Brave is a fork, not a Chromium reskin
twitter.com
twitter.com
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
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.
Brave runs faster and consumes less memory for me. Perhaps their additions aren't bloat at all?
Brave has an excellent adblocker with Brave Shields built in and now just added vertical tabs native.
Vivaldi has the best tab and window management in a browser by far, and even has an internal command line/launcher in pressing F2.
I can tell by this line that you're biased against Brave because you wouldn't have said this if you had you know, even read the title of this discussion, let alone clicked the link and read the tweet.
> They are handling "fine" because they only do low complexity changes.
You realize the author of the tweet, who is the CEO of Brave is Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript and one of the main developers for Netscape Browser (arguably one of the reasons we have the web today), co-founder and former CEO of Mozilla... I'm sure maintaining a fork of Chromium is not a massive undertaking for them.
He is a guy. He cannot maintain Chromium with too little of a team
Brave maintains patches in a very specific way [2] to ensure maintainability. My impression is that Kiwi's patches are structured in a way that technically works but isn't easy to keep rebasing on top of upstream changes. Kiwi's been chronically outdated compared to upstream Chromium whereas Brave generally gets updated within a day of a corresponding Chromium release.
[1] https://twitter.com/brave/status/1574822799700541446 [2] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Patching-Chromiu...
At minimum both add an encrypted, independent sync service in lieu of Google's one. And of course a ton of useful new UI customizations, built in adblockers and other mere reskin stuff. I, too, hear "built-in adblocker written in Rust" and think "reskin".
Full Disclosure: This is my tool
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.
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-...
/tmp/tmp.KVE7aSEvue/brave-core/patches $ wc -l *.patch | sort -rh | head
8879 total
172 third_party-blink-renderer-modules-webgl-webgl_rendering_context_base.cc.patch
112 chrome-BUILD.gn.patch
104 chrome-installer-linux-debian-build.sh.patch
76 chrome-android-java-AndroidManifest.xml.patch
72 components-vector_icons-aggregate_vector_icons.py.patch
68 chrome-android-BUILD.gn.patch
61 chrome-installer-linux-BUILD.gn.patch
57 chrome-browser-resources-settings-privacy_page-personalization_options.html.patch
55 net-socket-socks5_client_socket.cc.patch
One might say -- "but a lot of that's just context!"
Those are significant lines of code that these changes must play nicely with. There's actually more, these numbers do a disservice to everyone
/tmp/tmp.KVE7aSEvue/brave-core/patches $ wc -l *.patch | sort -rh | head
8879 total
172 third_party-blink-renderer-modules-webgl-webgl_rendering_context_base.cc.patch
112 chrome-BUILD.gn.patch
104 chrome-installer-linux-debian-build.sh.patch
76 chrome-android-java-AndroidManifest.xml.patch
72 components-vector_icons-aggregate_vector_icons.py.patch
68 chrome-android-BUILD.gn.patch
61 chrome-installer-linux-BUILD.gn.patch
57 chrome-browser-resources-settings-privacy_page-personalization_options.html.patch
55 net-socket-socks5_client_socket.cc.patch
Sure, some of this is inflated by the context of nearby lines - but we don't get to ignore those, patches must play nice.
This might explain why my Steam account is always logged out.
Any fork of chrome is probably doing the same thing with regards to session resuming and session cookies.
You can leave a comment if it's something you'd like to see as an option
Popular itself is a squirrelly word here. Popular can simply refer to as "most used" (by this metric, Xi and Modi would be the world's most popular leaders, since they lead the world's biggest populations), or it could be "most liked" by some other measure (I have no analogous leader to nominate here).
That sentence has the same fallacy as yours.
Really rolls off the tongue
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.
Honestly I don't know why you're even asking this. It's literally the whole thread is about this: it's not a reskin, it's a fork.
Is it "kind of weird" that it's at odds with Chrome's goals? No. Because if it wasn't at odds, it wouldn't exist, these people would be just Chrome/Chromium contributors.
Chromium is open-source because they forked WebKit, and WebKit forked KHTML. Google were at odds with Apple when they forked WebKit to Blink, but the FOSS license allowed it. And lo and behold it has allowed it again. What's surprising here?
If they used Gecko then these issues wouldn't exist and they would just have to add new features.
Not sure why is everyone trying to sell Gecko here. Isn't Mozilla a good custodian to Gecko? Clearly if I take your opinion at face value, no. But why? Google is clearly not a good custodian for the most popular browser, their private interests are all over it. But the core engine is good.
