Helium Browser is stepping up its fight against browser fingerprinting

In a rather heated conversation on X, the developer of the Helium browser has claimed that fingerprinting protection will improve even further in future releases.

It all started with a rather innocent post: the official Helium browser account posted on X, reminding people that MV2 extensions were still supported on the browser. This later blew up into a thread of people comparing the privacy and security of Brave and Helium.

Under the post linked above, someone presented a query regarding the security compared to Brave. While several replies from the thread are now deleted, the developer of Helium (@uwukko on X) has left various replies that are still up. He claimed that Helium has a “higher quality” fingerprint noising (though it has fewer APIs).

For those unaware, fingerprinting is a process where browsers quietly collect some of your data. For example, your screen size and resolution, fonts, audio processing, time zone, language, and a lot more. Put together, this can create a “fingerprint” that can uniquely identify you across websites. This occurs even if you clear your cookies or use private browsing.

“Noising” is the process of deliberately providing random values/fake values to the collected details, which ultimately makes tracking across sites much harder.

From what I can infer, the Helium developer also claimed that a certain website (presumably Cover Your Tracks) is “snake oil,” and that hardware acceleration cores are randomized in a way that the site doesn’t expect. Furthermore, he asked for a proper technical report from someone more educated on the topic.

The bottom line is that such test results can be inconsistent for Helium. This is because the browser randomly spoofs details about hardware acceleration in a “stealthy” way. Since trackers can’t easily flag the data as fake, fingerprinting is affected overall. The testing website (Cover Your Tracks) is probably not designed to identify this technique. As a result, it may wrongly identify the fingerprint as “unique,” even when it’s actually not.

While the developer defended Helium’s fingerprinting protection, he simultaneously mentioned that fingerprinting will improve even further in the future, towards the end of the thread.

In other Helium news, the latest update adds a crash reporting dialog and fixes several bugs. We covered that here.

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