Aero: a Chromium-based privacy browser with zero ads, zero crypto, zero telemetry
I’m starting Aero, a Chromium-based privacy browser. The pitch:
- Zero ads. Not “acceptable ads,” not replaced ads. Zero.
- Zero telemetry. No analytics, no crash reporting, no pings.
- Zero crypto, no VPN upsells, no affiliate links, no AI assistants that phone home.
- Fingerprint resistance on by default.
- Fork of ungoogled-chromium with a minimal patch stack.
It’s not a Brave clone. Brave is a company with investors and a crypto business model — they have an ads program that replaces ads with their own, a VPN to sell you, and a wallet built in. Aero is a project with no business model. Different species entirely.
Repo: github.com/builtbyashwin/aero-browser
Background: I’ve contributed patches to the Linux kernel across staging, networking, media, and filesystem subsystems, reviewed by maintainers including Greg Kroah-Hartman, Dan Carpenter, and Jan Kara. Same patch-management discipline applied to Chromium.
Right now it’s just me. I’m looking for 4-5 people to own specific lanes: build/CI, Chromium patches, features, docs, privacy research. Async-first. If you’re interested, check the issues — each lane has a “good first issue.” Comment there or reply here.
May I ask why Chromium and not Firefox as base?
It’s a tradeoff, not an obvious call.
Chromium, because:
The honest downside: even stripped clean, it’s Google’s engine. That’s a real philosophical problem for a “privacy browser.”
Firefox would be more independent, but Mozilla is Google-funded ($500M+/year search deal), is laying off staff, ships AI features nobody asked for, and has its own opt-out telemetry. Gecko is also harder to fork — fewer people have done it, less documentation, fewer patches to inherit.
Neither choice is pure. I picked Chromium because it gives the best shot at actually shipping something real in a reasonable timeframe. If someone wants to fork Aero onto Gecko later, the project structure supports that — but v0.1 is Chromium.
Ai ass comment lmao
I assume they’re not comfortable to write English without machine assistance.
Then use AI to translate what you want to say. It’s clear that these aren’t OP’s thoughts, they prompted the AI “Make a post body about the project I wrote (slopped)”
I type like this, moving on
asking users to try your project when you can’t even be bothered to write your own comments smh
why not use one of the several mozilla forks that do not include AI or telemetry – they’re all just as mature as firefox itself since that’s their starting base and address your concern about shipping in a reasonable amount of time.
normally it wouldn’t matter, but google has already demonstrated that they want to use their chromium leverage to bend the world to its will w ublock origin so adding to the clusterfuck should be an automatic response.
Helium already exists that seems to do mostly the same thing. What are you looking to do differently?
Fair question. Helium does a lot of what Aero aims to do, and they’re a solid project.
The difference is architectural. Helium runs a proxy layer — “Helium Services” for extension downloads, filter updates, bangs. It’s privacy-respecting, and you can self-host it, but the browser still depends on servers someone else operates.
Aero’s goal is to have zero server layer. No proxies, no services, no Aero-operated infrastructure. Extension downloads come direct. Filter updates come from uBlock’s own sources. The browser should work offline and never need to phone home to function.
The other difference is verifiability. Reproducible builds from v0.1, so users can rebuild from source and confirm the binary matches. Helium doesn’t publish reproducible builds, and neither does Brave. That’s the actual trust gap in every privacy browser right now, and it’s the one Aero wants to close.
I’m not claiming Helium is bad. It’s not. But their trust model says “trust our proxies.” Aero’s should say “you don’t have to trust anything — verify it yourself.”
If you’re going to reply with ai the least you could do is remove the dashes so it’s less obvious
nah i just type like this. dashes are my thing yk
Seems cool ideal. Will check it out as it updates.