Helium Browser
helium.computer
helium.computer
> 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
It is important to try to avoid letting perfection be the enemy of good.
Firefox is at least something that is distinct from WebKit or Chromium (which is itself based on a fork of WebKit). That's good.
It's not perfect, in part because deals with Google pay for most of it, but it is still good despite its imperfect status.
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.
Oh and of course focus. Mozilla has lacked focus for almost a decade now with all the random products and initiatives they launch.
Zen came close, but also didn't stick.
Containers seemed nice at first but my personal usage of them devolved into an over abundance of containers to isolate everything from one another (my fault, though).
On the other hand, I've had various small nits here and there that always eventually push me back towards a chromium browser.
But hey, I'm a believer in not holding on to my decisions so long that they become assumptions, so off I go to install Firefox and give it a 4th whirl since 2010.
That's gotten me married to Firefox. The hierarchical vertical tab management makes research and general web browsing far more efficient and productive. It also helps me know which tabs I can close when I'm done.
I've tried all kinds of tab management things (they're usually a motivation for trying a new browser that supposedly offers a better way) and nothing ever sticks out for me.
I'd agree. Although I'd also add: people don't want to sell software anymore, they want to sell subscriptions, and I personally do not have much desire to pay $10/month for a browser (and then get pitched more services to buy on top, no doubt).
You can donate to Mozilla, who then go on to spend their money on things other than firefox development. Or development in general.
Mozilla had a browser that had huge market share and was growing, and actively destroyed it for the sake of Chrome, at the same time as they became a financial dependent of google.
> google is also just buying user traffic with their investment
Google is not buying user traffic from a browser with a 3% share and falling. Google is probably responsible for 2-300% of firefox's profits, because if they stopped paying them off, they'd have to close up shop in 6 months. Everything else they do is a failure, and if it looks like it has a chance of being successful, like Servo and Rust*, they get rid of it.
They're not going to give them money to them with a check with "Bribe to fail continually, and to never give users a feature that they would leave Chrome for ever again" written on it. Money is fungible. If they couldn't bribe them like this, they'd create an "Extensions Interop Consortium," let Mozilla host it, and fund it to the tune of a half-billion dollars. Let Google prove this "partnership" is profitable, this default search engine placement on the 3% browser used exclusively by people who are experts, know how to change their defaults, and hate google. It doesn't pass the stupid test.
But actually, they don't have to prove anything because even though they're officially a monopoly, one of the worst of the many horrible, horrible Obama judges has now affirmed that there will be no remedy, because a remedy might affect their business. He then immediately went on tour, telling audiences how the government is bullying tech companies.
[*] And maybe firefoxOS, I accidentally had one as my daily phone for a year, and it worked fine. I didn't love it and I didn't even like the idea of it, but it certainly worked.
I just don't think Google's funding of Mozilla is what's actually holding Mozilla back.
Oh, Google did sabotage Mozilla: https://archive.is/2019.04.15-165942/https://twitter.com/joh...
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...
Paying for relay will give money to Mozilla Corporation, the same pot the google money goes into, which will predominantly pay for Firefox development but also other products. The corporation’s profits also fund the non-profit Foundation’s activities.
People often raise this argument regarding donating to the Foundation, as that money will be spent by the foundation, therefore not on Firefox. But a dollar raised by the foundation is a dollar less the corporation has to give the foundation, leaving it with more money to spend on Firefox and other things.
You can also donate directly to “MZLA” which makes thunderbird, and that money will be spent on thunderbird.
Personally, I don’t feel like firing Firefox devs and starting controversial and expensive diversity campaigns while raising executive pay when Firefox is losing market share every year is being a great steward.
Can we just for once not blindly hate something for not being perfect and consequently strengthening an even worse option?
Could you, and everybody, stop saying this for any reason about any subject? Go through this thread, pick out all of the people saying that they hate Mozilla for "not being perfect." Argue with them.
> the point really is "what's the alternative"?
