Most of the comment section is hating on it being a chrome based browser, and not really answering the question, so let me try.
(partially unrelevant bit, you can skip it if you want to) I have been using it for about a week. before this, i was using qutebrowser (qt-webengine, which is essentially older lts chromium) for nearly a year and discussing with someone how i definitely should not be using such a old browser. So I am trying out “mainstream browsers” again. I went with helium, because the “someone” also recommended it. I was using librewolf for more than a year before qute, and did not like the performance (especially in my case, ha ving keyboard navigation, with something like vimium or tridactyl). Another reason is that i wanted to try something chromium (proper) after a long time.
What it is - if you have heard of ungoogled chromium project, this project builds from that, and they add some ui/ux features. for example, in ungoogled chromium, you can not download extensions from chromestore, you have to use a separate extension, and you essentially “sideload” them. They (helium) have made a middle man service (open, you can host your own instance), which you can use to get a nearly chrome like experience. They also ship with ublock origin (the proper manifest v2 version which is now deprecated in other chromium browsers). Other than that, it is almost stock chromium.
trustworthiness?? - can not really comment on that. I know the devs behind this browser have also made “cobalt.tools” website (imagine yt-dlp, but written from scratch and based in web tech (js)). So they have some cred from that. other than that, team is likely very small, and your proper trustworthiness essentially boils down to - do you trust their work? you can check their patches on github. if you want to, you can try to build from source and patches (building chrome is nightmarishly long). if you use their binary packages (which i am currently doing) then you are putting trust on them (remember xz situation?). in case they are using stuff like github action to generate their builds, then you can check the build files and artifacts as well.
Most of the comment section is hating on it being a chrome based browser, and not really answering the question, so let me try.
(partially unrelevant bit, you can skip it if you want to) I have been using it for about a week. before this, i was using qutebrowser (qt-webengine, which is essentially older lts chromium) for nearly a year and discussing with someone how i definitely should not be using such a old browser. So I am trying out “mainstream browsers” again. I went with helium, because the “someone” also recommended it. I was using librewolf for more than a year before qute, and did not like the performance (especially in my case, ha ving keyboard navigation, with something like vimium or tridactyl). Another reason is that i wanted to try something chromium (proper) after a long time.
What it is - if you have heard of ungoogled chromium project, this project builds from that, and they add some ui/ux features. for example, in ungoogled chromium, you can not download extensions from chromestore, you have to use a separate extension, and you essentially “sideload” them. They (helium) have made a middle man service (open, you can host your own instance), which you can use to get a nearly chrome like experience. They also ship with ublock origin (the proper manifest v2 version which is now deprecated in other chromium browsers). Other than that, it is almost stock chromium.
trustworthiness?? - can not really comment on that. I know the devs behind this browser have also made “cobalt.tools” website (imagine yt-dlp, but written from scratch and based in web tech (js)). So they have some cred from that. other than that, team is likely very small, and your proper trustworthiness essentially boils down to - do you trust their work? you can check their patches on github. if you want to, you can try to build from source and patches (building chrome is nightmarishly long). if you use their binary packages (which i am currently doing) then you are putting trust on them (remember xz situation?). in case they are using stuff like github action to generate their builds, then you can check the build files and artifacts as well.