Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Helium Browser

helium.computer

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 561 posts

Re: Helium Browser

#491

Post by ProfessorLayton »

dani_kagi wrote: post #239
setsewerd wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Thanks for the feedback, I definitely see some wonkiness with the bookmarks bar and forwarded them to the team to investigate.

Please add a setting to disable tab hibernation. Opening my laptop on a plane only to discover most of the tabs have been offloaded makes using Orion impossible.

Re: Helium Browser

#492

Post by efreak »

ayaros wrote: post #17

Why did anyone think it was a good idea to put tabs in the title bar. How the hell am I supposed to easily drag a window if I have 100 tabs open? Who the hell thought this was a good idea? Why do I feel like the only sane human being left on Earth? Why is this project continuing to use this horrible UI convention? How are they going to make money or enshittify this in the future or sell it off to an evil billion doll…

> Why did anyone think it was a good idea to put tabs in the title bar.

Because we decided it was a good idea to keep making monitors wider and wider and wider without making them any taller, and not everyone wants vertical tabs.

You can pry my 16:10 monitor from my cold dead fingers. Give me a 3:2 and you'll never get it back.

Why do you have 100 tabs open in the same window, anyways? Use tab groups and profiles, with a secondary window for session-tabs that'll get closed soon. Having too many tabs is like having too many desktop icons, but worse.

Re: Helium Browser

#493

Post by EasyMark »

GodelNumbering wrote: post #91

I have felt like a perennial browser refugee for a while. For about 20 years now (since OG Firefox was at peak and Chrome was not yet launched), every new browser promises the same things, gets popular enough, then does a full or partial 180. While I like the pitch of this browser, I find it a little difficult to take it at the face value, especially given there is no info on the founders, or whether it is run as a c…

Browsers are always going to be "as-is, best effort" . No one, not even google is going to stick out their neck and protect your privacy, that's up to you, and especially not "legally" as that has aspects of easily being sued when privacy/money is involved. Certainly not for a "small monthly fee". Best you're going to get is open source and security community scrutiny of said open source code

Re: Helium Browser

#494

Post by godelski »

bonoboTP wrote: post #335
godelski wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have a lot of weird excuses for disliking Mozilla. There are definitely legitimate ones, but the point really is "what's the alternative"? Are the faults of Mozilla really so much worse that we'll turn to Google instead? Honestly, that seems silly to me. Can we just for once not blindly hate something for not being perfect and consequently strengthening an even worse option?

> so much worse that we'll turn to Google instead Did you know that ~85% of Mozilla Corp's revenue comes from Google?

  > Did you know that ~85% of Mozilla Corp's revenue comes from Google?
Actually, yes, I did[0] ;)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45369826

Re: Helium Browser

#495

Post by sunaookami »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #75
tyre wrote: post #9

How will they make money? Or is this always meant to be OSS community supported? The challenge is that people have to get paid and infrastructure to build things costs money. Looks like there are only two people full-time at the company right now, though even then eventually they’ll need some revenue stream. I love this project, but to have confidence that it stays that way it would be nice to see how they’ll replace…

Why does a browser need to be continually updated? Is Google/W3C adding more features and busy work to keep browser developers employed?

Security updates to fix zero-days? Google releases those very often and such forks take a long time to integrate them (even big forks) so I would not trust such a small team.

Re: Helium Browser

#496

Post by efreak »

superasn wrote: post #78
xnx wrote: post #41

Make an Android version that supports extensions (preferably MV2) like the now abandoned Kiwi Browser did and I'll be very interested.

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!

I still (unfortunately) am stuck with kiwi as well. I use it almost exclusively for a few webapps that use large amounts of indexeddb storage (>10gb) without a working export method[1]. With Firefox, I was able to export this data with devtools over ADB[2] to another Firefox install.

I really wish someone would create an indexeddb shim that interfaces with another system and only uses indexeddb for (very large) cache. Something I could drop in with a userscript would be lovely, even if it required running a local server with something like rsync or rclone responsible for the actual transfers.

[1]: dexie import export used to work, now it never returns. I have no way of verifying that it's doing nothing without putting it in background (thus suspending it...), but I've let it run 3 hours with no results. [2]: Firefox doesn't allow backing up app data for some reason but devtools functions allow reading and writing the profile directory through the use of terminal commands (zip profile directory, unzip and restart browser).

Re: Helium Browser

#497

Post by efreak »

rpdillon wrote: post #404
uyzstvqs wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extensions in Firefox are required to be signed by Mozilla. If you make your own build of an open-source extension, it will not load. The setting to disable this check only works in Developer Edition, ESR and Nightly builds. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-signing-in-firef...

Installing the developer edition seems like the move.

Firefox nightly is pretty darn stable, though I'm not sure if there's any security issues with it. I use it for both mobile and desktop, and have for the past 5~10 years and haven't had any issues that weren't fixed by immediately downloading a fresh build (this happened twice) or were caused by me performing unsupported/insane actions (transferring browser profiles (indexeddb) on mobile via CLI commands using remote devtools).

I've got one buggy device, but I suspect corruption due to the error message and I'm more interested in saving the unsyncable data I've got on that profile than I am in trying to fix it by clearing data.

Re: Helium Browser

#498

Post by efreak »

vogu66 wrote: post #257
godelski wrote: post #124

> 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…

There's Palemoon's Goanna, also

Isn't Goanna unmaintainable and full of potential vulnerabilities?

Re: Helium Browser

#499

Post by input_sh »

pjmlp wrote: post #352
input_sh wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason Safari has any market share is because it's the default on every iPhone. 4/5 top browsers by market share are there because they are preinstalled on millions of devices and none of them are terrible enough for an average person to look for an alternative.

Indeed, otherwise the only thing left would be ChromeOS Platform and its forks.

I disagree wholeheartedly, the current state of browser market share has nothing to do with how good any of the browsers are, it's just monopolistic behavior. Device manufacturers should force you to pick one during setup, which is absolutely a reasonable policy decision away.

In fact, as of this year, Apple devices in the EU already have to ask you which browser you want to use during the setup process, while Android devices don't have to ask you which browser you want to use, but do have to ask you which search engine you want to use. It is a bit inconsistent and arbitrary, but it's a step in the right direction.

Re: Helium Browser

#500

Post by [deleted] »

godelski wrote: post #151
vasco wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Allow me to rephrase my earlier choice Chromium: Entirely dependent on Google, a $3T company who's entire business model relies upon invading your privacy and currently has a >70% global share of browsers WebKit: A closed source browser with ~18% of browser share and run by a nearly $4T company who forces all browsers on their mobile devices to be reskinned versions of their browser and probably wants to do the same…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN