Fork or not, they obviously integrated almost everything from the upstream. Keeping a long-running fork that's increasingly diverging is not a simple task.
Does Brave have the man-power to sustain their fork if it diverges sufficiently that they can no longer integrate upstream changes?
EDIT: My broader point being, Brave's mission is less compatible with Google's and as such it's unfortunate they aren't basing Brave on Gecko.
I know the whole history with Brendan Eich and Mozilla, as well as the problems with extending and embedding Gecko. Still, seems like an unfortunate outcome
Most of the divergences are already compile flags or command line flags on upstream. They are just disabling it by default. Is not a Brave-only thing, but different browsers have different settings disabled, the community that compiles the browser from source also pushes those features to be conditionally added. Eg. Debian, Arch or other distros, could have WEI disabled on their chromium distribution, forks like Edge and Vivaldi could disable GAIA, etc.
Just give a look at the divergence issues and the PRs solving them [1], most of them are just single file or small changes to compilation/default flags
It's far more work to do what they currently do which is nitpick the things they don't like to remove/disable/replace them.
Increasing divergence is a benefit for them here, but the main concern with chromium forks isn't the effort required it's the lack of coherent vision. Except for maybe Arc, but that's closed source, the rest of them feel like chrome but dirtier. Giant bing buttons, crypto wallets, new tab ads, it's absurd how much of them are willing to sacrifice the user experience. To the point where I can understand why a user would just stick with chrome despite what they're doing.
Can they implement some new web standard in a shifted away codebase? Or fix a zero day?
You seem to vastly underestimate the complexity of a browser engine. Just letting it stay afloat is a huge task in itself — remember, Microsoft itself decided against doing so. They can maintain a soft fork, but from a much smaller company, it is not a trivial feat at all.
They are handling "fine" because they only do low complexity changes.
I remember that people asked, some years ago, to Brave team add add-ons in their Android reskin and they, after some time, rejected because they said that what Kiwi Browser were doing was too complex for them because it required too many patches.
They were not even able to modify Mv3, they just said that they already added an adblock.
Brave and Vivaldi are mere reskins, and they don't do anything more than Ungoogled Chromium do, but adding their own bloat.
They seem to be throwing decent resources at this as well. If you you click on "+500 code churn" in the contributors chart at https://devboard.gitsense.com/brave?repos=brave-browser,brav... for brave-browser and brave-core, you can see there is a decent number of contributors. I would say there are probably 30+ full time employees working on this. And if you look at the merged pull requests, at https://reviews.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=merged%3Atrue... you can see many contributors are 1 year+ contributors (look at the gift icon for this information)
What's the point of basing it on Chromium when Chrome exists?
Brave seems intent on actively trying to sabotage the Google ad distribution business model and inject their own ad distribution system. It's kind of weird to base their browser on the browser maintained by an entity with objectives that are at such odds with their own.
There's both privacy and user experience improvements that a fork could enable. If I had any hope that I could keep it up to speed with mainline Firefox, I'd fork Firefox myself if only to roll the numerous userchrome changes I make to my installs into the browser itself, as well as to make some changes that aren't possible with userchrome customization alone.
I never tried Brave, but they lost all credibility when they injected their own affiliate links in Coinbase URLs. I like that they use their own index in their search engine, but I will never use it, better alternatives exist and my trust is easy to lose and almost impossible to regain.
I'm really grateful to Brave and Brave search for the alternatives they provide. Firefox is still my main browser, but Brave is an easy, reliable option when I come across a (thankfully increasingly rarer) website that refuses to work on Firefox (and happens to be an essential website in some way).
I would use it a lot more if it was better about coping with low memory (4 GB) systems. This is possibly something they inherited from Chromium, but Brave is very memory hungry compared to Firefox, and is much quicker to slow down when there's 10+ tabs - Firefox on the same computer is able to cope much more easily with multiples of that. It's like using an old school Windows system, Brave has to be restarted periodically or it slows down dramatically, and starts responding erratically to UI interactions. I can have multiple Firefox profiles open, and a Librefox instance on the side too, and they all work fine; as soon as Brave is open, there's a tangible difference in the performance, of both the browser itself and the system as a whole.
I'm shocked at folks' willingness to use a browser that has a history of tampering with a user's URL input (among other shenanigans). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027&p=2 for more.
That's the bare minimum a browser is expected to do. Not touch my URLs.
- The PR is on GitHub, this isn't a closed source browser.
- The bug appeared when Brave was like a few months old.
- The URLs that were being overwritten were only a few crypto exchange websites that partnered with Brave. The affiliate URL was supposed to be a suggestion but the bug made it overwrite the URL.
- The affiliate program was shutdown right after the PR was merged.
- Nothing of that sort happened again.
- Even the CEO apologized for an issue that was blown way out of proportions.
> The URLs that were being overwritten were only a few crypto exchange websites that partnered with Brave. The affiliate URL was supposed to be a suggestion but the bug made it overwrite the URL.
