> Helium is based on Chromium
> Best privacy by default
Sorry, pass...
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.
This seems like something pretty easy to mess up. Maybe it is good now, but it sure is going to be a cat and mouse game.
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].
Because at the time IE6 was a terrible browser with poor standards support, while Chrome is an excellent browser with leading standards support. It is a gilded cage.
The last thing Google would want is the web to turn into a Chrome platform. Unlike with Microsoft or even Apple, their source of revenue is web, and they they are doing everything in their capacity for this platform to win. This is exactly why they open-sourced most of Chrome and almost fully finance Chrome's biggest competitor.
the (very challenging) "trick" is to use Libre hardware/software, like Pinephone and LineageOS, but that's not realistic for the vast majority of people :(
It's not just anyone, it's the folks at Igalia. I think people disregard Servo since it's no longer under Mozilla but Igalia aren't just random contributors picking up the slack, they're browser experts that also work on Chromium.
Maybe it's just me, but from time to time I try latest Servo build and it never survives more than few minutes of usage before crashing. Last time I did it was 3 days ago, I opened a website and it crashed with "RefCell already borrowed" in what seems to be a logger module. This always strikes me as weird because one of the selling points for Rust is memory and thread safety (quote from the website: "eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time").
I agree with you here. I want a viable non-Chromium browser.
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
What is your definition of “viable”? Plenty of people own iPhones, which is locked down to webkit.
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).
I like Arc browser by The Browser Company. As far as I understand it, it's made by a bunch of jaded ex-google employees, so the Google stuff is also stripped-out. The features are next level, and I feel it's a very forward-thinking browser. Maybe it will work for you
Literally the first thing I looked for...(if it is based on chromium).
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)
While I agree that monopolies suck, I _absolutely hate_ having to waste my time adjusting styles and writing workaround code just to make everything look and work consistently in a multitude of browsers. This is one of the reasons — among a hundred others — that I grew to somewhat hate front-end, doubly so with the rise of mobile devices. And the more rendering engines we have, the more developers will have to fight frustrating battles with inconsistencies and quirks.
It's actually the beauty of open source that we can align on a few primitives that are reusable in several different contexts to build radically different product experiences and world views. If you think of the phylogenetic tree of software this is exactly what you want to happen.
A browser being based on Chromium has nothing to do with how private it is. Yes you are furthering an internet monopoly by using chromium. But there is noncorrelation between being based of Chromium and Privacy.
Yes it has, unless they plan to do significant changes to how the relevant JS APIs function, which is usually prohibitively expensive to maintain. Standard Chromium allows websites to fetch a lot of fingerprintable bits, this is even true for Brave. Tracking protection on Chromium is a joke.
Firefox on the other hand is better in this respect and even has a setting explicitly for resisting fingerprinting.
You need to look at history. In early 90s why did Microsoft invest in apple when it is its competitors. Investment doesn't mean they are medling into mozilla business.
For companies like google (present) or Microsoft in 90's.
It is better to have a crippled competitor than no competitor.
No competitor attracts government agencies for monopoly which is worse.
Maybe it's also the other way around: if Firefox was legitimate competition, Google wouldn't "fund" them (quotes because really, google is also just buying user traffic with their investment).
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.
All three choices suck. I don't think anyone is disagreeing with that. But there's only one option on here that isn't trying to royally fuck everyone over and actually cares about the very service we're arguing over.
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]
Seriously, are we all that greedy and myopic? They're a non-profit. You know tons of companies, such as Google and every other big tech company, have some donation matching system. Google pays the Mozilla Foundation about half a billion a year to make Google the default search engine. How is the fact that they are throwing such massive amounts of money not a concerning thing? Yet FF has enough users that we could give them an extra 40% revenue if we tossed them $5 PER YEAR. That's it.
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...
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.
You used to be able to get Epiphany preview on Windows, for quite a long time after you could get Safari on Windows. Doesn't seem to be the case anymore, though.
> 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.
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.
While I appreciate your perspective, the widespread adoption of Google Chrome has presented challenges. The implementation of Manifest V3 demonstrates Google's significant influence over extension developers, requiring adherence to increasingly restrictive APIs or facing limited visibility within less popular browsers.
For me, the fact that a browser is based on Chromium is a deal breaker when compared to CPU/RAM usage of Safari on Mac OS. When I open the some JS heavy tabs like Notion, AIstudio.google.com, email, the difference is huge.
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.
Most of these chromium-based browsers are intended to address privacy concerns. Firefox (mostly) respects your privacy.
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.
That's my (admittedly extremely limited) understanding. The Mozilla/Firefox people de-prioritized making Gecko a separate linkable library years ago, and it's no longer a straightforward thing to do. Which is a real bummer.