This is probably pedantic, but I think the way they actually work is that they integrate all upstream changes, and then disable any behavior they don't want to support? Which means they can minimize their overall divergence, which is what you want for maintainability.
They don't maintain changes that take too much manpower to maintain.
You have to pick your battles.
Most relevant part of the tweet. Go Brave!
So no, fuck Brave.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/brave-browser-caugh...
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.
Did you read the comments?
- 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.
Brave is the only mainstream browser right now that is not serving ads in the address bar. So before anybody has a problem with a bug that was fixed a couple of years back, they should be talking about their favorite bug-free browser.
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.
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.
Hamburger menu -> Settings -> Brave Rewards -> Uncheck the boxes (Reddit, Github, Twitter)
---
...or the baroque but useful to know:
Hamburger menu -> Settings -> Shields -> Content Filtering -> Create Custom Filters -> reddit.com## .action-brave-tip
(which you can get to quicker with a right click context menu)
Wait, that actually sounds like a great feature! Is there a way to get it for other browsers?
The only actual counterbalance to google's power in web is the firefox browser and it's basically dead because "wah wah they bought pocket wah wah there are two tiles on the new tab page that show popular websites wah wah" so alright I guess we will just do the whole IE6 debacle again this time with less willingness from regulators to fix our bullshit.
Leaves you with this:
EDIT: It looks some of Vivaldi's source is available FWIW, https://vivaldi.com/source/
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)
I like the desktop metaphor that computers adopted, and one way to use it is to think of different application windows as different paper documents on your meatspace desktop. You could have a rule that only 1 piece of paper is on your desktop at any time, but I find it much easier and more efficient to work with, as needed, two or more pieces of paper on my desktop. When multiple pieces of paper are on my desktop, I can arrange them such that I can easily focus on different papers by only moving my eyes, or, if the papers are relatively far apart, by moving my head and/or the rest of my body a little too.
I personally like the desk organization rule of "1 project/task per desk", i.e. you clear your desk when switching tasks to ensure only relevant things are on your desk / within your visual domain. I use computers to similar effect with different desktops/workspaces.
Tree style tabs has kept me on FF for a decade.
YMMV applies.
[0]: https://vivaldi.com/desktop/
[1]: https://arc.net/
Arc is basically someone looking at Vivaldi and hitting it with the "design stick". I didn't anticipate I'd love it as much as I do. Since it's Mac-only I only use it on my work machine, but that's 80% of my browsing anyway and I have no desire to sync my work shit anywhere else.
Turned off by default.
> 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.
That's not how it works though. Brave blocks ads by default, but it doesn't insert ads on any websites. It has some separate ads you can enable to get paid, but they are either on the browser start page or in system notifications.
You know that's not true, right?
Sometimes it worries me that we form opinions from the opinions that aren't even ours.
It's opt-in by the way, not opt-out. This isn't Chrome.
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.
These threads always unfold the same way tho. Brave gets lambasted by some, the people that enjoy using Brave end up being “well actually” guys etc etc.
And I use both Brave and FF in addition to occasional librewolf they’re all useful
But the tab thing is the most breaking to me.
Brave also has vertical tabs which are scrollable OOTB.
- 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.
They have extensions for other browsers too: https://snowflake.torproject.org/
This was purely for Chromium performance reasons (although it seems Firefox has made some major improvements recently). I didn't like leaving behind a unique browser engine, which needs to remain a significant player.
I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave. If you don't like the crypto integration, the ads, etc you can just disable them. I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one. It may not have played out as intended, but it wasn't a scam.
One year in, I've had no issues I can think of. And now they have their own search engine, another net plus to the ecosystem. Outside of things like Tor Browser, the privacy is about as good as you're going to get from a client. In fact, you can open a new window using Tor directly in the browser. I don't use their VPN but that's available also (Mullvad?).
I spend enough daily time in it that I would notice UI/UX/perf. problems ... I really haven't seen any.
YMMV
I certainly don't hate Brave. I use it. I also don't like Brave, I put up with it. It's just that there aren't any great browsers out there, and Brave sucks less than most.
Where are we getting these absolutely unattainable ideals from? Who can possibly support and fund such a project besides an enterprise?
KHTML was doing fine before Microsoft, Google and Apple forked their codebase.