I'm sure the outcry from folks who recognized this was happening did not have anything to do with the affiliate program being canned and this 'bug' being patched ASAP. It's quite an egregious thing for a browser to screw up. That kind of trust can't be bought back by saying "Nothing of that sort happened again", because now that statement is permanently "Nothing of that sort happened again...yet" because that trust is gone.
If this issue wasn't "blown way out of proportions", one can only theorize how how long this bug would have stayed. The way I see it, the CEO apologizing is basically an apology that they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar.
Thats the joke, they changed the browser to harm the user and help the business. You and them have the gumption to act like wei isnt the same thing they've been shipping.
Opt in setting doesn't mean much here. While it's technically true the crypto stuff isn't "enabled", it's constantly pushed to you with no option to remove all of that during installation.
I'll walk you through it:
Upon loading the browser on a fresh install, you are greeted with a new tab page pushing Brave Rewards. With manipulative UX, there is no button to disagree or remove the feature, only a button for "start using rewards". You can hide it by clicking the 3 dots, which for most users they're never going to do unfortunately.
Looking at the address bar, there's a triangle up there with a badge. Hiding the new tab Rewards card doesn't hide this triangle. Clicking on this does not show a remove feature option. Beside that, there's a sidebar button and a wallet icon again with a badge. Clicking on this only shows a learn more button. I can right click both of these, and finally see a hide option.
Finally all of that is hidden. Maybe I browse a page or so, and then open a new tab. I'm shown an ad on the new tab screen. Right clicking it shows no hide button. So I'll try the customize button. Here's where you have to scroll down and disable the "show sponsored images" option.
All done, right? Ok let's browse Reddit for a bit. There's where you see the "tip" button under every post. Right clicking shows nothing about hiding it. So into the settings you have to go to finally remove the last bit of the feature and be prompted to relaunch the browser.
My feeling on the matter that nothing is free and every time a team like this spends their resources on some extra bauble, they are drifting from the core goal. Like Mozilla.
I don't think Vivaldi is open source. But if Brave's features are so bad that you're willing to switch to an closed source browser, why not switch to Firefox?
The ignorance so stale. Learn more about Crypto. Learn more about BAT, and its integration into Brave. Your argument is so 2018. We're in 2023 now. Update your knowledge.
Initially, I held the opinion that Apple's mandate regarding browsers on iOS/iPadOS, wherein they function as mere skins atop the Safari web viewer, constituted an anti-competitive measure. However, presently, it has emerged as one of the few non-Chromium browsers with a substantial user base, necessitating web developers to accommodate its requirements. As a fellow web developer, I find myself utilizing Safari for personal browsing while resorting to Chrome for development purposes due to far superior developer tools.
It's good that Google has some non-marginal opposition, but in this case you don't gain computing freedom, you only only choose your master. Apple loves having tight control over their devices.
Totally personal preference, but not a fan of the Brave UI. At least from my perspective they (like Vivaldi and Edge) are trying too hard to distinguish themselves from the outward look and feel of Chromium. It's their right as a fork, and that of whoever finds it works for them. I'm not even bothered by (or much notice) the built-in crypto-based gamification. I just wish someone would do a minimalist fork of Chromium, maybe with a rudimentary sync service.
The gamification is a pretty out of date hot take now. They still have that crypto stuff, but they pivoted about a year ago to try to sell the built in VPN and get more value out of their search engine to raise revenue instead.
The best part is that right click is all it takes to hide the VPN and other stuff from the UI. I usually do it first thing after I install Brave and never see it again.
Honestly Firefox is way worse than brave in terms of intrusive stuff.
When Firefox updates I get full screen ads for their VPN and whatnot. Brave has never done anything like that to me. Hide the features you don’t want once, never see them again.
My only real issues with Brave is 1)that when you have too many tabs open it starts stacking them elsewhere... and two, when I open settings they are terrible and I have to search Password manually to find saved passwords, but the way their UI works it first loads the password module and when I go to click it it loads something else and moves it around, it is annoying.
Readit News
Does Brave have the man-power to sustain their fork if it diverges sufficiently that they can no longer integrate upstream changes?
EDIT: My broader point being, Brave's mission is less compatible with Google's and as such it's unfortunate they aren't basing Brave on Gecko.
I know the whole history with Brendan Eich and Mozilla, as well as the problems with extending and embedding Gecko. Still, seems like an unfortunate outcome
Just give a look at the divergence issues and the PRs solving them [1], most of them are just single file or small changes to compilation/default flags
[1]: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
This might explain why my Steam account is always logged out.
Increasing divergence is a benefit for them here, but the main concern with chromium forks isn't the effort required it's the lack of coherent vision. Except for maybe Arc, but that's closed source, the rest of them feel like chrome but dirtier. Giant bing buttons, crypto wallets, new tab ads, it's absurd how much of them are willing to sacrifice the user experience. To the point where I can understand why a user would just stick with chrome despite what they're doing.
You seem to vastly underestimate the complexity of a browser engine. Just letting it stay afloat is a huge task in itself — remember, Microsoft itself decided against doing so. They can maintain a soft fork, but from a much smaller company, it is not a trivial feat at all.