Yes, that is the point. If there were an alternative people wouldn't complain, they would just leave. But Google is paying Mozilla (and Apple by the way) massive amounts of money not to compete. Mozilla is just very-ungoogled-chromium. It is not an alternative to google, it is one of the alternatives that google offers. I use it because I don't want to leave the internet altogether. It is a pain in the ass that involves a lot of work to bring it up to 70% of the functionality and UI it had 20 years ago.
Did you know that ~85% of Mozilla Corp's revenue comes from Google?
> Did you know that ~85% of Mozilla Corp's revenue comes from Google?
So not independent of Google and not a non-profit.
To be clear: I use Firefox, mainly because uBlock origin is blocked on Chrome.
If you purchase a product from them, it goes to Mozilla Corporation which makes all the products[0], if you donate money to Mozilla, it goes to the foundation.
[0] Minus Thunderbird, Thunderbird is developed by a separate foundation. Both the "Thunderbird foundation" (not actually called that) and Mozilla Corporation are 100% owned by the Mozilla Foundation.
You seem to be confusing Safari (a closed source Apple product), and WebKit (an open source browser engine used by multiple browsers).
Don't forget Servo. People are actively working on it, and it could use more help.
I think the main repo does not have Swift yet.
If I would put all the eggs on a basket, I will prefer Servo.
Because there is nothing wrong in protecting your project from ideologues who do a drive by PR just to further their cause.
There is nothing wrong in preventing your project from being used as an vehicle for someone else's ideology.
I'm tired of people who are doing such great work being labeled politically over things like pronoun preferences and somehow this is supposed to make us wish for the projects failure OR the founder's expulsion from his own project.
(oh dear I forgot to imagine the project lead could also be female - damn you English language!)
But you, by resorting to sarcasm, inappropriate quotational use of a term, and distorting my sentences, demonstrate that you understood what I said and what I meant. This, in turn, tells me you think it is okay to deny people liberty, equality and justice, as long as the product is swell. In fact, I think you think that's OK even if there is no product.
I could argue some more, but this is the internet. So I leave it be and remind myself of the well-known saying "all evil needs to triumph is that good men do nothing."
Me no. And 20 or 30 years some people used to care about that stuff. The same thing could be said about if it's opensource or not.
PD: So yes, I don't have any account now on that site that was called "Twitter".
Did I miss a controversy somewhere?
Yeah well tell me how a Web browser in the 2020s is not an ideological device. I'll wait.
Is that a condemnation, or are you being sarcastic? Isn't that what projects and business should default to?
For the decision itself, I don't see how he should be put in some extreme political camp for that. I think that's probably hard to understand for anyone outside the US / culture wars bubble.
Same way nobody asked him to plaster pride flags over his project, but he went to the step of telling a contributor to please remove a flag from their avatar because showing that avatar in his project would be "political".
Reasonable responses I can think of are:
1. No we will not use gender neutral language here, it's a policy.
2. I think it's a good idea, but I don't have the bandwidth to make ground rules for that right now, so for the time being it will stay as it is.
3. Good idea, I'll set up some policy on that and if you have time to change things, help is appreciated.
> Same way nobody asked him to plaster pride flags over his project, but he went to the step of telling a contributor to please remove a flag from their avatar because showing that avatar in his project would be "political".
If that part is true, that's pretty wild. If he _did_ ask someone else to remove symbols from their personal avatar, that sounds as political as it gets to me... But from some quick research, I couldn't find anything about such a thing happening.
And how does that work, exactly? If you get a PR to modify all the docs/code to be gender neutral you accept it? And what if in the same PR someone else vehemently opposes to the change? Or what if 2 days after the PR was merged you get a revert PR by someone else?
The thing is that you cannot just ignore "politics", politics are an integral part of our lives. Completely ignoring politics means accepting the status quo, so it's by definition a conservative position.
I hardly can imagine browsing the Internet without ublock origin or other extensions like cookie autodelete, privacy badger, ublacklist
"These pre-built nightly snapshots allow developers to try Servo and report issues without building Servo locally. Please don’t log into your bank with Servo just yet!"A more interesting question is why it was not possible to use compile time borrow checking in this particular case. It shows how valuable the borrow checker is when you can use it.