Forgot which, but had a 12 letter word that I misspelled one letter of, Brave underlined it in red with no replacements in right-click menu, I fixed it by googling the spelling and underline went away.
In often happens that it has no or even very wrong suggestions.
In any case no one lost their stuff, bad UX was critiqued and bad UX was fixed.
If you buy fruits from a shop that also sells scummy lottery tickets, you at least should accept that other people will bring criticism and skepticism to that shop.
That "should" shit, however, is inviting other people to make a value judgement just so you can attack them for not being libertarian or something, nobody cares. They should do what is best for their business if they want to be successful. They thought that was crypto, and who am I to second guess? As long as they're doing it, or strange advertising shell games, I'm not even their customer, so I don't get a say. I don't think they did anything remotely fraudulent...
So do most gas station and random convenience stores. No one complains since you don't have to buy em.
You're still using Brave which can be seen as endorsement of those things by others, including by website operators looking at user agent traffic.
Some people use very specialized versions of Linux as a political choice, for example.
My point is that if other people use other variants (non-specialized) it doesn't necessarily mean that they support opposite "political views".
...and the redirection of the URLs of other cryptocurrency exchange websites...and the time it inserted affiliate referral codes when users navigate to Binance. Yes, you can turn off the crypto BS, and they stopped doing the redirects. But I can't trust a browser company that _may_ do such shenanigans again in the future. They "fixed" or removed that stuff, but that doesn't mean they won't do it again. I just don't trust them, at all. That right there is enough to not use the browser. Not to mention Brendan Eich and his views.
If you still don't understand, then I don't know what to tell you.
A browser company that tries to monetize in ways that doesn't weaponize my info against me is much preferred.
That said, I can't personally separate his politics from his product, which is why I use Firefox.
I would be fine with it if it were opt-in for users who want to support the browser in that way, but silently injecting them across the board is just a scummy thing to do and also likely a violation of any sane affiliate program's terms. A company that's willing to do that loses an unrecoverable amount of credibility and trust in my eyes.
I think society has largely adopted a victim mentality with abusive software these days. We are so used to being betrayed and hurt that we now accept it as normal. It started off innocuously enough, but now we are effectively being hurt on the regular. We have learned helplessness, and that will not end well.
That's not what a victim mentality (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_mentality) is. What you're describing is closer to learned helplessness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness), which is different.
> Their past actions irreversibly tainted their reputation, and they are no longer worthy of our trust.
This is closer to something you might hear from someone with a victim mentality. I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is evidence of such, but certainly this rigidity of thought around being a victim to another's actions contributes to such.
So now we've given a hostile ad agency control of the internet to save 100ms on certain web site loads. Good job everyone.
Meanwhile Mozilla the organization boots people for politics, wants "more than deplatforming" and uses as one of their examples organizations deciding what I should see on the Internet - preferring outlets that Mozilla themselves like, naturally. They publish stuff with the gist of "did you encounter other politics on YouTube, how scary".
Meanwhile the organization spends money on getting a sneaker designer to make time-limited color themes for their browser and writes a pile of copy about how cool it is that a sneaker designer painted the browser blue.
Meanwhile, Brave releases a user-customizable filtering function for their search engine so you, not someone else, can decide from what POV you see the Internet and added native vertical tabs to the browser.
One organization is blatantly political, the other just makes a good browser.
But if you want people you like to decide what I see (at least easily) on the 'net, that's good, I guess.
/rant
Not to mention that they're based on chromium.
Which is why they were silently filling in affiliate links without user consent right? Or why they were collecting tips for users with no affiliation to the company that runs brave.
Or that using a single wallet built into your web browser for crypto stuff nicely ties all your transactions to that one wallet in a way that completely removes all "privacy" aspects
They absolutely do, and using the chromium code base, regardless of what you supposedly patch into or out of it, pushes forwards GOOGLE'S goals, not the open web's goals.
Let me help you understand why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...
That's the one and only real reason why they hate brave, all the other reasons are just excuses they like to tell to themselves and to others.
Cause Mozilla did him dirty? When Obama ran in 2008 he opposed gay marriage. Hell proposition 8 passed. California's constitution still has text banning gay marriage in it.
Really? It's FUD that the Brave browser and team worked with and on a crypto project to integrate crypto into the browser?
