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.
You found the authors' screen names and some other things they've made.
That's not finding who they are. No one has signed their names, like their real names, to this. Who are they? Intelligence agents? For which country? There's no way to know.
At least one of the authors is Russian. They were giving away Helium stickers to “anyone who is in Moscow”, and not many non-Russians are traveling there nowadays.
Well it is just one those element naming chrome fork. Kinda like:
https://iridiumbrowser.de/ But that one looks have not being updated in a while. But what is the point forking Chrome browser now days since manifest 3?
I tried using Zen as I moved away from Arc, it really tries to be Arc but had a ton of issues at the time(6 months ago). Ranging from performance, different parts of UI crashing or behaving weirdly, to typos in English translations all over Settings. I settled on Brave for now because I won't give up uBlock Origin but I also didn't enjoy using Firefox long term for some reason. I honestly loved Arc, but I won't use product they won't work on anymore.
Brave is a good option too. I use brave for websites that are too junk to work in firefox. I have never used arc. I was coming from librewolf/floorp with sidebery. I really like the layout in zen, it hasnt shown the performance issues i sometimes saw in stock firefox and the vertical tab bar is good enough yo replace sidebery for me. Tge only annoyance ia how it sometomes weirdly display extensions in the truncated interface. Otger than that i am pretty happy.
For what it's worth: “All Chromium extensions are supported and work right away, by default, including all MV2 extensions. We'll keep support for MV2 extensions for as long as possible.”
Whether that's worth much is of course another matter.
Do Helium, or any other browsers with intent to keep supporting MV2 extensions say what they intend to use as a repository to acquire them?
I don't think the chrome or microsoft extension websites even let you upload a MV2 extension anymore, and most chromium forks I've used rely entirely on the chrome web store.
FWIW, I think ublock is probably the most important mv2 and they've got a GitHub repo here that builds it automatically (not sure if the browser uses this, I just saw it and remembered this comment)
My thoughts exactly. I read on their website that they're a two person team who care about privacy. But how do they finance their work on these tools? Are they still figuring it out? Do they have a sustainable business model?
Agreed, and my concern is not a "NSA is monitoring my activity" but more along the lines of whether they have enough funding to staff security research and response for this browser.
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.