Yeah, everyone is doing their little contribution to help Google take over the Web and turn it into ChromeOS Platform.

Why did we ever bothered with the IE lawsuit, for a newer generation to give the Web on a plate to Google?

> So what, our choices are Firefox (Gecko),

Don't forget Servo. People are actively working on it, and it could use more help.

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)

Security isn't just about your data. It's about the security of an open web. Having one rendering engine that controls everything is not secure.

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

How is firefox legitimate competition when they are basically financed by Google?

Pass, sure, but vs what currently?

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)

Safari should be on Windows. I don't care what CSS standards it has, it needs to give Chrome and Firefox some competition

Epiphany (WebKitGtk) on Linux, native Gtk-UI :)

I'm posting right now with it here.

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.

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.

There's Palemoon's Goanna, also

The answer is to get rid of the web, JS, and HTTP. I’m working on it.

Reminds me of DuckDuckGo's "privacy" browser that is again just a Chrome/WebView wrapper.

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.

> 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.

Zen is quite nice if you like something based on Firefox, but with a stronger UX focus!

> which company/org structure provides best guarantees against gradual, slow, multi-year rot that seems to take over everything?

German e.V. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_(German...

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.

> which company/org structure provides best guarantees against gradual, slow, multi-year rot that seems to take over everything?

I don't think any such guarantees exist, unfortunately.

You can look into Ulaa browser by Zoho. It fits your description.

it’s made by the same person who made cobalt.tools

In my opinion that's Ladybird at the moment.

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.

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?

I switched back to firefox/librawolf for now.

Who is paying for it?

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.

It really isn't hard to find. I went to the browser's github page and then the repo author.

https://github.com/imputnet

I now found who exactly manages this (and it turns out colbalt, too! awesome downloader)

https://github.com/wukko https://github.com/dumbmoron

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 in 2025 you still get the most compatibility with [insert-website-here] with Chromium

Its probably the easiest to build off of.

>Can someone explain to me why most browser forks are based on Chromium?

Because it's very very very good. Google poored billions into it and it shows.

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.

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.

Would use it 100% if it was open source, such a solvable dealbreaker.

Zen browser is eating their lunch at the moment.

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.

I'm guessing it doesn't support certificate revocation very well as ungoogled-chromium has/had some issues with that.

removing every google url in a browser without replacements will have such downsides

And it's written in Python.

I would not feel comfortable with my browsing data being in the hands of 3 random people.

And Vivaldi also supports MV2 extensions - so uBlock origin still works without any issues.

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).

Slightly amusing, perhaps, but accurate and concise? Definitely.

Please review your opinion about Qwant, the overwhelming majority of search results are produced internally and they are very clear about what isn't: https://betterweb.qwant.com/en/2023/09/18/web-indexing-where...

In Europe they are still IMHO the best option for an independent search engine.

The irony is it is a Chromium browser...

I wish we could just add our own default search with a search string template like when the Internet was still alive.

That being said, I like using the slightly more obscure presearch.com and Swisscows.com, for what it’s worth.

Imagine reading that list in 1995. Sigh.

I know this is unfair to firefox, majority of enterprise software now (including and starting with Microsoft teams) outright say do not support firefox or have ‘limited’ support whatever that means.

For anyone working remotely like me, teams is a crucial piece of software (however bad it is). So as much as I like Firefox and legends that started it and religiously developed it over the years, bottom line, I can’t use it now.

Some maybe majority of blame falls on Mozilla, they let it stagnate and focus on cosmetic changes in last few years instead of focusing on improving core technology.

i can't wait for Safari to add proper horizontal tabs. There's a sidebar with tabs but you still have compact tabs taking up precious vertical space

vertical tabs never really worked for me. What would you say are the biggest benefits for you?

What are you using instead?

Why does a browser need to be continually updated?

Is Google/W3C adding more features and busy work to keep browser developers employed?

Wow, that's a real fuckup.

No commits on that project for 5 years, so what are you talking about?

I just wish there were a browser that would use their webview technology with better tabbing, video playback, etc. Apple is often minimal to a fault.