I'd rather use the C++ app that doesn't crash than the Rust browser that crashes safely.
The last time I had firefox crash was over a decade ago.
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.
If you build on top of it, you're not forced and unable to extend the ecosystem.
Why did we ever bothered with the IE lawsuit, for a newer generation to give the Web on a plate to Google?
MS was not smart enough to do this. Google was smarter.
Google learned it can be "standards compliant" if it submits a draft spec to WHATWG/W3C, and while the comment and revision process is still ongoing, roll out those features in Chrome and start using them in YouTube, Gmail, Google docs, and AMP. Now Firefox and Safari are forced to implement those draft specs as well or users will leave in droves because Google websites are broken. Soon enough, Google's draft spec is standardized with minimal revisions because it's already out there in the wild.
The debate, revision, and multistakeholder aspects of the standards process have been effectively bypassed, a la IE6 and ActiveX, but Chrome can claim to be on the cutting edge of standards compliance. This is a case of Goodharts's law.
Push for mail, webgpu for maps (iirc) and I believe WebUSB is used for Android flash/debug.
Who knows.
Not us, we’ll never know.
And to those rushing out to point out the excuse part about OpenGL on Mac not having support for compute, WebGL already back then wasn't backed up by OpenGL on all platforms, see Windows (DirectX), PlayStation (LibGNM).
Also eventually Safari also moved their WebGL implementation from OpenGL to Metal, and Chrome did as well, replace their WebGL to run on top of Metal on Mac.
So not really that much of a problem regarding the state of OpenGL on Mac as "required" implemenatation layer for WebGL.
If you're looking at fugu in particular (especially in the latter stages) we had external developers or businesses wanting the features.
Note: there are some apis that a Google customer wanted to use first.
- All of hardware standards. WebHID's timeline is especially egregious https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459#is...
- Most of standards advertised on web.dev as "new exciting opportunities you can try now". E.g. WebTransport https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/webt.... The status of that spec is "scribbled on a napkin", but somehow already released in Chrome.
- Other "standards" and "specs" here and there like web share target https://w3c.github.io/web-share-target/
Can I Use had to create a special UNOFF tag for all the web APIs that Chrome (mostly Chrome) ships. If you go to MDN and look at all APIs marked as "experimental", you'll find that most of them are already shipped in Chrome: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API
WPF XAML was originally designed by ex IE team members, and they were the same that a few years later proposed XAML Grid concept as CSS Grid initial design.
Many JavaScript devs have to thank their abuse of JavaScript in the browser to XMLHttpRequest introduced by IE.
Yeah, people forget that IE was a great browser. It was easily the most performant, I think driven by the Outlook web (I believe the first web app to make use of XMLHttpRequest) team demanding IE team make it so. The issue, like you said, is they won and then stopped updating.
Internet explorer became the dominant browser for one reason only: it came by default.
Default helped, but IE was the far superior browser for a long time. People chose to use it.
I was also a FF user and it came out a few years later than IE6. When FF came out IE6 was still the superior browser, though it was eventually overtaken by both FF and Chrome.
"Leading" being the operative word. Ship a new feature, submit it as a standard and encourage its adoption so things only work on chrome and further increase market share when people find other browsers "broken".
MS did exactly the same shit with IE - the only really difference was that the standards body (w3c) was independent, so they couldn't self declare it as a standard. Now the "standards" body (whatwg) is mostly google...
Yes, Chrome has leading standards™ [1] support!
_________
[1] A so-called standard™ is a piece of source code that sits on the main branch of the Chromium repository. Not to be confused with actual standards!
