That's a very interesting move. The patch seems fairly small, but now it's a patch that Brave needs to maintain and update every time they merge a new upstream version.

That's what makes me wary of the whole Chromium fork concept. Every time Brave/Vivaldi/Edge/etc decide to take a different path from Google's they effectively add to their maintenance burden forever, even if like in this case they actually disable an unwanted feature.

How long until the list of patches to backport for every new version of Chromium becomes so large that they have to pick and choose which one to keep maintaining and which one to give up on? If tomorrow Google decides to push a very deep change to the way, say, extensions are handled that makes them less effective at ad blocking, will Brave accept the burden to suddenly have to maintain a very deep fork of the browser in order to maintain old functionality?

I'm effectively FUDing right now, but my concern is genuine. I'm very perplex that you can make an effectively anti-ad, pro-privacy browser based on the source code of one of the biggest ad companies in the world.