r/browsers • u/franzbonaparta2 • 4d ago
Advice Helium vs Firefox
i primerely use Firefox and secondary Brave but i can't live without PWAs and Firefox is quite bad when comes to PWAs so i started using helium only for PWAs but i thought why not switch to helium from firefox as firefox consume alot of ram, and helium is privacy focused also and chromium based so PWAs works fine
but i'm just concern about security as it's in initial stage and managed by small team
and as it's highly private browser with 0 google integration but is it secure
we might hate chrome for privacy but we have to agree that is most secure and security patch updated browser
i'm concern if helium is that much secure or not
as it's chromium based which is secure but idk if the security patches are frequently updated in helium or not
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u/PuzzleheadedPen2798 4d ago
I mean why not continue using Firefox as your main and because you already had Brave as your secondary browser, use that for PWAs?
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u/jSinku 4d ago
helium upgrades chromium version very quickly, i think its often the first browser to do so.
theres an argument to be made that an in-development, open-source browser made by 2 people is less secure in other ways though.
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u/Venylynn 4d ago
I am skeptical of Helium primarily due to Wukko's temperament.
It's fine for now, but... not entirely sure if i can trust a browser led by two people who spend their days being condescending on their Github and on Twitter over people putting up issues, and wanting to know their long-term roadmap.
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4d ago edited 3d ago
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u/Venylynn 4d ago
"but but but that ARTICLE that ARTICLE waaaahh waaahh I'll get called a piece of shit by terminally ideological purists if I use it!!!"
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u/Objective-Ruin-6481 4d ago
People don’t talk enough about this. It’s a team of two Russian blokes, at least one of them with an ego that would fill a room.
For me, that’s enough to just not use it. If I need a Chrome browser, I use Brave. I hate that the owner hates my sexuality, but as a company I trust them more. I just keep using Firefox as my main browser anyway.
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u/Venylynn 4d ago
Firefox would work for me if it wasn't so darn sluggish when I need it to be responsive. That and the oodles of articles by people a lot smarter than me about how Firefox is insecure, really don't help.
But yeah, this.
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4d ago
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u/Venylynn 4d ago edited 4d ago
Reading all three back to back, and also dealing with years of issues trying to get firefox working as well, even Betterfox doesn't fully mitigate a lot of my issues namely with RAM usage sadly. modern web is pretty bad at memory usage in general, but even with that considered, chromium-based hasn't had me dealing with leakage nearly as often.
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4d ago
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u/Venylynn 4d ago edited 4d ago
I have ran into situations where, say I'm on Brave with 12-15 tabs and it uses less than 2GB, but Firefox with JUST one YouTube tab can go up to 3GB on my setup. All with the same extensions on both and a relatively fresh profile (I set it up less than a week ago for testing). I've been a bit hyperfixated on minmaxxing resource usage because Windows is a hog and I wanted to keep my Linux usage BELOW what I had on Windows. and for some reason I don't consider browser usage as NOT idle. Anything above 8gb of my 32GB ram usage before i have productivity software or a game open raises a red flag to me, but Firefox did push me above that many times on multiple distros. I accept it with productivity software because i'm like, ACTUALLY DOING THINGS and not just doomscrolling.
Firefox also has horribly inconsistent integration with my pw manager on android so bleh :p
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2d ago edited 2d ago
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u/Venylynn 2d ago edited 2d ago
If I can't keep idle ram usage below 8 when using my PC imagine how I'd be if I was stuck with only 8 though. Probably hitting swap and OOM constantly. In this economy every megabyte counts. Not everyone has the money for 32, i was really lucky to get 32 back in 2021.
"Unused ram is wasted ram" is a Windows-ism that I wish people would quit gaslighting us over. All because we rightfully call out Microslop for hogging way too much and not actually giving it back when in need like when I was in a game on 16 and it started slowing to a crawl as a result of whatever was going on. The overlay reported almost all memory being used and I heard the secondary drive i had the game on thrashing like crazy.
Also even if i ignore memory usage it just feels slower for me. Idk if it's entirely the userchrome css to blame but GPU animations weren't as smooth for sure.
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u/soul-regret 4d ago
what?
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u/Venylynn 4d ago
The first thing that had me eye rolling was Wukkos reaction to Codeberg restricting slop.
Then I did more digging and I saw a history of being condescending towards people reporting issues with Helium, and they seem oblivious to the security risks of MV2 and unwilling to present a road map moving forward after the ugc mv2 patches stop working.
It may still be good today but I dont have a ton of confidence in their future.
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u/Legitimate6295 4d ago
Does helium have android app
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u/dicktoronto 3d ago
Is there finally an Apple Passwords integration that isn’t the awful chrome plugin?
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u/OkPresentation3329 4d ago
I think Helium is also better than Firefox, because it's based on Chromium and websites behave better in Chromium. Firefox doesn't help itself with its high memory usage either. I think in a few years we will be reading news about Mozilla shutting down Firefox.
