Transparency efforts behind the Helium Browser | Hacker News Reader

Transparency efforts behind the Helium Browser

helium.computer

28 pointstwapi20 comments

They messed up basic color scheme, making it almost unusable.

[0]: https://github.com/imputnet/helium/issues/1532

[1]: https://github.com/imputnet/helium/issues/1850

This is mostly an argument for full user customization. I'm willing to bet some people prefer the current scheme. Presumably the developer(s).

In the same sense that a blockchain can be forked by using software that only accepts certain types of block, is it possible to fork the WWW in a similar manner? e.g. with changes that neuter the ad-mongers.

For example coming up with a way to get rid of these god awful cookies. Maybe ad-monger sites could be allowed in the same way an insecure connection is allowed behind a series of warnings?

The internet is literally just a pipe. There's no limitation binding us to HTTP. You can use any protocol you want over the internet, anything at all.

Well quite. So why are we living in this surveillance hellscape?

Because the capitalists want you to

Not sure I'd call it just a pipe, but maybe a series of tubes.

How are they going to be adding uBlock Origin to Chromium going forward if manifest v2 gets completely deprecated/removed entirely?

AFAIK some of the other chromium forks (brave and/or edge?) were committed to backporting manifest v2 (or more specifically the webRequestBlocking API) for future chromium versions.

this is not correct. neither brave nor edge has committed to that.

as of yet, there's no (publicly stated) contingency plan if the upstream mv2 code is excised, but I could be mistaken.

Brave has integrated uBO directly into their core logic. Visit brave://settings/extensions/v2 and you can download it, even with no MV2 support. I'm not aware of any other browser adopting this approach.

They said until they can't afford to maintain it.

The exact misimpression I was trying to counter.

firefox 149+ actually bundles brave's adblock-rust as well, it just doesn't really use it. waterfox does enable it and use it, though they're still testing (https://github.com/BrowserWorks/waterfox/issues/4182).

all of that being said, I was answering the question about mv2 broadly, not ad blocking.

Nothing. It will be a huge burden for them to maintain all the removed code. Their only choice is to integrate brave's adblocker.

This seems to be the only way forward from what I can figure. Helium's main selling point is that it's essentially degoogled chromium + a few miscellaneous patches & full uBlock. But once Google completely strips all that out of Chromium project, that won't be a tenable option.

I'm not sure what Opera/Vivaldi/et al. use for their native adblocking, but Brave's rust adblocker makes the most sense to me. Really it's uBlock's filtering lists that keep the whole thing working anyway.

I just set Helium as my default browser yesterday after dual-wielding it with Arc. Never thought I'd move on from Arc but here we are.

> cause havoc, and put people first

An odd pairing

Not really. Every activist that made a real difference for the good caused some kind of havoc.

if you follow wukko on twitter you know it makes sense. its the same guy who made cobalt the video downloader.

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