox-based web browsers, including IronFox, have security deficiencies when compared to Chromium. This is especially notable on Android.
[1] https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
[2] https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox/-/blob/dev/docs/Limit...
An in-depth examination of this topic and a plethora of other sources can also be found here: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
The only acceptable Gecko-based browser I know of right now is Zen, which is great but still in beta. And Tor & Mullvad Browser are good for private one-time sessions.
We need competition for a free and open internet, I fully agree. Mozilla is far from a decent champion for that cause. I'm far more excited at what Ladybird has to offer.
because in my experience, it doesn't--I've installed a couple of extensions manually by just dragging the .xpi into the window.
Thank you.
All the website gives me is the name of a Wyoming LLC, Wyoming being one of the states you incorporate in if you don't want others to be able to find out who runs the company.
Granted, you can find out a bit more on Github, but in general, if you're building privacy- and security-critical tech... I think you ought to own it.
I now found who exactly manages this (and it turns out colbalt, too! awesome downloader)
That's not finding who they are. No one has signed their names, like their real names, to this. Who are they? Intelligence agents? For which country? There's no way to know.
https://iridiumbrowser.de/ But that one looks have not being updated in a while. But what is the point forking Chrome browser now days since manifest 3?
I switched back to firefox/librawolf for now.
Whether that's worth much is of course another matter.
While I like the pitch of this browser, I find it a little difficult to take it at the face value, especially given there is no info on the founders, or whether it is run as a company or a non-profit etc.
Perhaps someone in this thread could answer: which company/org structure provides best guarantees against gradual, slow, multi-year rot that seems to take over everything?
I would happily pay a small monthly subscription fee for a browser if it has strong legally protected privacy guarantees.
German e.V. [1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_(German...
I don't think any such guarantees exist, unfortunately.
It's hard to predict what future generations of developers are doing, but right now Ladybird seems to have the right values embedded into their nonprofit structure.
All the other browser projects have to be enshittified eventually, and therefore have to fulfill other interests than their users' interests to get there.
Gecko has an uncertain future and is perpetually at risk of dying.
It's at least possible to switch from Chromium to WebKit if necessary so the risks of building off of Chromium are not that big.
The real problems with Gecko is just that it’s harder to fork and has less compatibility with the web (that last part is largely just due to Chromium being the de facto standard so fewer people test their sites against Firefox).
I don't why webkit is more popular. Maybe because it(Apple) is slow to adopt standards.
I think this is an interesting bit of propaganda - they are historically not all that slow to adopt actual standards.
What they often are is unwilling to adopt Google's pre-standardisation extensions (things like WebUSB, which have never been adopted as standards).
Because Safari comes pre-installed on billions of devices?
That plus the fact that using a chrome based browser effectively hands over a bit more control of the web to chrome. If I don't like the privacy issues with chrome, it seems like a bad idea to hand (more) control of web standards over to the company that makes it, directly or indirectly.
We've kind of lost the plot if we get too far away from the core notion that a web browser is for correctly and completely rendering websites. The user population don't use web browsers to hide, they use it to look at the internet and do internet work. If a browser has any problems doing this, it not going to be relevant.
There is a few browsers based on WebKit, so that seems doable.
Because it's very very very good. Google poored billions into it and it shows.
Quoting GrapheneOS developers[1]:
> Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
IronFox (an FF fork) developers[2]:
> While we do as much as possible to improve the situation, it should be noted that Firefox-based web browsers, including IronFox, have security deficiencies when compared to Chromium. This is especially notable on Android.
[1] https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
[2] https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox/-/blob/dev/docs/Limit...
An in-depth examination of this topic and a plethora of other sources can also be found here: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
Orion is WebKit based, so it uses less battery and feels faster to me compared to Chromium browsers, yet it largely supports Chrome extensions via a compatibility layer; like Helium uBlock Origin is included by default. It also has vertical tabs which is essential for me, and open-url routing between profiles.
However, I tried it in January 2025 and gave up on using it after a few weeks of sporadic bugs. I didn't lose data or anything but some actions in the UI didn't produce any result, or they produced a confusing unintended result. I hope they get better - I will probably give it another go in a few months, especially since Arc (my current browser) is now owned by Atlassian.
Anyways, great to see a Chromium browser improving on the privacy of ungoogled-chromium.
I do enjoy vertical tabs, faster browsing, better privacy obviously. But "largely" is doing some heavy lifting in your mention of chrome extension support. I use about a dozen chrome extensions typically and about 4 of them are supported by Orion last I checked. Although of course #12 in Chrome is the Kagi search extension itself :)
The bookmarks bar seems consistently wonky though, with bookmarks showing the wrong logos (like Google Sheets showing up with the Google Docs logo, or ChatGPT showing some weirdly cropped version of itself), inability to rearrange bookmarks in a folder without opening the dedicated bookmark manager page.
