Tell HN: Helium is the best browser I ever used

Posted by prmph 2 days ago

Helium (https://helium.computer/) is Chromium-based, with all the Google odiousness removed, emphasizing minimalism, privacy, zero telemetry, built-in uBlock Origin, and no sync or AI features.

I am just a regular user that was looking for a Firefox alternative for a long time. I do not know why Helium does not get more attention. It's so fast all the time even with several hundred tabs, it never crashed, it is strongly privacy and safety protecting, I do not have one complaint about it.

Here are some ways the others fall short:

- Firefox and all its derivatives are frequently incredibly sluggish, even on the same machine at the same time other browsers based on Chromium and Webkit are fast. I really wanted to like them, but I just gave up finally. I can't even use Mullvad browser now.

- Safari's interface and UX seems somewhat clunky to me. I tried Orion; it shows a lot of promise as my secondary browser, but, even after updating it today, it has significant UI regressions. And this is for software that's past version 1.0.0

- Brave browser was pretty good, but I was disillusioned by their not taking user protection as seriously, and some of their "scandals"

- Of course, the least said about IE, Edge, Chrome, etc, the better

And I've tried a large number of browsers over the years: IE, Edge, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, Orion, Zen, Brave, Mullvad, DuckDuckGo, Vivaldi etc, etc.

Comments

Comment by runjake 1 day ago

I tried to daily drive Helium on my Mac but it crashed too much (multiple times a day, as recently as a couple weeks ago). It also scores much lower on EFF's Cover Your Tracks website versus Brave. Looks interesting and I like the relative minimalism, though.

Comment by Bender 2 days ago

Helium is my fallback when a Firefox addon is giving me grief and I don't feel like debugging it/them. Firefox will always be my primary as I find the addon options make the internet functional for me. Canonical, Certage, ClearURLs, CSS Exfil Protection, FoxReplace, NoScript, Tab Reloader, Temorary Containers, uBlock Origin, Zoom Page WE

I use both browsers on Linux.

Comment by Torikul007 1 day ago

Never heard of Helium, but your “hundreds of tabs and never crashed” comment got my attention. My only concern with lesser-known browsers is maintenance/security cadence. How long have you been driving it daily?

Comment by prmph 1 day ago

More than 6 months now

Comment by colesantiago 2 days ago

> And I've tried a large number of browsers over the years: IE, Edge, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, Orion, Zen, Brave, Mullvad, DuckDuckGo, Vivaldi etc, etc.

If you are on any of these browsers, especially Chrome please switch to Helium.

Comment by saicharanjogu 1 day ago

what do you think about arc browser?

Comment by colesantiago 2 hours ago

Arc Browser is trash and not privacy friendly.

Please do not use it.

Comment by satvikpendem 2 days ago

> is Chromium-based

Yeah I'm out, not using any Chromium browsers, especially due to not having full extension and adblocking support.

I'm not sure when you used Firefox but I don't find it slow at all, seems to be on par with Chrome and Safari.

Comment by prmph 2 days ago

It has uBlock Origin built in. No need to even install it.

Comment by tt_dev 2 days ago

Well you put it on my radar