Except no support for:
CSS Canvas Drawings
CSS filter() function
Video Tracks
Audio Tracks
FIDO U2F API
SPDY protocol
JPEG XL image format
HTTP Live Streaming
HEIF/HEIC image format
SVG fonts
CSS hanging-punctuation
CSS font-smooth
CSS Initial Letter
Speech Recognition API
CSS -webkit-user-drag property
CSS3 Multiple column layout
CSS text-indent
Synchronous Clipboard API
HEVC/H.265 video format
TLS 1.1
text-decoration styling
CSS display: contents
CSS Container Style Queries
CSS clip-path property for HTML
CSS Counter Styles
Ruby annotation
WAI-ARIA Accessibility features
Media Fragments
autocomplete attribute: on & off values
DOMMatrix
SVG effects for HTML
X-Frame-Options HTTP header
DNSSEC and DANE
WebXR Device API
DeviceOrientation & DeviceMotion events
Permissions Policy
asm.js
Network Information API
theme-color Meta Tag
Document Policy
The whole "Chrome is the leader in standards" meme is a lie.
- CSS Canvas Drawings is not a web standard. It's a WebKit-specific feature, only Safari implements it. Chromium removed it in order to replace it with an actual web standard (CSS Painting API).
- Likewise, the CSS filter() function is Safari-only.
- U2F API has been deprecated for years, was replaced by WebAuthn, and only Safari still implements it.
- Same with SPDY, which was replaced by an actual web standard (HTTP2). Only Safari still ships it, but has marked it deprecated.
- SVG Fonts were removed from the SVG spec.
- HLS, JPEG-XL, HEIF/HEIC are essentially Safari-only as well.
CSS hanging-punctuation and audio/video tracks are new features that haven't been widely implemented yet.
Plus all the Electron crap that gets shoved as "native".
4/5 top browsers by market share are there because they are preinstalled on millions of devices and none of them are terrible enough for an average person to look for an alternative.
In fact, as of this year, Apple devices in the EU already have to ask you which browser you want to use during the setup process, while Android devices don't have to ask you which browser you want to use, but do have to ask you which search engine you want to use. It is a bit inconsistent and arbitrary, but it's a step in the right direction.
Which I think is important as it relates to Mozilla. Because a lot of the arguments back and forth about Mozilla assume that change in browser adoption was about what features they did or didn't add. But I think that completely ignores powerful actors leveraging monopoly positions to drive users to their browsers, which is more important by several orders or magnitude. Any explanation of that history which leaves that part out is revisionist history in my opinion.
I just checked some website stats I have access to and ~78.6% of iOS users use Safari. On Android on the other hand, ~76% of them use Chrome, ~8.1% uses the Samsung Browser, and there's a marginal amount of people using other manufacturer-provided browsers like Huawei Browser and MIUI (Xiaomi's default). Of course I don't know the exact manufacturer of Android phones to be able to tell what percentage of say Samsung devices switched to Chrome, but I'd say the pattern's still pretty clear.
The only people likely to switch browsers are desktop users, but they total to <20% of the traffic. Funnily enough Chrome isn't even the top browser overall, it's Safari, but that tells you more about my clientele (richer than average for my target market).
I feel like there's a missing step in the argument here. Yes Google's revenue comes from the web, yes Chromium being open source and paying for search deals are a hedge against anti trust, but why does it follow that they wouldn't want to dominate the browser space? They do, and it seems to be working quite well for them. But it feels more like a minimum effort hedge against antitrust then a demonstration of a healthy ecosystem.
Also, every time Chromium comes up you have people pointing to it like it's a counterpoint to their browser dominance. It's open source, so what's the issue? But the issue is that Chromium as a body decides whether commits make it into the browser and the decision making body is an invite only group of full time Google developers. So it is controlled by Google after all.
Not if you fork it.
But I think there are cases, such as Chromium where the "just fork it" response is unrealistic about the burden of maintaining a codebase or the ongoing relationship to new updates, or not having capacity to solve new problems or comply with new standards in Google-independent ways. Part of the problem of Chromium is that it's normalized a velocity of development and of codebase size in exactly the way you would if you were going for embrace-extend-extinguish.
And the foundational point is still true, Google controls commits to Chromium, so the core project itself is not ever going to be an organic manifestion of community desires for an egalitarian internet. It's going to be whatever helps consolidate Google's monopoly.
