I’m moving away from Chrome for privacy and security reasons. What is the preferred web bowser and search engine that prioritizes privacy that also has good searchability. I was researching Helium with either the DuckDuckGo or Startpage search engine. My use case is academic research, general questions, and typical things that one might "google. " I’m currently on a debloated Windows, but I also want to migrate over to Linux, too, but perhaps that’s a learning curve for a different day and post. Thanks!
99.5% of browsers are based on chrome or chromium (the base for chrome) including Helium.
As far as I know Safari / firefox and it derivatives are the only few browsers that are not based on chromium / chrome. Others here I’m sure will chime in and fill in the gaps I’m glancing over.
As for the search engine I don’t have a suggestion.
if you don’t mind it chromium based there is brave browser and search engine but if want nothing to with chrome and thing based on it there is firefox,waterfox,librewolf all these are good options and all of them are available on Linux but waterfox has some steps to install it on Linux.
Yeah, for me more precisely, it neither about a dislike for chromium based products, nor absolute privacy (which is likely impossible), but reducing telemetry. In a sense, it fits a larger project of mine (and my wife) to migrate off the cloud.
At the same time, I appreciate the option of non-chromium based browsers, such as Firefox and it’s derivatives. I think for me, it may be a matter of using two; a daily driver that accomplishes 95% of my tasks and another option when I want more (read: different) results for queries.
Thank you. I considered Brave, but one thing I realized is (and maybe it is just my preference) is that the UI felt bloated with stuff I don’t really want. What I noticed with Helium was it’s super plain, no widgets, adds, or links, just a search box. And while I can understand that being odd from what we’re used to, it was actually refreshing and calming.
DuckDuckGo is one of the default search engines that privacy focused and after a few days using it, seems good enough for now. Helium actually had a few search engines to choose from and next to each of them it had a little blurp about how data is collected or used, which was nice. I read that Startpage is another search engine option.
I think for now I may go with the Helium + DuckDuckGo option. That said, I’d like to have a back up and maybe that’s a spot for the Firefox derivatives.
Always open to feedback from others’ experiences. Thanks!
I switched to Mojeek for searches when I am not using duckduckgo. Firefox/librewolf for most sites, and very secure settings profile. Firefox has a fun (DISABLE ALL AI) toggle right noww that I find hilarious.
Telemetry can be blocked in pihole or similar DNS sinkholes
Update: Yes. I noticed some websites were super slow with Helium + any search engine, so I switched to Librewolf + DuckDuckGo and it’s been a lot smoother and snappier.