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Finally Moved to the Helium Browser

I was using the Brave browser for a few years now, but was also trying different browsers like Ungoogled Chromium and LibreWolf in the search of something better. Honestly, I didn't know what I was looking for in my web browser, but I just kept trying them.

However, I kept coming back to the Brave browser as it has everything that others lack.

But this time, I have completely migrated to the Helium browser, and for the good only. The browser was recommended to me by Fardeen on X, and I installed it the next day after I saw multiple people mentioning online.

It's been over a week since I'm using the open-source Helium as my default browser now, and I've never been happier using a web browser. In this post, I will be sharing my experience – the good, bad, and everything.

1. Clean and quick

When I first installed, I didn't see any annoying bloatware at all. It looked very clean and minimal on the very first install, and it didn't even have the background image set on new tabs. Unlike the Brave browser, it doesn't have:

Below, take a look at how clean it looks.

Clean look of the Helium browser

And the migration process was quicker than I thought, as I was able to import my Brave browser profiles within seconds – from history to bookmarks and even the extensions I could import everything.

2. Based on Chromium

To be honest, I've always liked Chromium engine more than that of any other browser, and the Helium browser is based on Chromium project itself. It's fast and supports all Chrome browser extensions as well.

In fact, it also supports the Manifest v2 extensions and comes with uBlock Origin preinstalled. And manifest v2 is a big deal for me because I want extensions like uBlock Origin, Scraper, and more correctly working for me.

3. Safe and secure

The Helium browser comes with all the good features of the Brave browser in terms of security and also without the tracking capabilities of the Google Chrome browser.

I also noticed that it doesn't save your addresses, card details, passwords, etc. as these features are completely removed from the browser. And I like this a lot because on Brave or Chrome, I always first turned off these features when getting started.

But it still does have the "Use secure DNS" feature which I absolutely need, as I use the Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver.

4. Cool features

While I don't use extra features a lot, but they're good to have, and I like them so far. For example:

I also like that it lets me completely customize the top toolbar. By the way, this option appears when you right-click anywhere on the toolbar.

There's one minor inconvenience of using the browser is that it can't play DRM protected content in the browser, means, you won't be able to watch Netflix or Amazon Prime in the browser. And it makes sense because Helium doesn't have Widevine DRM, as it costs tens of thousands of dollars to get. But it's not a deal-breaker for me, as I rarely watch DRM content on my computer and even if I sometimes do, I still have Brave installed that I can use.

Apart from this, I'm absolutely loving the browser and sticking with it.

Also, it'd be great if the browser was available for mobile devices as well, but I don't think that's possible as of now.

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