> Why did we ever bothered with the IE lawsuit, for a newer generation to give the Web on a plate to Google?
So the history here is that Microsoft lost its monopoly on its own poor decision making.
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.
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)
So many choices!
That would actually make sense. But it would also point at the larger problem (the one we're not actually looking into because we're too busy with solving the unsolvable a.k.a. with C++).
It goes like this: are "we" building a browser for it to be reckoned with, or are "we" building a browser in order to let people browse webpages?
Because only one of these two requires collecting tens of million of... pretty much anything where ten million is a large number I guess? Yet people conflate the two, thinking the same approach holds for both goals, so let's put it sideways:
Which exact problem does a new browser (engine) solve, besides people saying there are too few browsers? What's the purpose of having this problem, its underlying nature? Can we solve it a way that doesn't require reimplementing the last 30 years of computing history? Can we even go look for such a way or will someone show up to stop us?
If the goal is to become a browser vendor, obviously there's no workaround to building a browser (or rebadging one lol); if the goal is not that or not only that, anyone building a browser is gonna have to expound a little more on what exactly they're trying to achieve. That's complicated by how the vast difference between a new browser engine and, say, a new model of TV set, can't really be expressed in beancounts.
Tens of millions all around
I even use gemtext now and then offline just as an even simpler markdown. Since it has so few features it is trivial to convert gmi to markdown or to any other format without losing anything. It works as a lowest common markup language for when something that minimal is enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
2019? (gemini)
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.
The easiest way to run WebKit on Windows is via Playwright.
Firefox on the other hand is better in this respect and even has a setting explicitly for resisting fingerprinting.
Try some good fingerprint testing sites on Brave and see what comes up (those results alone should chock you). Then try the same sites on Firefox with privacy.resistFingerprinting=true. Unless some truly revolutionary initiatives have been taken at Brave since last I checked, you will see Firefox do A LOT better than Brave.
Brave suck at resisting fingerprinting. It may be better than other Chromium-based browsers, but it's still pathetic.
Um. Have you tried this? Because obviously based on my comment I've done this before (and I've of course included Firefox).
I just did this again and sites tell me Brave has a randomized fingerprint. Firefox's is "unique". A specific example: the EFF Cover Your Tracks website[1] said that both browsers convey 18.21 bits of identifying information.
Additionally, if you need to enable a certain setting for best performance, that browser is obviously worse for purpose, given that the vast majority of people don't change settings.
I think I wrote some report at one time about this issue, so it was a bit more than just surface level testing. Chromium was always a disapointment whenever I attempted a comparison.
I think a more fair comparison would be today's Brave vs some hardened Firefox such as Librewolf, Mullvad Browser or even Tor Browser. Because the issue is not how vanilla Chromium or Firefox perform, but how well they can be hardened in practice.
Worth noting is that Brave does better when it comes to compatibility, because it leaves WebGL and other APIs enabled, while something like Tor Browser will disable those for privacy reasons. It hints at different priorities between these projects.
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)
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.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-signing-in-firef...
I've got one buggy device, but I suspect corruption due to the error message and I'm more interested in saving the unsyncable data I've got on that profile than I am in trying to fix it by clearing data.
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.
Primarily probably yes, but I think for example Brave or Arc Browser teams also had ideas for their own browser features instead of "just" making a more degoogled Chromium. Helium as well, I suppose, otherwise what's the point?
Thank you.
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
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).
For Safari, the problem for most platforms is that it doesn't run on most platforms. It doesn't really count to me if I can't use it on my computers. (Caveat that there are non-Safari webkit browsers, but they're not very good.)
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.
On desktop (multiple Linuxes, Windows 7 and 10, and MacOS) I run into problems which I spend hours trying to fix, until I give up and go back to a Chromium browser. On iPadOS and iOS, it would crash when using arrowkeys to navigate URL history(or something like that, if I remember correctly. Been awhile). I had another issue with it on Android, the details of which I'd forgotten. I don't even use the sync features- these are just independent bugs.