If some basic usability things like this were fixed, along with adding tab groups (also big for me when I have 50 tabs open), I'd probably give it another go. Kagi search engine has largely replaced google search already for me so I'll definitely give it another go once these things are updated.
Like using a content blocker and "hoping for the best". It might work, or not.
That's one of the reasons i stopped using Orion...
Zen browser is eating their lunch at the moment.
Orion is a WebKit based browser (like Safari).
removing every google url in a browser without replacements will have such downsides
Hard pass. Arc had an entire dev team with serious investors and couldn't just focus on building a browser
thats literally why we get slop, because companies focus on investors rather than users? when there are 3 people working on it, they would listen more to the community
> Your personal data fuels its monopoly. Market-dominant due to anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices.
> Qwant
> Based in Europe. Uses Bing results. Sends tracking data to Microsoft.
> DuckDuckGo
> Privacy-focused. Relies on Bing results but never tracks or profiles you.
> Ecosia
> May plant trees for clicking ads. Relies on Bing and Google. Sends tracking data to Microsoft and Google.
> Microsoft Bing
> Collects extensive personal data. Privacy controls are buried and limited. Subjectively overwhelming UI.
> Kagi
> Privacy-focused. Customizable results without ads or tracking. Requires a paid account.
That being said, I like using the slightly more obscure presearch.com and Swisscows.com, for what it’s worth.
In Europe they are still IMHO the best option for an independent search engine.
should be changed to
> Openly and proudly collaborates with russian government
I hope more people take ungoogled-chromium and create new interfaces. It's a shame that Servo's in an unusable state, I'd love to see more tooling around that.
I just want someone to give me Opera 12...I suppose that's Vivaldi though.
Maybe not surprisingly, I'm currently on Vivaldi (although it has its own issues of not infrequent slowness or hangs).
This doesn't particularly give people any confidence in your product if even the devs don't know how long they can hold the line. Why not fork Firefox like Zen?
For anyone working remotely like me, teams is a crucial piece of software (however bad it is). So as much as I like Firefox and legends that started it and religiously developed it over the years, bottom line, I can’t use it now.
Some maybe majority of blame falls on Mozilla, they let it stagnate and focus on cosmetic changes in last few years instead of focusing on improving core technology.
The challenge is that people have to get paid and infrastructure to build things costs money. Looks like there are only two people full-time at the company right now, though even then eventually they’ll need some revenue stream.
I love this project, but to have confidence that it stays that way it would be nice to see how they’ll replace they’ll stay afloat.
Is Google/W3C adding more features and busy work to keep browser developers employed?
I would prefer to use and support browsers using alternate rendering engines and without any ties back to Google, even if it means I personally get a lesser experience, because I don't trust Google and I want to ensure they don't entirely control the direction of the browsable internet.
But in this day and age, I need to understand more about intentions, and what sustains projects like this.
For the moment I've settled on Safari simply because Apple makes its billions elsewhere, even if I am increasingly disappointed with how they are playing along with politics right now.
I did recently see this browser is unsafe when trying to open Gmail in it, so any chromium based update to date alternative there would be amazing!
Not 100% related but I found it funny that on that specific video, in which he spends the best part of 40 minutes talking about how the only browsers that are worth talking about are ones which "improve" your browsing experience beyond Chrome, which is the de facto "decent" browser. He mentions Zen and Vivaldi as examples.
He then finishes the video gushing about how he loves helium, which is just ungoogled-chromium lol
b) He is an investor in helium
How does it compare to Firefox privacy wise being based on chromium?
I'm posting this comment from Helium and so far, so good! I would honestly say ignore the naysayers, everything is a trade off, including which browser engine you put under the hood.
If I could have a version of zen that looked exactly like it but had their devtools it'd probably be my main driver.
Instead, what I want is a browser that actively blocks annoying page behaviors. For example, I want a browser that makes all text on a page selectable, prevents a page from trapping right-click, prevents a page from accessing the clipboard, ect, ect.
I'll personally say I don't hate this project as such, I mainly use a Chromium based browser because I build a product that uses the FileSystem API with a directory picker [0] and the FileSystem Observer API [1]. Both of which aren't supported anywhere except Chromium based browsers.
I used to use Thorium, but last build was out in February and I simply can't use that as my main browser, so now I simply use ungoogled-chromium.
