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Helium Browser

helium.computer

371–380 of 561 posts

Re: Helium Browser

#371
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Feels like we need something like early versions of Edge, where it was using Chromium but could be told to open individual tabs (or configured to always open links to certain origins) in an IE webview. Except, instead of Chromium, Firefox, and instead of IE, Chromium.

I assume you mean early edge2. The first release of edge (project spartan) used a custom rendering engine and javascript runtime. The chrome-based version released five years later.

It might have died with e10s but there was a firefox extension that let you embed IE in a tab on demand or for certain sites.

Re: Helium Browser

#372
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

This is perfectly safe behavior, would you prefer it slightly corrupting the destination address when transferring money through online banking?

Yes it's safe but undesirable, like Java's NullPointerException.

A more interesting question is why it was not possible to use compile time borrow checking in this particular case. It shows how valuable the borrow checker is when you can use it.

Re: Helium Browser

#373
post #184

I was excited for a new Helium browser release and it just turns out that people these days don’t even do a single google search before using a name that is already taken. https://slashlos.github.io/Helium/

There are, unfortunately, only 118 different element names to choose from. Few of which end with -ium.

Re: Helium Browser

#374
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the context? Is there a proof of sorts?

https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

There is nothing about collaborating with Russian government in the post. They merely make use of a Russian-based search engine to provide better search results. I won't argue if this is good or bad, but from your statement it sounds like they collect all the users' data and sell it directly to Federal Security Service.

Re: Helium Browser

#375
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

> For which country?

At least one of the authors is Russian. They were giving away Helium stickers to “anyone who is in Moscow”, and not many non-Russians are traveling there nowadays.

Re: Helium Browser

#376
post #369

> 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. > Heli…

Naive question — why is everyone building chromium-based browsers as opposed to using Gecko? Is it difficult to integrate?

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.

Re: Helium Browser

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> The real problems with Gecko is just that it’s harder to fork That goes contrary to my experience. I'm a maintainer of a Firefox fork (with rather extensive changes to a lot of the internals), and it is pretty manageable to maintain. We manage to keep it roughly up to date and add new features without financial backing or folks working full-time on it. If all you do is change the branding and apply some superficial…

I think you're conflating the Engine, Gecko, with the browser, Firefox. The Browser, Firefox, is easy to fork, judging by the multitudes of soft forks a la Libre Wolf, Zen, etc...

The Engine, Gecko, however, is hard to fork since it's tightly coupled to the browser itself.

I also think that when the parent mentioned "forking Gecko", it might be in the sense of extracting the engine and putting a new browser on top of it, just like other Webkit based browsers e.g. Orion and Gnome Web.

Re: Helium Browser

#378
post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

There is nothing about collaborating with Russian government in the post. They merely make use of a Russian-based search engine to provide better search results. I won't argue if this is good or bad, but from your statement it sounds like they collect all the users' data and sell it directly to Federal Security Service.

Yandex is russian government

Re: Helium Browser

#380

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…

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.
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