I remember that people asked, some years ago, to Brave team add add-ons in their Android reskin and they, after some time, rejected because they said that what Kiwi Browser were doing was too complex for them because it required too many patches.
They were not even able to modify Mv3, they just said that they already added an adblock.
Brave and Vivaldi are mere reskins, and they don't do anything more than Ungoogled Chromium do, but adding their own bloat.
Full Disclosure: This is my tool
Brave seems intent on actively trying to sabotage the Google ad distribution business model and inject their own ad distribution system. It's kind of weird to base their browser on the browser maintained by an entity with objectives that are at such odds with their own.
They don't maintain changes that take too much manpower to maintain.
You have to pick your battles.
That sentence has the same fallacy as yours.
Deleted Comment
Most relevant part of the tweet. Go Brave!
So no, fuck Brave.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/brave-browser-caugh...
Deleted Comment
I would use it a lot more if it was better about coping with low memory (4 GB) systems. This is possibly something they inherited from Chromium, but Brave is very memory hungry compared to Firefox, and is much quicker to slow down when there's 10+ tabs - Firefox on the same computer is able to cope much more easily with multiples of that. It's like using an old school Windows system, Brave has to be restarted periodically or it slows down dramatically, and starts responding erratically to UI interactions. I can have multiple Firefox profiles open, and a Librefox instance on the side too, and they all work fine; as soon as Brave is open, there's a tangible difference in the performance, of both the browser itself and the system as a whole.
That's the bare minimum a browser is expected to do. Not touch my URLs.
- It was a URL auto-suggestion bug.
- It was fixed in a day after release.
- The PR is on GitHub, this isn't a closed source browser.
- The bug appeared when Brave was like a few months old.
- The URLs that were being overwritten were only a few crypto exchange websites that partnered with Brave. The affiliate URL was supposed to be a suggestion but the bug made it overwrite the URL.
- The affiliate program was shutdown right after the PR was merged.
- Nothing of that sort happened again.
- Even the CEO apologized for an issue that was blown way out of proportions.
I'm sure the outcry from folks who recognized this was happening did not have anything to do with the affiliate program being canned and this 'bug' being patched ASAP. It's quite an egregious thing for a browser to screw up. That kind of trust can't be bought back by saying "Nothing of that sort happened again", because now that statement is permanently "Nothing of that sort happened again...yet" because that trust is gone.
If this issue wasn't "blown way out of proportions", one can only theorize how how long this bug would have stayed. The way I see it, the CEO apologizing is basically an apology that they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar.
Even when they were redirecting to AMP pages, and hiding the prefix so you couldn't tell, it barely elicited a yawn.
But, yeah, I agree that you should use FF and not Brave.
Did you read the comments?
Dead Comment
I'll walk you through it:
Upon loading the browser on a fresh install, you are greeted with a new tab page pushing Brave Rewards. With manipulative UX, there is no button to disagree or remove the feature, only a button for "start using rewards". You can hide it by clicking the 3 dots, which for most users they're never going to do unfortunately.
Looking at the address bar, there's a triangle up there with a badge. Hiding the new tab Rewards card doesn't hide this triangle. Clicking on this does not show a remove feature option. Beside that, there's a sidebar button and a wallet icon again with a badge. Clicking on this only shows a learn more button. I can right click both of these, and finally see a hide option.
Finally all of that is hidden. Maybe I browse a page or so, and then open a new tab. I'm shown an ad on the new tab screen. Right clicking it shows no hide button. So I'll try the customize button. Here's where you have to scroll down and disable the "show sponsored images" option.
All done, right? Ok let's browse Reddit for a bit. There's where you see the "tip" button under every post. Right clicking shows nothing about hiding it. So into the settings you have to go to finally remove the last bit of the feature and be prompted to relaunch the browser.
It seems it’s a go app and it’s not the best optimised thing in the world. So I turned it off again.
I’m still a fan of Brave. The only browser with actual integration of vertical tabs besides Edge (no the firefox extensions don’t count)
[0]: https://vivaldi.com/desktop/
[1]: https://arc.net/
Turned off by default.
https://privacytests.org/
Deleted Comment
> The secure, built-in crypto wallet that supercharges your browser for Web3.
It sounds like it's simply a wallet, not that I personally want that in a browser at least not yet, not "earning" (do you mean mining).
I'm talking about getting paid in BAT coin for looking at ads they hijack on other peoples websites.
When Firefox updates I get full screen ads for their VPN and whatnot. Brave has never done anything like that to me. Hide the features you don’t want once, never see them again.
- Sponsored images
- Cards
- VPN button
- Wallet button
- Set shields to aggressive
- Brave rewards program and button in UI
- Turn off Autoplay
- Turn ON Snowflake
So it looks pretty clean but it is a lot of digging in menus. But I would rather have more settings than less.
But the tab thing is the most breaking to me.
Brave also has vertical tabs which are scrollable OOTB.
https://i.imgur.com/LriOYog.png