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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

I don't quite follow, are you saying Mozilla's structure is poor so making modifications is harder? Or perhaps that Chrome's developers did the work on IPFS and adding Tor and that you feel Brave rubber stamped them?

Mozilla has something like a $200M pa income (from Google alone). I wonder how that compares with Brave's income.

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I think the person's point is that Mozilla is making a complete browser, rendering engine and all, while Brave is basically a shell of stuff on top of Chromium/Blink.

I don’t think the customer cares as long as you can use it

Some of us care.

The type of people who are into decentralizing the internet are also usually against a single company (google) controlling the rendering engine of most users.

If you're talking about typical user of the average web browser, they care about IPFS as much as they care about the rendering engine - i.e. not at all.

I am that person. I moved away from Brave because its still chrome/chromium based. I am also not confident in their "blockchain" advertising model and don't trust they are actually any less private with my data than chrome/chromium.

It would be cool to see IPFS integrated and enabled by default on all browsers. I doubt Google would ever take the leap, but maybe Mozilla would. I also have doubt that Microsoft would but they would be more willing than Google. Anyways, I hope this can happen before Mozilla's market share shrinks more.

You don't have to participate in the advertising bits of Brave; those are optional. But, they're a privacy-centric way to generate rewards which can be passively contributed to your favorite sites, sustaining their content creation.

I would love to hear more about your privacy concerns; we have excised quite a bit from Chromium. You can read about those changes [on GitHub](https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...). We also audit our network activity to make sure nothing ever slips out. You can read about our [desktop](https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff...) and [iOS](https://brave.com/ios-browser-first-run/) audits on our blog.

Perhaps more of interest would be an independent, third-party review and comparison. Trinity College's School of Computer Science and Statistics did a comparative review of Chrome, Brave, Edge, Firefox, Yandex, and Safari. They found that Brave was the "most private" in terms of phoning home. You can [read their review online](https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf).

Always happy to discuss any specific concerns you may have.

Thanks for this clarification. I use Brave less because I am actually afraid to install extensions, because addition phoning to Google. Or how does Brave handle that?

> against a single company (google) controlling the rendering engine of most users

That isn’t really applicable here though. That’s kinda like claiming we should be against Linux because it runs all the web servers. There is a difference between centralization and standardization.

Linux isn't controlled by an advertising company.

Neither can an open source project be controlled by a single entity

Chromium is.

There is a difference, and all the html rendering code being written by google is centralization not standardization.

I don't think the linux comparison makes any sense for this situation. Linux has very little to do with the web experience, where the rendering engine is the core of it. Linus's ability to change world wide web standards on a whim is close to non existent. Google is literally replacing the WWW network stack (a good change mind you, but nonetheless demonstrates the level of power)

Customers caring about IPFS support are also the ones caring about browser engine monoculture.

The evidence is in, and I'm sure you're right about the typical users. But the discriminating ones know better. The difference is how much it's using you.

Those that care enough about privacy to use TOR and IPFS likely care very much about using a browser made by Google. De-googling Chrome is like removing telemetry from Windows 10 over installing and running Linux: For some it's great while others wont touch it no matter how much work is put into making it "safe" (and IMHO Chrome variants are at most "safe").

Mozilla makes an entire browser.

Brave takes an existing browser (Chromium) and adds some extra features to the UI and networking stack.

Modern web browsers are incredibly complex pieces of software. The overwhelming majority of code in Brave's repository is shared with Chromium. What Brave's developers do and what Mozilla's developers do are not comparable.

You’re either saying: Mozilla can’t afford to hire another set of developers to add IPFS, Firefox is too poorly written for this to be reasonably done, or Mozilla doesn’t actually care about the decentralized web to even try.

None of the reasons really sheds a good like on Mozilla.

why would mozilla pay to add a fad technology or take on the tech debt?

Some of us believe that the client-server model has led us to the current situation, ruled by internet giants. A future where people are less reliant on giants is within our reach, the biggest hurdle is making it available to the masses.

Hopefully uptake by non-mainstream browsers like Brave will increase the exposure, attract developers, increase the network and get us closer to having IPFS, Hypercore or some other protocol available to the mainstream, whether that be in Firefox or by some other means.

Besides, you could argue that browsers have added plenty of fad technologies over the past few years, DRM comes to mind.

> IPFS, Hypercore or some other protocol available to the mainstream, whether that be in Firefox or by some other means

TIL about hypercore! Looks like an interesting concept based on append-only logs. It reminds me of this work being done at VMware: https://github.com/vmware/node-replication

The biggest hurdle is convincing the masses that your way is better than the current way.

I don't think that is ever going to happen.

> Or Mozilla doesn’t actually care about the decentralized web to even try.

I think this is closer to being true, as someone who forks ff and has had to remove/add stuff and compile it myself for almost 5 years now.

I'm tempted to start working on adding native ipfs support for myself in netwerk/protocol/ipfs…

It's the first one, they can't afford it, they actually laid off a bunch of people less than a year ago.

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