What I mean is that year in, year out you'll see the same things about a bug in their Firefox Suggest-esque feature that got fixed within one day of being reported, the bad Rewards UI which got fixed without anyone losing their cryptocurrency in response to eg. Tom Scott's feedback being treated as a scam where Brave stole it from people and so on.
They're basically criticisms of first iterations of new things and assume maximum malice on part of the Brave team. The integrating crypto into the browser side is mostly unrelated, nobody denies it and few think it's unequivocally good.
The original intent was absolutely a scam. They wanted to hide the ads that were already on websites, replace them with their own, then give a fraction of the revenue they just effectively stole from those websites back to them (but only if they knew to ask for it).
Also they were going to take over all the third-party tracking data for their own, while branding it as “privacy” — so much hand waving about "we don't run a MiTM proxy" (while hoping we didn’t notice it’s because they don’t need to be in the middle when they control the browser itself).
Absolutely brazen, and they kept changing their story in real time whenever people started to notice hey wtf is this. Happened to be able to find this in my posting history for example; in hindsight I wish I hadn't been so cowed by the fact that I was arguing with Brendan Eich Himself, because man what a load of horsepuckey he and his guy were delivering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14464518#14465271
The user and their browser decides what ads they see. Websites are not entitled to showing ads.
* lying to users about protecting their privacy, while gathering and reselling more information than was possible with existing 3rd party trackers
* lying about "giving back to publishers", while actually coopting those publishers' revenue streams
Your "Websites are not entitled to showing ads" statement gave me a moment of thought, I have to admit: I don't see anything wrong with ad blockers, but I do think the ethics of ad replacers is pretty problematic. At best it makes Brave a parasitic entity feeding off revenue that would have otherwise gone to the content creators.
I'll reluctantly agree that that part on its own doesn't rise to the level of "scam" but I certainly don't think it's admirable.
Like, do Brave think google is just evil and that if someone else becomes the advertising behemoth things will be just rosy?
The presence of ads and/or crypto is a strong signal that you're working with an untrustworthy entity, whose objectives will not be aligned with your own.
Maybe Brave the browser isn't outright a "scam," but the willingness of the company to dip into scam-enabling technologies like crypto makes the brand toxic, and anything by the company is immediately suspect.
The same is true for Signal, for what it's worth, as it still supports Moxie's pet shitcoin.
It's easy enough to opt out of Brave because Firefox exists, but there's still sadly no better alternative to Signal.
Decentralized wealth is crypto. Sure, there are scams, but the point is to pay people for viewing ads (wealth re-distribution in a decentralized fashion). No one else is paying you to view ads; they are just taking your engagement data, your face and eye gaze data, your mouse trajectory data, etc. Brave is the first to try to pay you a portion of its ads revenue in a way that you the end user can flip into whatever currency you want, including USD. I've never been cut a check from Google, Amazon, Facebook, or the like. But I've received BAT, which I can flip into ETH/BTC, and earn more money.
> Maybe Brave the browser isn't outright a "scam," but the willingness of the company to dip into scam-enabling technologies like crypto makes the brand toxic, and anything by the company is immediately suspect.
Do you use any resource owned/operated by Google? Amazon? JPMorgan Chase? Facebook? Bank of America? Wells Fargo? (to name a few) All of these companies "dip into scam-enabling technologies like crypto."
Do more research.
Isn't the Matrix protocol the better alternative to Signal?
Hopefully this can change some day, and Matrix (or something like it) will become ubiquitous. But it was a slog for Signal to gain even its small market share, despite its better usability and lower barriers to entry.
For lack of a better alternative, we "standardized" on Signal as the de-facto secure messaging system that is outside of the control of ad companies, and it will take time to rectify that.
This is a ridiculous take. Every technology you use that facilitates payments or communication is, objectively speaking, "scam-enabling".
The intent is to circumvent how authors have themselves chosen to monetize their own content, insert themselves as the man in the middle, display their own ads and "pay" people in a currency they print. They're actually replacing the direct compensation the author would receive with an indirect one. Traditionally this kind of scheme is known as a protection racket. Also of course this means that Brave is simply an advertisement company, like the ones they are supposed to protect you from.
When someone visits your page through Brave the ads you would have been compensated for are being blocked, Brave earns actual money for the ads they put in their place, and then users get the chance to tip you in 'attention tokens', which they wisely pre-mined. That's not noble, it's like the mafia combined with a Nigerian prince currency scam.
