Alternatives to Chrome on the Mac

Chrome is a decent enough web browser; but it’s Google’s, and seems to send an alarmingly large amount of data back to Google which could be enough to monitor your web usage. So, what alternatives are there? I enjoy trying out new browsers just to see if they’re decent, and here’s where I’m currently at…

Firefox - In 2004, I bought the t-shirt to help fund it to get v1 out. It was a significant step forward from the Internet Explorer that I was using. Sadly, Mozilla has lost its way recently; embedding AI into the browser was just one questionable management decision. But, more to the point, because I maintain a website for a living, I can’t really use a browser with just 2.5% market share, because I’ll not see my website like everyone else does. So, Firefox is out, sadly.

Zen browser - Zen looks nice, and similar in many ways to the ARC browser which I spent six months using. However, it uses the Firefox rendering engine, and so, suffers from the same 2.5% issue above. I appreciate that means I’m part of the problem, not part of the solution; but it’s out.

Safari - I mean, Safari’s an obvious choice for someone who uses a Mac. And it’s a decent web browser with a market share of around 16%. There are a few little things that put me off Safari: three that are show-stoppers:

• an inability to view the source of an RSS feed
• I can’t select Kagi as my default search engine, having to rely on an extension for that
• I use an extension that injects an HTTP header for security on a few of my personal websites (so I can see the origin server rather than the cached, CDN version everyone else gets). I’ve written that extension for Chrome and Firefox, but I don’t appear to be able to write it for Safari: it’s much more complicated.
  So, sadly, Safari is out.

Orion - Since I use the Kagi search engine on a daily basis, Kagi’s browser might be for me. It uses the same rendering engine as Safari, says it has good privacy, and says it supports Chrome, Firefox and Safari extensions. If that was true, I’d probably use it - but my simple security extension doesn’t work on it, so it’s out for now. It’s also not entirely open source, so you’re never sure what’s in it. I did use this as my daily driver earlier this year, but my life was a little full of skipping between Chrome and Orion for things I wanted to do, because of this extension issue.

Vivaldi - this is a decent browser, based on Chrome but with lots of additional things, including (if you want it) a mail reader, calendar, RSS reader, etc; a built-in VPN client; and it’s very configurable. I used this for a while. It’s fine; but there are a few things I’m not much of a fan of - first, it’s not open-source, and second, it’s got too much stuff in it. I don’t want a mediocre mail client in my browser, or an even more mediocre RSS reader. I don’t want to learn how to use a command centre, or any of those types of things. I don’t want widgets and side-panels and stuff. And yes, I can turn most of those off, but all that stuff is an attack vector that I don’t really want in my browser.

So I’m running…

Helium. It’s based on Chromium - the Chrome rendering engine. Everything is open-source. It supports “bangs” so I can search all kinds of places direct from the browser. It supports “split view”, which was the only Vivaldi feature I regularly used. It’s entirely open-source, and it’s been stripped of a lot of features that I don’t want. “There’s no built-in password manager. Passwords should be separate from a web browser,” it says. Yes, this. And there’s no cloud-based history sync, which, again, is just a privacy issue waiting to happen.

Things that give me pause about Helium is the small size of the team - just two people; and where that team is - they’re quite coy about that, which makes me think they’re in Russia. (Their Twitter account agrees - and says they’re using the Russian app store, but VPN’ing out of the Netherlands). However, the Github is busy, and it appears to have a number of other contributors.

Helium itself is very good. Quick, bloat-free and decent. I’m cautiously recommending it.