Helium is great. I love how it focuses on having 0 distractions. No popups, great default settings.

Used zen when it barely has a site, loved it, then they made changes and it sucked.

Helium is pretty no nonsense, wish they had containers

From a non-technical user, Helium ships with the Manifest V2 version of Ublock Origin and has all forms of telemetry removed. So it's more private than the base Chromium browser. I switch between Firefox forks and Helium, depending on whether a specific website works better in a chromium browser or not.

This is what zen is doing on fedora.

Since my computer is having some memory issues, I keep an eye out for it. Watching a YouTube video in Firefox took around 700 mb, opened it in Zen browser and it took >1 gb. Zen overall doesn't seem very responsive.

Zen is my main browser and Helium is my main chromium-based browser. I love both very much 🥰💋💯

I've been using Zen and really love it. As far as I know, they aren't sending anything to Mozilla, but I never looked extremely deeply into that, so I could be wrong

I've been using both, helium mainly for sites that needs webgl (mostly my self hosted stack) and jellyfin, Grimmory, and zen for docs, dev tools and things that requires login like codegerg, kagi, OSM etc, and also got librewolf for everything else

Helium has uBlock Origin built in. It is the most lightweight yet functional browser I've found. That being said, there's only so much you can do with browsers to slim it down, and I only notice the speed difference in truly ancient hardware. It's also basic in terms of settings but that can be seen as a plus. Stock Firefox or even worse, Chrome or Edge feel like sensory overload to me if I go back. It annoys me that it is only available as an AppImage on Linux.

Personally I use Brave Origin on most devices, so I don't mind Chromium, it's actually significantly better and more secure/private on Android. On any desktop Firefox based stuff is just as good but I use the same browser for consistency and bookmark synching without an account. Brave has more active privacy features than Helium too, though Helium does remove telemetry which is the only way I'd use Chromium, so Helium is a perfectly reasonable choice.

I wasn't aware of any controversy with Zen. It may have telemetry options but they can be turned off just like Firefox. You're trading marginally slower updates for a better Ui, that's the only difference from Firefox really. The maximizing of space is really cozy and macOS-y but it is more customizable if you want something a bit flashier too. It is as reasonable choice as Firefox more or less, meaning a very good one that is sadly trending down.