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Helium Browser (helium.computer)

Does anyone know anything about it? Any thoughts worth sharing? Is it trustworthy?

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[-] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago

I have concerns.

Best privacy

What does "best" mean here? Privacy is binary: either something is private, and only you decide who has access to it, or it isn't.

and unbiased ad-blocking

Uh-oh. That's a red flag. When a company makes a big deal out of being unbiased about something that isn't inherently biased to begin with, I just automatically assume right-wing.

by default.

And how easy is it to change that default if you don't like it? Or if YouTube kills ad blocking in it? No thanks, I'd prefer it be an extension, thanks.

Handy features like native !bangs

Custom search with extra characters. Firefox has had it for over a decade, and Chrome has had it for a while too.

and split view.

Pretty sure this has been in several browsers recently, too.

No adware,

Thanks, that's...kind of the bare minimum in a browser?

no bloat,

Degoogled is already that for Chromium, if that's really what you want. There are several Firefox forks that pull out a bunch of stuff and make it leaner, too.

no noise.

Bold move disabling the sound API. Respect. /s

People-first

Which people? Ok, this is easy to say, but essentially meaningless.

and fully open source.

Isn't BSD a sharealike license? So they can't not. Still, props to them.

At the end of the day, I think I'd still prefer a Gecko browser, or Degoogled if I absolutely had to use Chromium.

[-] sga@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago

unbiased ad-blocking

in this case, this just means they are using ublock origin with default filter lists. my guess for their wording is that they are not doing something like brave (you partially see ads) or like edge and other chromes which use some very light form of adblocking, which ofcourse does not work on their websites.

I’d prefer it be an extension

it is. they are shipping the manifest v2 (the full version) of ublock oob.

Isn’t BSD a sharealike license? So they can’t not

no. bsd (i think chrome is 3 clause, but not sure) is a just as open license like mit or gpl (minus the copyleft in gpl). and the core(ish) bits of chrome are lgpl (not sure. i am taliking about blink).

this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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