Every time I tried to switch to Firefox, it's a time sink that ends with a broken install. I used Firefox as my primary browser in the early 00s through to ~2010. I tried to switch back every few years between 2017 and 2023.
The recent bad new changes (forced built-in advertising, new worse ToS, forced AI stuff) make me uninterested in spending more time on Firefox. I'm happy it works for you, but we are not the same person, and Firefox is entirely nonviable for me.
And yet I, and a few hundreds of thousands of others, have used it on all of those platforms. Even at FAANGs.
If it's only breaking for you, and you alone, you can see why the rest of us are skeptical that it really is that broken.
There are several problems here.
Before anything, I want to note that we don't have to fight, we aren't enemies. We're on the same ideological side, even. This tastes like an angry and bitter internet argument. Do you taste it too?
We're just two people talking about web browsers. We don't need acrimony for each other. My bitterness is for the browser ecosystem. I am very sad about the browser ecosystem.
On that note, who are you speaking for, other than yourself, when you talk about "the rest of us"?
You are only you, and I am only me. The difference here is that you have good experiences with Firefox, and I have had bad experiences with Firefox.
Second, your skepticism is part of the problem with Firefox. In trying to find support for these issues, I mostly found people who did not believe me (or that I'm using it wrong, etc.)
The way you engage with people is common in the Firefox community, which is deleterious to the goal of having more people use Firefox. I think it's actually really important that we have a good non-Chromium non-corporate browser which people want to use, and Firefox is still the most promising one in the running.
Third, it's just incorrect to think I am alone in my issues. Some of these issues I could confirm were unfixed bugs, by finding them in the issue trackers. Others I could find with my issues in threads on Reddit, for example. Others are in this same thread we're commenting on. You can see people here talking about issues with Firefox, or needing to "Frankenstein" their install to get it to a usable state (a relatable experience for me, except I couldn't get it back into a usable state. I never want to touch user.js again.) My experience is lonely, but I am not the only person with my experience.
There is also the 94% to 98% of people on the internet who do not use Firefox. Some of those must be because they wanted to use Firefox, but had a breaking issue and went to Chrome.
People use software with bugs all the time, and Chromium and Safari's dominance is mostly because of years of costly domination from Apple and especially Google. But part of it is also things simply not working in Firefox. (Which is, also, partially due to Google expanding on Microsoft's IE-era standards playbook).
Finally, what is your position exactly? That Firefox can't possibly have the bugs I had? Or that I am lying about wanting a viable non-Chromium browser? I think you might be responding with a knee-jerk defense of Firefox, and you might assume I'm arguing in bad faith, which is fair, given this is the "Forum for Bad Faith Arguments About Computers with Some Amount of Financially-Motivated Arguments".
But I am ideologically motivated to be on Firefox's side. It's the largest browser engine not owned by a FAANG. Ideological motivation is the reason why I tried to use Firefox several times over several years, and why I spend time talking on the internet with strangers about web browsers.
Sure, I don't want bad blood -- but like, I get why their tone is this way; this ain't just McDonalds vs Burger King.
Op is correctly frustrated at the "consumer is always right" mindset folks like you show. This is more important than consumer choice and (as someone who uses Firefox as a daily driver and will just bounce to Chromium as needed) "fixing a billion little bugs that you see" isn't as near as important as promoting the ideology more?
It clearly is, with hundreds of thousands of daily users. Maybe it's broken on some specific sites[1]; can you recall which sites those were?
Because it works, right now, on all the mainstream and popular sites, including every banking site I use it on, every shopping site, every wordpress site, every forum, subreddit, LLM/webchat, search engine, LoB and social networking site I used it on over the last decade and a half.
Actions speak louder than words - use FF, and then when you get to a site it doesn't work on, start Chromium, instead of complaining about the hours trying to fix it.
=============
[1] Note I am not saying that it is broken for you, I am saying that it is broken for specific sites.
I myself am guilty of this in the past, and I hope GP does not take offense at my writing this, as I don't intend to offend. I think it's just a feature/bug of humanity... some underlying mechanism that can possibly only be explained with psychology of lizard brains or something ;)
I didn’t know either until a few weeks ago.
