Helium Browser
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
helium.computerTechstoryHigh profile
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Web BrowsersPrivacyChromium
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Web Browsers
Privacy
Chromium
Helium Browser, a new Chromium-based browser with a focus on privacy, has been launched, sparking a discussion on its differentiation, sustainability, and the implications of being based on Chromium.
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Sep 24, 2025 at 6:51 PM EDT
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How does it compare to Firefox privacy wise being based on chromium?
The noun, not the verb
I'll also add that it's easy for bad features to sneak in without users knowing. We happened to be talking about this issue in a related thread just the other day [0]. This one the Brave devs were even aware of bot users weren't... so it's kinda a good example of both points
[0] just check out the linked GitHub issue https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45364533
https://github.com/imputnet/helium
Better than either is the frequency of 3rd party audits/security reviews/research interests - but I think that comes more from usage/popularity than the size of the 1st party dev team.
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
removing every google url in a browser without replacements will have such downsides
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?
Most of those changes would be supported by the underlying rendering engine, and the only ones doing that afaik are Ladybird.
It's simply that building and mantaining _the rest_ of what we now expect a modern browser to be is staggeringly hard.
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.
https://github.com/imputnet
I now found who exactly manages this (and it turns out colbalt, too! awesome downloader)
https://github.com/wukko https://github.com/dumbmoron
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.
At least one of the authors is Russian. They were giving away Helium stickers to “anyone who is in Moscow”, and not many non-Russians are traveling there nowadays.
And https://meow.camera
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.
I don't think the chrome or microsoft extension websites even let you upload a MV2 extension anymore, and most chromium forks I've used rely entirely on the chrome web store.
https://github.com/imputnet/ublock-origin-crx
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.
A once-simple action which required minimal thought now requires you to parse an arbitrarily populated area of the screen and find a tiny gap within a litany of buttons and controls and carefully drag that part of the window. If you make a slight mistake and click on a tab or button, the unwanted activation of that control (e.g. switching to a new tab) serves to needlessly penalize the user.
This is not just an issue with web browsers now, but seemingly everywhere. It's been a big issue in the macOS Finder for a while now.
At the very least, Firefox still gives me the option to show the native window title bar, which I very much appreciate. It's certainly not the sexiest part of the UI, given the native element clashes a bit with FF's controls, but at least it's usable! This is an issue that could be solved by giving people a choice via a simple toggle... Most often, the option isn't there.
I'm sorry people have downvoted my post here a bit, and I agree it was a bit strongly worded, but I won't apologize for venting some frustration at what I see as the perpetuation of user-hostile design choices like this.
OP made it sound like tabs in the title bar was a new innovation.
"The parent post is overly strongly worded, but I agree with the meat of it: tabs should not be in the title bar of the window. It's worse usability for a space savings that really isn't relevant because it's so small."
I was nodding to this.
But I'm also someone who cares about vertical screen real estate (enough to call it vertical screen real estate).
So I was in a hypocritical conundrum. Do I care about the title bar, or do not care about the title bar?
Check firefox. Wait wtf, my firefox has no title bar! Did I customize it myself, I don't remember removing it???
[1] https://manualdousuario.net/en/liquid-glass-2/
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
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.
Pretty happy with it; I tried basically all browsers out there, fully switching to them for some time even if I didn't even like them, and after all that time I found Vivaldi the best overall browser right now (for me).
It's a shame, because I like the attitude and spirit behind Vivaldi.
Of course you can customize with CSS and other types of things, but I'd ideally like my browser to just work well and be designed well.
Having said that, I miss some features from Vivaldi. However, I am much happier using vertical tabs in other browsers that have that feature.
They really only work if you have a large monitor. I use a 50" 4k TV and two other monitors, and a 15" laptop. When I'm on smaller screens I have to hide the tabs.
1. Great if you have a wider screen (could never do it on my old 13" Macbook Air, for a 15" it's pretty good but for a 24" iMac it's perfect). But if you need the space youjust have it set to minimize by default, maximize on hover.
2. See the titles of your browser tabs, which is great when you are like me and never have fewer than 30 tabs open at once.
3. Easier to select browser tabs when you have many of them open (ie they don't get squished unreadably small)
I find the Tahoe tab bar pretty ugly.
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.
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.