Right now? All major corporations play along with whatever the current political winds are. Your own personal biases don't matter in their decision making.

What makes you think that Apple respects your privacy any more than Google and Microsoft? The marketing brochure?

It's based on ungoogled-chromium which applies https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium/blo... to retain manifest v2 features. They're likely dependent on ungoogled-chromium for maintaining this feature.

They say they'll support MV2 "as long as possible".

It's actually deliberately clever wordplay. Helium is light, chromium is heavy. Their browser is a set of patches to Chromium.

a) He has a “I use the web in a very niche way that nobody cares about an your browser sucks if it doesn’t meet those exact needs” way of thinking

b) He is an investor in helium

I think it's a mixture of dislike for Google/Chrome and the constant Chromium reskins that dominate the browser market + Firefox evangelism.

I'll personally say I don't hate this project as such, I mainly use a Chromium based browser because I build a product that uses the FileSystem API with a directory picker [0] and the FileSystem Observer API [1]. Both of which aren't supported anywhere except Chromium based browsers.

I used to use Thorium, but last build was out in February and I simply can't use that as my main browser, so now I simply use ungoogled-chromium.

I can easily avoid any Google telemetry, use uBlock Origin with MV2, Privacy Badger and the plus point is all sites work. I love Firefox as well, but I feel you can't do much about the fact all "regular" people end up using Chrome or Safari; so while developing on the web you simply can't become a Firefox main and avoid chromium entirely.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/show... [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FileSystemO...

Why are you writing in upper case?

To me, that contributes to the overall uncomfortability

Yes I'd be interested too. I'm still using Kiwi browser but afraid it will stop working anytime soon.

I did recently see this browser is unsafe when trying to open Gmail in it, so any chromium based update to date alternative there would be amazing!

Same. I generally avoid Chrome-based browsers on all devices.

What privacy concerns do you have with Chromium?

The only problem is it disables OOB security updates.

https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/

My biggest gripe with Safari is that it only handles the few blessed search engines Apple has chosen.

On my personal systems I can use the extension to hack Kagi support in there, but it’s a bit of an ugly solution.

On my work laptop, we aren’t allowed to use the App Store, so I can’t get the extension. This means if I want to use Safari and Kagi, I need to go to the actual Kagi homepage, which is a very annoying behavior pattern.

I used Firefox for a while at work because of this, but now that’s been blocked too. I’m trying really hard not to give in and use Chrome, but at this point, it would make my work life easier. It supports adding other search engines natively, which is quite ironic.

I submitted feedback to Apple about this. They have integrated some of my feedback into past releases (silence unknown callers, most notably), but they must have some silly business reason for not allowing this, which is very disappointing.

It would work just fine. People will use search to find products they seek.

Good. "Free" is a lie.

I would hate to have a 40px title bar doing nothing except wasting space on my screen. I've been using this layout for years, and I didn't even consider that anyone could have an issue with this until I read your statement.

I'm not saying that you are wrong to disregard it due to your personal preferences, but please consider that this might not be such a horrible design as you make it out to be. Also, you can be certain that you are not the only sane person left - I think it's just that most of them don't show up on boards and forums.

There is some space you can click on for dragging the window, or on Linux just hold Alt and move the window. I have an application for Windows that allows me to do the same.

Firefox does that too and avoid this issue reserving a small space on right site of title bar. Not the end of the world.

I’d rather ask, why are desktop environments continuing to use the horrible UI convention of stacking window managers? In a tiling window manager, there is no reason to waste space on a draggable window bar.

so you have ptsd from a browser?

It looks like a pretty normal chromium variant to me? It's nice to see the work of ungoogled-chromium given a nicer skin.

It’s playing the Browser Company playbook

From the website

> Install any web apps and use them as standalone desktop apps without duplicating Chromium.

They're 30+ million lines of code to cover the feature set, but monetization is tough and security/feature churn is constant. It's also nearly meaningless to start small - either you build everything or you don't.

This is just Chromium with some patches though, the problem with these kinds of things is it's small groups that tend to lose interest.

It’s the new vscode fork