They do, whilst they have a minor user base. If they become the majority they'll lose funding.
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.
You say this like chromium is not the best browser experience we have. There used to be a point where everyone had to build websites for 5 different web engines, each of which had their own quirks. Now that we just build for one it's so much easier, and while chromium still does a great job I'm not sure why we'd want to create another, likely worse, engine and browser.
I use FF... but they are financially tied to Google and even technically they are waiting on Google to implement JPEG-XL instead of moving forward themselves. Why not do some work/spend some money to borrow Safari's implementation or audit and augment a third party library? Instead of waiting on Google... esp on this matter where you could be waiting for a long time.
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 thing is, Gecko is really insecure when compared to Chromium. Its sandboxing is asinine. Additionally, due to lack of WebView implementation, on mobile you have to use Chromium either way, leaving you with two completely separate attack surfaces.
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.
Yet I pick a Chromium based browser because Firefox is awfully anti-user. I still can't load extensions that are not Mozilla-approved, a major deal breaker for me. Then there's the "news" (ragebait slop) on the new tab screen by default, almost like I'm using MS Edge, and also the many sponsored & "suggested" (read: sponsored) links by default in new tab and the address bar as well.
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.
Sponsor stuff that you can just turn off (Firefox) vs. Selling out your privacy directly (chromium with worse fingerprinting protection) and indirectly (Google browser monopoly).
I love Chromium ! It's the fastest browser implementation out there, and the best to handle hundreds of tabs in the background. What if, everyone was going on a fork of ungoogled chromium, there would be interest into alternative browsers to Chrome and money invested there, and at some point making forks of Chromium separated from Google might make sense business wise. So, we can impact the future of browsers by using chromium based browsers
What makes me a bit uneasy about the project is that the website doesn't explain who is building it. For most open-source, I think that would be fine. But browsers auto-update, so their vendors essentially have the continued ability to run code on your machine. You want some confidence that they won't get owned and won't sell the access to bad actors down the line, so there is an element of personal trust.
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.
You found the authors' screen names and some other things they've made.
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.
Well it is just one those element naming chrome fork. Kinda like:
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?
For what it's worth: “All Chromium extensions are supported and work right away, by default, including all MV2 extensions. We'll keep support for MV2 extensions for as long as possible.”
Whether that's worth much is of course another matter.
My thoughts exactly. I read on their website that they're a two person team who care about privacy. But how do they finance their work on these tools? Are they still figuring it out? Do they have a sustainable business model?
Agreed, and my concern is not a "NSA is monitoring my activity" but more along the lines of whether they have enough funding to staff security research and response for this browser.
I have felt like a perennial browser refugee for a while. For about 20 years now (since OG Firefox was at peak and Chrome was not yet launched), every new browser promises the same things, gets popular enough, then does a full or partial 180.
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.
I feel the same. For now, I've made peace with having to switch to "whatever is the latest maintained fork with privacy defaults" every 6 months. Hopefully Ladybird becomes a usable browser sometime soon.
The hard answer is the project cannot attract the good engineers anymore because it eventually stops being a growth project. Without being a growth project, you don't get investment into what you want to do anymore and there is less potential growth in your career and income.
Browsers are always going to be "as-is, best effort" . No one, not even google is going to stick out their neck and protect your privacy, that's up to you, and especially not "legally" as that has aspects of easily being sued when privacy/money is involved. Certainly not for a "small monthly fee". Best you're going to get is open source and security community scrutiny of said open source code
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.
For what it's worth, I like Orion - built by the same team that built the Kagi search engine. It's a shit browser for developers (inspect panel crashes half the time and other bugs), but I trust it way more than Chrome or even Safari. For development tasks - if I need to, I simply switch to Firefox.
Can someone explain to me why most browser forks are based on Chromium? If the goal is to make a privacy focused browser which is independent of Google, isn't it then a bit counterproductive to put all your eggs in a basket which only exists due to the goodwill of your main competitor? Why not webkit or Gecko? There might be a good argument for it, but as a person concerned with privacy and the future freedom of the internet, who is supposedly the target user for a browser like this, I would expect the justification to depend on Google code to be front and center on the page.
WebKit is easy but has terrible compatibility because the fruit company makes money from native apps. They do the bare minimum to keep Safari functional so that people keep buying iPhones.
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.
Gecko is too big to die. Even with Firefox’s market share being a shadow of its former self, it’s still used by millions.
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).
Couple main reasons: 1) BSD license vs a CopyLeft license. Edge, Opera etc don't want to push their changes back up. 2) Compatibility and performance is why Brave switched from Gecko to Chromium. 75% of the marketshare is chromium based browsers so sites will more than likely work with chromium browsers.