First builds were spring of 2002 and you probably didn't have those because they were still called "browser" or "m/b" back then and not made terribly discoverable. You probably mean you got with it in 2003, summer or fall, which would be 20 years ago, not 22.
Yes, I was off by a year or so, I'm not making anything up. Two decades is a long time to remember details.
All I know is I'd FTP to grab the latest and unzip it into a folder.
By this point I was running a couple major websites and had a "5-star CNET Award" for an internet-centered software product so I was on top of anything in that sphere.
Glory days.
After being pretty happy with Firefox for a very long time, eventually I just got tired of them shuffling around the UI for no good reason, removing useful features, and doing absolutely nothing about letting users be in control of their privacy and security as they browse. I have a feeling that all of the motivated developers left Mozilla a long time ago and the ones that are left now are limping along in maintenance mode and just copying whatever Chrome does. Firefox lost its mojo years ago.
Vivaldi is Chrome, of course, but about a million times more flexible and it actually comes with a bunch of privacy-preserving settings right out of the box. The only thing it lacks is an open code base, but the team behind Vivaldi seem to have enough respect for their users that it doesn't bother me as much as it might otherwise.
If it doesn't have an open codebase, how would you know?
I think they're just padding out their resumes for the next job. If you aped a part of chrome into firefox, that probably gets you a leg up for working at google, or some company that has chrome integration.
Thank you for the confirmation
I've migrated my desktops to Brave a while ago, it's just mobile I've been lazy on..whelp here is the motivation haha
https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/bw6sek/
https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/b7rwbx/
> 1/ native C++/Rust code, no JS tags on page that have zero integrity. That means ability to use SGX/TrustZone to check integrity and develop private user score from all sensor inputs in the enclave; ...
> We already have to deal w/ fraud. That is inherent in any system with users and revenue shares or grants. We do it better via C++ and (under way) SGX or TrustZone integrity checking + OS sensor APIs, vs today’s antifraud scripts that are routinely fooled.
> What Brave offers that's far better than today's joke of an antifraud system for ads is as follows: 1/ integrity-checked open source native code, which cannot be fooled by other JS on page; ... (1) requires SGX or ARM equivalent, widespread on mobile.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/9yys6b/
https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/97trex/comment/...
> Part of the roadmap (details in update) is a BAT SDK. Obviously it would be open source, but more: we would require Secure Remote Attestation (Intel SGX broken but ARM TrustZone as used by Trustonic may be ok) to prove integrity of the SDK code in app.
And that should be the main distinction between browsers today - relience on ads for monetization has profound impact on incentives.
There are browsers that are directly (or indirectly) ad-supported, and those which are not. The second group is very small though - how many browsers you can buy today?
Does buying the whole device counts?
What has Brave ever done that comes even close to trying to DRM the entire web?
They gave you WEI.
Do you trust:
- Google, who's trying to DRM the web by building a majority-market-share browser engine and jamming their DRM into it, or
- Brave, who takes that same Google browser engine, _supposedly_ strips "junk" out (but based on their own arbitrary selection criteria) while also adding crypto and rewriting links to add their own affiliate trackers?
If you answered one of those two, I'd ask why. And if you said "because what other option is there", _then_ you'd finally be asking the right question.
"just fork Firefox" lol
Why did Opera, Microsoft, Vivaldi and Brave all base off Chromium if Gecko was so good?
*I do use Firefox
On Chromium I can't do that.
And MS uses Chromium because Google tampered with YouTube to hinder Edge. MS just gave up.
I would bet any money that the reason why they chose Chromium, and did not choose Gecko, was performance-related. Blink is technologically superior to all the others. And between Blink, Webkit, and Gecko: Gecko is the worst-performing choice. I imagine if they did not fork Chromium, they would likely have forked Webkit instead.
"That's a self-fulfilling issue, though."
"If no one is using Gecko why does Gecko have reason to improve performance."
"If they had good performance engineers it wouldn't matter if they picked the "worst performing", because they could work to improve it and prove they had good performance engineers."
"Fast" is the second priority listed in Brave's webpage ("Secure, Fast, & Private"), so it is very easy to assume that it was one of their reasons for making a fork of a browser in the first place. It is more than fair to criticize them for taking the ("paved with bad intentions") easy road in that stated priority rather than accepting the true engineering challenge of doing that work on the underdog engine in current last place. (The basic through line of lamenting that they didn't use Gecko: If they had succeeded in that challenge, they would have won a lot more acclaim and done a lot more overall good for the web than anything they have done in forking Blink.)
