You Should Give Helium A Try

Browsers have become enshittified like everything else. Even Mozilla’s Firefox is not immune to it with their existence being propped up by Google money, and their CEO glazing AI. Ugh.

There’s not that many other options, as most browsers have abandoned their in-house browser engines for Chromium and its manifest V3 designed to kill off ad blockers. Maybe you’ll be happy with one of the several Firefox forks, but given Firefox’s second-class status, you’re bound to find compatability issues when web developers pretend Chrome is the only browser to exist.

What about the Ladybird Browser, a “truly independent web browser” using “a new browser engine built from scratch”? This sounds promising, but you can automatically write this one off for being vibe-coded and the creator supporting white replacement theory.

Now, Servo is a pretty cool project, but they’ve got a long way to go thanks to how complicated browser engines have become. Their focus is specifically on embedded web rendering engines, rather than making a browser, but making a browser using it shouldn’t be too hard. Keep an eye out for this one.

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With all that required reading out of the way, I want to share with you the browser I’ve switched to and love, Helium! It’s a Chromium fork from the creators of cobalt.tools, and it does a lot to protect your privacy. It gets rid of Manifest V3, installs uBlock Origin by default, has anti-fingerprinting, makes zero web requests without your consent, and even anonymizes all internal requests to the Chrome Web Store.

But more than just having excellent privacy by default, it includes handy features like vertical tabs, side-by-side pages with split view, and !bangs * Lifted straight from DuckDuckGo :P to skip the search engine and go directly to the website you want. For example, type !minecraft axolotl into the search bar and you’ll be taken directly to the Minecraft wiki page for axolotls!

And just as important as having features is, so is excluding anti-features like built-in password managers or cloud-based history/data sync. The former is dangerously insecure, and the latter is freely giving your browsing data to data harvesting companies. I did come up with an interesting solution to sync my bookmarks another way, so I might write a blog post about that.

Anyhoo, it’s genuinely refreshing to use such a deshittified and lightweight browser, so I want to let others know about it too! I hope it brings you just as much joy as it did to me to finally find a browser I can happily stick with :3