I can easily avoid any Google telemetry, use uBlock Origin with MV2, Privacy Badger and the plus point is all sites work. I love Firefox as well, but I feel you can't do much about the fact all "regular" people end up using Chrome or Safari; so while developing on the web you simply can't become a Firefox main and avoid chromium entirely.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/show... [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FileSystemO...
To me, that contributes to the overall uncomfortability
> We'll keep support for MV2 extensions for as long as possible
Zen browser is my home currently, I think Arc has broken my ability to move back to traditional tab management.
On my personal systems I can use the extension to hack Kagi support in there, but it’s a bit of an ugly solution.
On my work laptop, we aren’t allowed to use the App Store, so I can’t get the extension. This means if I want to use Safari and Kagi, I need to go to the actual Kagi homepage, which is a very annoying behavior pattern.
I used Firefox for a while at work because of this, but now that’s been blocked too. I’m trying really hard not to give in and use Chrome, but at this point, it would make my work life easier. It supports adding other search engines natively, which is quite ironic.
I submitted feedback to Apple about this. They have integrated some of my feedback into past releases (silence unknown callers, most notably), but they must have some silly business reason for not allowing this, which is very disappointing.
As it currently stands, I'm leaning more into WebKit-based, but for daily use it's Firefox. I'm not happy with any of them, but I'd struggle to pick just one right now.
I downloaded Helium and gave it a spin and my first impression was "Ah, it's like Camino all over again". I can't use this for my job where I need to use stock {Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge} because our customers do - but for personal browsing I'm currently using Arc which is very comfortable but heavy, I might try to use Helium for quick simple things when I want less overhead! Thanks for sharing!
God (I say as a prayer!) this is what I want for every single app and the OS. Currently on LibreWolf but will look at this carefully.
We should name languages only after letters. After all, 26 languages should be enough for anybody.
> Helium does not make any network requests, including to the Services, unless such requests are the result of user actions (for example, visiting a website or installing an extension) or are part of features that the user has explicitly enabled or configured during setup. If Helium is making any network requests without your consent, please file a bug report.
Gold standard.
A few things that made me go back to Brave: - No vertical tabs - Sync with mobile - I haven't found how to show bookmarks bar only on blank page - Little customization for new tab page (might be fixable using extensions)
I'll definitely follow the project as Brave is far from perfect too.
In my case, the lack of sync is a big show stopper for me. Brave syncs without "cloud." Instead, it syncs when you have the browser open on both devices.
Those "browsers" are just front-end to the web engines of the whatng cartel.
And, apparently, no tree style tabs, no vertical tabs at all.
I switched to it and haven't looked back. The tab search functionality is so damn nice.
> Based on Chromium
Sigh...
If you want to target privacy nerds, please consider supporting Linux off the bat.
i dangle between Zen and Helium and both are a very solid option imo. I don't really get all the browser wars
- breadth of the http/css/js standard? - inefficient implementations - requires too many resources?
Why has the market converged on two major players and most independent attempts fall short?
This is just Chromium with some patches though, the problem with these kinds of things is it's small groups that tend to lose interest.
As a side note, the very similar Arc browser was just sold off to Atlassian for a quick exit.
I'll stick with FF or brave until Mullvad or else comes up with a good alternative
I hate all the invasive pop-up crap ads with a passion, but this 0 ads just gets to a lot of gatekeeping, putting things under subscriptions etc.
How are they going to make money or enshittify this in the future or sell it off to an evil billion dollar corporation who will sell my data off to god knows who?
</rant> :/ ...the site design is nice at least.
I'm not saying that you are wrong to disregard it due to your personal preferences, but please consider that this might not be such a horrible design as you make it out to be. Also, you can be certain that you are not the only sane person left - I think it's just that most of them don't show up on boards and forums.
Because we decided it was a good idea to keep making monitors wider and wider and wider without making them any taller, and not everyone wants vertical tabs.
You can pry my 16:10 monitor from my cold dead fingers. Give me a 3:2 and you'll never get it back.
Why do you have 100 tabs open in the same window, anyways? Use tab groups and profiles, with a secondary window for session-tabs that'll get closed soon. Having too many tabs is like having too many desktop icons, but worse.
By holding a key and clicking anywhere in the window area.
> Who the hell thought this was a good idea?
Anyone who uses a better dragging method and doesn't want to waste space
> Install any web apps and use them as standalone desktop apps without duplicating Chromium.
Nope. No. Thank you.
Props for featuring Kagi though.
> Helium is based on Chromium
> [screenshot image of geckos and lizards]
Is the marketing page deliberately trying to rub it in Mozilla's face?
> We'll keep support for MV2 extensions for as long as possible.
“As long as possible” being _exactly_ why chromium wrappers have zero value.