Teams has explicitly supported Firefox for a while now https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-clien... but the problem is "there's always another site that doesn't work right". Firefox usage share got too low, so places just check Chrom* and Safari work with the new feature and ship (sometimes not even the latter, if they don't care about mobile as much).
I keep hearing it, but personally I’ve only come across one recently (a site was running some tracking bullshit that broke on FF). And there’s one feature broken on LinkedIn.
Webcompat used to be a lot more active (not sure if it's one of the things Mozilla has stopped actively engaging or not) but it was always a few big sites followed by an endless stream of "I'd never use that site, but that's precisely the kind of thing an average user wouldn't want to be troubleshooting" stuff. E.g. I remember seeing https://webcompat.com/issues/136422 and thinking "yeah, the hospitals I used to work at stopped testing in Firefox too - and the sites are already frustrating when they work as expected".
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Except, instead of Chromium, Firefox, and instead of IE, Chromium.
It might have died with e10s but there was a firefox extension that let you embed IE in a tab on demand or for certain sites.
Then again, there are definitely some Firefox behaviors that differ from the WebKit-derived engines (webkit, blink, etc); for a few years Notion editor had very different UX in Firefox for this reason. They eventually fixed it though! Firefox's profiler is also excellent, I always analyze my Chrome profiles in https://profiler.firefox.com/ when I'm optimizing CPU use.
Citrix has always been shit, so is not surprising.
> Install any web apps and use them as standalone desktop apps without duplicating Chromium.
> Google
> 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.
You can add any URL as a custom search engine by providing a string template for the query.
It doesn't have to be a formal "search provider". Any URL that accepts a query string will work.
[1]: https://mycroftproject.com/
Can't we? The %s thing works in Vivaldi. Worked in Chrome last time I checked.
should be changed to
> Openly and proudly collaborates with russian government
Such blanket statements really don't bring anything to the table.
PS: I think you might be confusing Yandex with VK. VK are known to be loyal to government and provide users' data to law enforcement at a whim, without proper procedures.
As a company providing the service of web search, Kagi should do whatever it takes to improve search results. I imagine Yandex is the biggest and most complete index of Russian-language content - not using it would make the search results worse. The fact that Kagi still cross-references other indexes and allows users to downgrade specific results provides a check on propaganda content.
It's OK to have an opinion, and it's OK to dislike Kagi because it doesn't have the same opinion. It's wrong to mischaracterize what Kagi does, using wording that strongly suggests actions way more nefarious than giving a few dollars to a Russian company in exchange for some (anonymized) API calls.
In Europe they are still IMHO the best option for an independent search engine.
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!
I really wish someone would create an indexeddb shim that interfaces with another system and only uses indexeddb for (very large) cache. Something I could drop in with a userscript would be lovely, even if it required running a local server with something like rsync or rclone responsible for the actual transfers.
[1]: dexie import export used to work, now it never returns. I have no way of verifying that it's doing nothing without putting it in background (thus suspending it...), but I've let it run 3 hours with no results. [2]: Firefox doesn't allow backing up app data for some reason but devtools functions allow reading and writing the profile directory through the use of terminal commands (zip profile directory, unzip and restart browser).
- 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.
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.
https://kagi.com/orion/
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.
I am afraid I do not have those anymore. There were few in the mail and almost 20 (few of those were feature suggestions tbh) in the notes app. I later deleted those as well when I was cleaning up notes and cleared trash of the app. I just checked iCloud and it doesn't have that old history. If I use Orion again - hopefully when it's open source - I shall report bugs I find directly on the feedback site or the proper bug report channel then. Cheers.
(edited:)
Iirc it was from Jan-Feb of this year or maybe a bit further back. I am sure most of those would have been fixed. I remember one - when I would see the "all tabs" view on iOS and then click "Done" to get back to the normal usage window i.e one tab in focus and nothing happened. i.e basically returning from the "all tabs" view on iOS where you used to reach with swipe up on Safari.
Another - clear history on Mac used to crash for me. These were the most annoying and 100% repro. for me.
One more → iirc there was no way to customise (or I didn't find - not sure anymore) right click context menu on Mac. I almost always used "open in new tab" and there were too many options there which I didn't want or maybe didn't want on top.
Zen browser is eating their lunch at the moment.
Orion is a WebKit based browser (like Safari).
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...
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.
Nope. No. Thank you.
Props for featuring Kagi though.
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