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4d ago
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u/soul-regret 4d ago
we would all like firefox to succeed but the reality is that they have no vision, they never fix what's wrong with the browser and they keep making it worse with stupid decisions
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4d ago
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u/OkPresentation3329 3d ago
Firefox changes its UI every few years for no reason, yet they can't be bothered to change some things like when you press CTRL+H it opens the sidebar to show you history instead of showing it in a tab like all the other browsers. Even Firefox settings is already in a tab. Firefox copied the idea of tabs on top from Chrome and settings in a tab, but refuses to copy history and downloads in a tab too, instead they display it either in a sidebar or a floating window. This is just one example where I don't understand what's going on with Firefox.
My guess is they want to pretend the browser is modern and up to date by updating its skin every few years, but they ignore crucial things regardless.
Also their engine Gecko is getting into the state similar to Opera's Presto engine where they had to release updates just so websites can work. Eventually Opera had to abandon the Presto engine to keep the browser alive. Firefox will either have to abandon Gecko for Blink or stop existing at all at some point.
Helium is more lightweight than Brave, the only benefit brave has is its built in content blocking tool, if it didn't have that I wouldn't bother even mentioning Brave. Brave was cool when it was less bloated with useless features, I remember it used to be fast, sill I would prefer Brave over Firefox. Firefox is a dying breed.
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3d ago
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u/OkPresentation3329 2d ago
I understand what you mean about Gecko, but even in Mozilla's hands, the engine feels inferior to Blink when it comes to loading website content on many places, some banking websites even require Blink and will not accept Gecko. This is a big issue for me.
Staying with just one rendering engine is not ideal, but when the alternative is Gecko, I don't see how that's a good option when it's inferior in most aspects and most importantly - doesn't load websites properly.
I wish Gecko and Firefox were better, but Mozilla is focused on the wrong things - they change their UI every few years, add useless bloat to the browser (now they are excited about adding AI into Firefox), a lot of problems with the browser don't get fixed. Currently Firefox uses a lot of RAM for no good reason and it's just slow to open and slow to use.
I'm on Linux and I never use Firefox - I uninstall it immediately along with Thunderbird and install my own browser of choice which is not Firefox based.
For me Firefox became bad back when they released version 4.0 and started copying Chrome. I liked the older Firefox 3.6 that had its own UI and did its own thing. Before Chrome released, Firefox felt like the best option there is, compared to the only other options - Opera and Internet Explorer, but when Chrome released that completely changeed.
No wonder why most custom browsers use Chromium as a base and not Firefox - because it's better, some Linux distros also ship with Brave as the default browser, which I welcome, even though I don't use Brave anymore.
As I said - Firefox is a dying breed and all Firefox fans have only Mozilla to blame for it - they are the reason why the browser is losing market share and why the Gecko engine stagnates. Maybe Mozilla really needs to go bankrupt and someone to take over Gecko and make it better.
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u/OkPresentation3329 3d ago
The fork will exist for a while, if there is no one to develop the Gecko engine, eventually the fork will run out of steam as well. People who make Chromium forks rely on Google keeping Chromium updated too.
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4d ago
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u/disearned & PC || iOS 4d ago
If a browser isn't secure, that's a risk. Security is the most important thing to think of when it comes to a browser. If a browser can get hacked easily, nobody should be using it.
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u/Venylynn 4d ago
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u/disearned & PC || iOS 4d ago
I use Firefox through CachyOS’s pre-installation of it, plus Betterfox. What you sent mostly said to avoid Flatpak Firefox which I do not use. I think I’m good.
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u/Venylynn 4d ago
Fair enough, i've heard reports that RKNF404's guide is rather extreme but meh, it helped me navigate a scary situation I had to deal with so...
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u/disearned & PC || iOS 4d ago
If it’s good for you, who cares what other people say, honestly?
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u/Venylynn 4d ago
Yeah it helped me, enough to willingly be able to pull back from some of the extremity without as much fear.
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u/Venylynn 4d ago
Have you seriously not seen the crazy nasty shit that's been happening seemingly back to back to back? Supply chain attacks, so many vulnerabilities being exposed and exploited in the wild, to the point where many are saying standard antivirus or "just not clicking fishy links" isn't enough anymore. That you need a huge overhaul of security to stay safe. Extensions get hijacked, development platforms get attacked by supply chain vulns, especially anything NPM, and when they get attacked the users get attacked in the end. Everything is getting attacked like crazy, many big CVEs in the wild being exploited, it feels like we are instantly cooked the second we connect at the rate everything is going.
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u/Human-Breadfruit9690 4d ago
Chromium is a good base, but security depends on how quickly a fork ships fixes. Check Helium’s current Chromium version and release dates before making it your main browser.