They realized they couldn't make any money with that, so they abandoned it and started Dia which was "AI". Again, they had no capability nor plan to make any solid product, was just sold to Atlassian
Actually, they really knew how to hype up their product. And their marketing videos were top notch. Innovation I suppose.
(Sent from orion on ios, with firefox’s ublock origin, etc enabled)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think any such guarantees exist, unfortunately.
German e.V. [1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_(German...
If this is true they should be in court for these anti-competitive practices.
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).
WebRTC went live in Safari the same year that the non-draft version went live in Chrome (Chrome supported the pre-standard webkit-prefixed version for some years before).
Similarly, Safari added support for WASM the same year that WASM was standardised (once again, Chrome supported a pre-standard version ahead of standardisation).
The further irony is calling it the “new IE” when in fact it’s Chrome that is far more similar to the IE of old, at least in terms of the dirty tricks - dominant market share, uses it to push non-standards, stuffs in user hostile features to the brim, and spies on you incessantly. The only difference is it’s not terrible at performance.
Because Safari comes pre-installed on billions of devices?
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).
That goes contrary to my experience. I'm a maintainer of a Firefox fork (with rather extensive changes to a lot of the internals), and it is pretty manageable to maintain. We manage to keep it roughly up to date and add new features without financial backing or folks working full-time on it.
If all you do is change the branding and apply some superficial stuff, Chromium might be doable, but that is hardly a new browser. Everybody who forked Chromium from the folks I know (mostly research/security testing people) gave up due to the constant churn.
For this reason, from my experience, Firefox forks are much easier to maintain once you start applying changes to internal things. Firefox is changing at a slower pace, making keeping up to date much more manageable, but that also has its drawbacks, as it does not support every crazy feature Google pushes out, e.g., WebUSB. But, for example, folks I know maintained a v8 fork that was shelved as the introduction of Torque (which has spotty public documentation, to be very kind) means it is a complete rewrite.
Why do you think that very few projects adopt Gecko then?
Also, I feel working with the Chromium codebase is easier if you only apply superficial changes, e.g., the linked browser. The patch files are all very simple, so the fact that Chrome is generally less crufty (Mozilla is working on cleaning up a lot of ancient stuff, which causes us a lot of pain but is probably great in the long term), simply due to being newer, might make it easier to get started. Although I always felt the most significant hurdle (if you know C++ and JavaScript sufficiently well to patch a Browser) is getting the stuff to build, Mozilla is doing reasonably well on that front. Building Firefox always felt less annoying than building Chromium.
The Engine, Gecko, however, is hard to fork since it's tightly coupled to the browser itself.
I also think that when the parent mentioned "forking Gecko", it might be in the sense of extracting the engine and putting a new browser on top of it, just like other Webkit based browsers e.g. Orion and Gnome Web.
Because it's very very very good. Google poored billions into it and it shows.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Can't we? The %s thing works in Vivaldi. Worked in Chrome last time I checked.
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.
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
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.
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).
Don’t let Opera cloud your judgement since it’s a poor choice to start with.
> We will keep Manifest v2 for as long as it’s still available in Chromium. We expect to drop support in June 2025, but we may maintain it longer or be forced to drop support for it sooner, depending on the precise nature of the changes to the code.
https://vivaldi.com/blog/manifest-v3-update-vivaldi-is-futur...
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.
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.
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)_/¯
Citrix has always been shit, so is not surprising.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I find the Tahoe tab bar pretty ugly.
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.
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 certainly will not be equating Apple to Google or Microsoft.
For 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!
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).
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?
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
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.
Asking is one thing, the other thing is not accepting the decision of a maintainer on a topic that is at the maintainers discretion and instead taking it to social media [1] [2] for it to be brigaded.
Addendum: It additionally appears that this was filed before the browser was even launched, if the Wayback Machine and their social media posts are anything to go by.
[1] https://x.com/uwukko/status/1970161297783238905 [2] https://x.com/theo/status/1970266199469810127
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.
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???
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.
> 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.