Methmine Browser
The Methium engine
What the engine is, what is inherited, what stays put, what is cut out, and what we measure later.
Methium is our own build of Chromium with our own patches. Not a browser written from scratch and not a wrapper around somebody else’s binary. The patches are few, and they are rebuilt on every release: every patch is a bill that comes due with every new version, so the number is kept small.
What is inherited
The network layer. It is not imitated and not tuned: JA4 and HTTP/2 are checked, byte for byte, against the Chrome build the browser claims to be. That is a check, not a promise: it is part of the engine build and passes on the bench against our build. The design has two such builds live at once, the current version and the one before, in the proportion in which people actually run them; every profile is pinned to one of the two and does not move on its own.
What stays put
Every value a page sees is computed once at launch and is the same in every tab, worker and frame. Nothing is rolled again: not for a new tab, not for a new site, not for a new launch. A profile has a seed of its own, drawn once, when it is created.
What is cut out
Chromium’s background services that talk to other people’s servers are switched off or bound to us. Where the browser actually connects is measured rather than written: the list of addresses is published with the first release.