I don't why webkit is more popular. Maybe because it(Apple) is slow to adopt standards.
My guess is just that a lot of people really like Chrome and wish they could have that without the privacy concerns. I mean honestly I'm the same, I'm just seemingly more cynical as to whether that's possible.
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.
Everyone mentions compatibility and performance as the main reasons, but this still doesn't make any sense to me. If I switch to a browser which has a stated goal of protecting my privacy and protecting the freedom of the web, then performance and web site compatibility is much further down my list of priorities.
Even if you have personal priorities for privacy, surely you can understand that many user's first expectation for a web browser is for websites to work correctly.
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.
I'd agree but performance and compatibility bubbles up to top concern pretty quickly when you use something nearly constantly (which I'd say is applicable for a browser).
I believe that Gecko is notoriously hard to maintain and integrate into other software. It's not something I've attempted myself so take it for what it is. It was one of the issues Servo was suppose to address.
There is a few browsers based on WebKit, so that seems doable.
Sure but I only use Firefox (no other browser installed (except Edge on Windows)) and I don’t have any issues; so some none-trivial portion of the web doesn’t require Chrom(ium) specific behaviour.
I don't know the internal details of the architecture, but on Windows, it's very trivial to be "Chromium". The newest web browser component has been based on Chromium for a few years.
The thing is, Gecko is really insecure when compared to Chromium. Its sandboxing is asinine. Additionally, due to lack of WebView implementation, on mobile you have to use Chromium either way, leaving you with two completely separate attack surfaces.
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.
This is neat, and reminds me of Kagi's browser Orion, since their hero image features Kagi search.
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.
I love Kagi as a search engine but the Orion UI feels too similar to Safari to really enjoy it as much.
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.
Tried Orion on mac for a week or two. I also had a few bugs when using google docs and sheets. I gave up because I couldn’t work. However I keep using the iOS app. It’s quite good although I need to restart the app from time to time because of some bugs.
The biggest problem with Orion is the Firefox & Chrome extensions;
Many don't work properly, but you don't see any errors, so you have no idea what parts are working and aren't.
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...
Orion was a very unstable/buggy app. I don't know how it is now. The funny thing is when I had reached out to their support with a detailed bug report, they asked me to go to GitHub issues instead (or their feedback forum; not sure whether they had moved). I asked them to pass it to the team since I had already shared it and these were easily and always reproducible; I had added proper steps as well. They said - nope. At that point, I realised what a mistake it had been trying to "contribute" to yet another closed-source software. Mail thread deleted, browsers - both iOS/mac - uninstalled. End of story.
I'm sorry you had this experience. If you still have the bug report please send it to daniel.langh at kagi.com. I'll check on your original report and see how we can improve our communication going forward.
Note that Zen Browser is (yet another) Firefox fork. Might as well just use Firefox, with better settings (like Arkenfox user.js, customized how you like it). Would be better security & privacy wise.
Might’ve worth giving it another shot. It’s still somewhat buggy but usually just with UI things. I haven’t had a lot of actual functionality issues in the last couple months of use on iOS or macOS.
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
it's a few hundred lines worth of scripts to produce an ungoogled chromium with some nicer defaults, why wouldn't it, in case pointing that out is meant to be a criticism.
Kagi uses Yandex to improve search results for relevant queries. That's all they do.
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.
Yeesh, tough crowd in these comments. And yet everyone's excited for new Gmail skins. Anyway.
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.
I tried Opera a few months ago and could not stick to it. All the features they were pitching at me felt a little off. The various panel integrations were clunky and didn't seem to offer anything over just... tabs.
Maybe not surprisingly, I'm currently on Vivaldi (although it has its own issues of not infrequent slowness or hangs).
Vivaldi doesn't intend to maintain MV2, from their website:
> 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.
Readit News
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.
This seems like something pretty easy to mess up. Maybe it is good now, but it sure is going to be a cat and mouse game.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
[1] https://github.com/mullvad/mullvad-browser
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)
https://geminiprotocol.net
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.
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
Seriously, are we all that greedy and myopic? They're a non-profit. You know tons of companies, such as Google and every other big tech company, have some donation matching system. Google pays the Mozilla Foundation about half a billion a year to make Google the default search engine. How is the fact that they are throwing such massive amounts of money not a concerning thing? Yet FF has enough users that we could give them an extra 40% revenue if we tossed them $5 PER YEAR. That's it.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...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45369141
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.
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(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...
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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.
Dead Comment
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/wukkohttps://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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
https://github.com/imputnet/helium
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
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> 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.
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.
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Dead Comment
should be changed to
> Openly and proudly collaborates with russian government
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...