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Hacker News

Transparency efforts behind the Helium Browser

25 points by twapi 5 hours ago | 16 comments

feverzsj 3 hours ago

They messed up basic color scheme, making it almost unusable.

[0]: https://github.com/imputnet/helium/issues/1532

[1]: https://github.com/imputnet/helium/issues/1850

duskdozer 3 hours ago

This is mostly an argument for full user customization. I'm willing to bet some people prefer the current scheme. Presumably the developer(s).

willtemperley 3 hours ago

In the same sense that a blockchain can be forked by using software that only accepts certain types of block, is it possible to fork the WWW in a similar manner? e.g. with changes that neuter the ad-mongers.

For example coming up with a way to get rid of these god awful cookies. Maybe ad-monger sites could be allowed in the same way an insecure connection is allowed behind a series of warnings?

vitally3643 3 hours ago

The internet is literally just a pipe. There's no limitation binding us to HTTP. You can use any protocol you want over the internet, anything at all.

bastawhiz 2 hours ago

Not sure I'd call it just a pipe, but maybe a series of tubes.

willtemperley 3 hours ago

Well quite. So why are we living in this surveillance hellscape?

NetOpWibby 2 hours ago

I just set Helium as my default browser yesterday after dual-wielding it with Arc. Never thought I'd move on from Arc but here we are.

pogue 4 hours ago

How are they going to be adding uBlock Origin to Chromium going forward if manifest v2 gets completely deprecated/removed entirely?

gruez 3 hours ago

AFAIK some of the other chromium forks (brave and/or edge?) were committed to backporting manifest v2 (or more specifically the webRequestBlocking API) for future chromium versions.

bjord 3 hours ago

this is not correct. neither brave nor edge has committed to that.

as of yet, there's no (publicly stated) contingency plan if the upstream mv2 code is excised, but I could be mistaken.

rpdillon 10 minutes ago

Brave has integrated uBO directly into their core logic. Visit brave://settings/extensions/v2 and you can download it, even with no MV2 support. I'm not aware of any other browser adopting this approach.

feverzsj 3 hours ago

Nothing. It will be a huge burden for them to maintain all the removed code. Their only choice is to integrate brave's adblocker.

pogue 3 hours ago

This seems to be the only way forward from what I can figure. Helium's main selling point is that it's essentially degoogled chromium + a few miscellaneous patches & full uBlock. But once Google completely strips all that out of Chromium project, that won't be a tenable option.

I'm not sure what Opera/Vivaldi/et al. use for their native adblocking, but Brave's rust adblocker makes the most sense to me. Really it's uBlock's filtering lists that keep the whole thing working anyway.

mrbluecoat 4 hours ago

> cause havoc, and put people first

An odd pairing

tancop 2 hours ago

if you follow wukko on twitter you know it makes sense. its the same guy who made cobalt the video downloader.

willtemperley 3 hours ago

Not really. Every activist that made a real difference for the good caused some kind of havoc.