What's the catch? Looks too good to be true.

Can someone explain to me how this differentiates itself from (ungoogled) Chromium with a few tweaks?

How does it compare to Firefox privacy wise being based on chromium?

Does it have manifest V2 like CNAM filtering? And if it's chromium based how is it going to support back port of features that are making it to chromium without investment in a robust dev team?

It's based on ungoogled-chromium and about 3 people are working on it.

https://github.com/imputnet/helium

And the biggest problem with extensions is their security model of permissions. How is this solving for that?

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 they’ll stay afloat.

My biggest problem with Thorium was lack of updates, so I hope Helium is able to remain consistent with updates. Congrats on the launch, cobalt crew!

What makes me a bit uneasy about the project is that the website doesn't explain who is building it. For most open-source, I think that would be fine. But browsers auto-update, so their vendors essentially have the continued ability to run code on your machine. You want some confidence that they won't get owned and won't sell the access to bad actors down the line, so there is an element of personal trust.

All the website gives me is the name of a Wyoming LLC, Wyoming being one of the states you incorporate in if you don't want others to be able to find out who runs the company.

Granted, you can find out a bit more on Github, but in general, if you're building privacy- and security-critical tech... I think you ought to own it.

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 dollar corporation who will sell my data off to god knows who?

</rant> :/ ...the site design is nice at least.

I just can't go back to horizontal tabs anymore.

Having the option to set Kagi as my search engine right away is nice. I wish more browsers included Kagi as an option.

>We'll keep support for MV2 extensions for as long as possible.

This doesn't particularly give people any confidence in your product if even the devs don't know how long they can hold the line. Why not fork Firefox like Zen?

Does it support PWAs?

> There are currently 2 of us

Nope. No. Thank you.

Props for featuring Kagi though.

Wow another chromium skin, how exciting.

In the "choose a default search engine" page, it has a slightly amusing summary for each.

> Google

> Your personal data fuels its monopoly. Market-dominant due to anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices.

> Qwant

> Based in Europe. Uses Bing results. Sends tracking data to Microsoft.

> DuckDuckGo

> Privacy-focused. Relies on Bing results but never tracks or profiles you.

> Ecosia

> May plant trees for clicking ads. Relies on Bing and Google. Sends tracking data to Microsoft and Google.

> Microsoft Bing

> Collects extensive personal data. Privacy controls are buried and limited. Subjectively overwhelming UI.

> Kagi

> Privacy-focused. Customizable results without ads or tracking. Requires a paid account.

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

What is the primary difficulty in developing a web browser?

- breadth of the http/css/js standard? - inefficient implementations - requires too many resources?

Why has the market converged on two major players and most independent attempts fall short?

This is neat, and reminds me of Kagi's browser Orion, since their hero image features Kagi search.

Orion is WebKit based, so it uses less battery and feels faster to me compared to Chromium browsers, yet it largely supports Chrome extensions via a compatibility layer; like Helium uBlock Origin is included by default. It also has vertical tabs which is essential for me, and open-url routing between profiles.

However, I tried it in January 2025 and gave up on using it after a few weeks of sporadic bugs. I didn't lose data or anything but some actions in the UI didn't produce any result, or they produced a confusing unintended result. I hope they get better - I will probably give it another go in a few months, especially since Arc (my current browser) is now owned by Atlassian.

https://kagi.com/orion/

Anyways, great to see a Chromium browser improving on the privacy of ungoogled-chromium.