Helium May Just Be the Browser You’ve Been Looking For

There’s a new browser in town, and it combines something familiar with something new. It’s called Helium, and you’re going to want to check it out.

The familiar bit is its Chromium base and all the performance and compatibility that comes with that. But what sets Helium apart from the crowd, including known-good alternatives like Brave, is that it’s completely open source: Its entire source code base is available on GitHub, and you could contribute to the project or even build your own versions of the browser if you wanted to.

Like most, I’m not interested in Helium’s source code. But a truly open alternative to Chrome and Microsoft Edge is obviously interesting. As is Helium’s focus on privacy and security: A quick visit to Cover Your Tracks right after installing this browser showed me the best results I’ve even from a stock browser. It blocks tracking ads and invisible trackers, of course, but it also has a randomized fingerprint to evade the most insidious form of tracking.

“Helium blocks ads, trackers, phishing websites, and other nonsense by default, thanks to community filters and uBlock Origin,” the Helium website notes. “Helium blocks all third-party cookies and does its best to prevent fingerprinting. No extra steps are needed, and there are no biased exceptions — unlike other browsers.”

So, yes, the uBlock Origin extension is preinstalled, or integrated, into Helium, explaining those results. You could even take the nuclear option and enable ungoogled-chromium flags and/or additional uBlock Origin filters. But the stock Helium has a nice lightweight feel to it and its doing all the right things out of the box. This one might have some staying power.

Key features include:

No annoyances. Helium is specifically designed to be annoyance-free, with “no unprovoked tabs about updates or sponsors, no persistent popups telling you about features you don’t care about, no weird restarts.”

Performance. Helium is fast, efficient, and light, and its makers claim it will not slow down over time. “All bloat is removed: Helium is one of the lightest modern browsers available.”

Chromium compatibility. Helium supports all Chromium extensions, including all MV2 extensions, which will be supported for as long as possible. All requests to the Chrome Web Store are anonymized, so Google can’t track you as you browse extensions.

Security. Helium forces HTTPS on all websites and warns you when a site doesn’t support it. There’s no built-in password manager, with Helium’s makers correctly noting that “passwords should be separate from a web browser to be truly secure and immutable.” Passkeys just work. There’s no cloud-based history or data sync. “You should be the only one with access to your browsing data, not some conglomerate.”

Bangs. This Helium feature lets you navigate quickly to over 10,000 sites using shortcuts, like !w for Wikipedia and !gh for GitHub.

Helium is available for macOS, Windows 11, Windows 11 on Arm, and Linux. It’s free, of course, and is currently in beta. It’s worth taking a look at.