I don't like BAT crap either.
Re WEI. I'm afraid that many websites will start demanding it.
I don't know why Google didn't and doesn't prioritize it. I might have accidentally switched to chrome years ago if they had a TST-style plugin. TST fully recovered (eventually) after plugin ragnarok and Firefox's bad and opinionated UI, and can be made perfectly nice with CSS. For me it ranks as one of the best Japanese things.
TST has 2/3 the number of installs that translation has.
Entirely volunteer maintained, there is no for-profit entity behind it looking to do crypto referrals or ad swapping or anything like that.
I wonder if there is a list, not on twitter, about what precisely was removed instead of just a twitter blurb. Ops! <esc>:%s/twitter/x/g
Orion also has an iOS version, and afaik they are also working on making a Windows version as well
Orion has Keychain support.
Orion has auto-filling 2FA codes.
Orion has iCloud sync.
If any one of those are not working as expected you should report it to orionfeedback.org
Private relay is an Apple service that is not available to third party apps.
[1] https://explore.whatismybrowser.com/useragents/explore/softw...
Each has a special purpose. I stay logged into Google on Google Chrome and that is for Google auth and personal gmail. I don't search for anything outside the norm there.
I develop using Chromium and use it for general purpose browsing, logged in to some sites.
And I use Firefox for casual browsing, youtube, and never log in to much.
Brave I mostly use on phone, occasionally Chrome.
Is this unusual? I keep seeing people talking about "switching browsers" but I haven't seen the need to discard one to take up another.
On mobile i used Opera mini for years, it had a serverside precompression of media and overall was really the fastest browser i have ever used to render a webpage. I don't know why i ditched it and don't know if it's still the same. Back then i just found out they have so many different little Opera browsers for mobile, that i was confused a lot by that scheme. But the performance of that one with serverside rendering was brutal. Of course: a security nightmare.
No. And I believe Brave is missing a huge opportunity here.
Brave even blocks Twitch and Youtube ads for me without addons.
Yes, I did have to spend time turning off the crypto stuff in it. But when tweaked it is an excellent browser.
Yea that’s the thing what browser is excellent out of the box? FF has telemetry on by default and shoves pocket down ur throat. It’s just a lame recycled take cuz like urself, no Brave supporter refutes the crypto bullshit
I am about as anti-blockchain as they come, but the reality is that blockchain has one very specific use case - hostile, unauthenticated users, who need to prove that work has been done. That's the model of a website serving customers - you have no idea who they are, they could be trying to lie to you, etc. It's at least not a bad fit for the technology.
At minimum they're trying something new and I think that's extremely worthwhile - it's not like their coin is their only asset, they are trying to actually sell value to customers. I believe Brave is far more mission aligned and practical than Mozilla is. They've already done a far better job around things like their VPN, TOR mode, etc.
I don't really care at all about webkit or v8 being used everywhere nearly as much as I care about web standards and an organization having the power to push back or contribute to them. I don't think the benefits of having competing JS engines really warrant much effort relative to what I'm advocating for.
I completely uninstall Chrome because of auto updates. I tried to disallow auto update with most of tutorials on net but nothing worked. So I kicked Chrome.
Also everything is open source you can see for yourself.
The problem is Google, being such a large company is far to powerful to compete with. Not to mention they own a lot of the products on the web that other engines need to be compatible with to be usable.
What should be done is Google should be broken up so it's no longer one company leading this thing but I can't see that.
That's just moving around terms. I think it's widely known that almost everyone knows all their devices are in some magical way connected to each other.
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/ladybird-a-truly-new-web-brow...
Even Blink, the rendering engine of Chromium, is a fork of the WebCore component of WebKit, which was originally a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE.
EDIT: TIL about Ladybird, not sure how accurate its rendering is.
https://awesomekling.github.io/assets/ladybird-proggit.png
It's impressive, but it also shows how hard and everchanging this sort of task is. I don't see Youtube or Google Docs as always being reliable.
LibWeb/Ladybird was made by a handful of people working part time on it over a couple of years. During that time, they managed to implement absolutely everything from image decoding to font rendering to javascript parsing and execution, all FROM SCRATCH.
Stop trying to twist it as if they applied tons of resources and came up short. Before last month they had nobody working on it full time.
They don’t have anywhere near the corporate support real browsers do, it’s just chasing cars.
They don’t have the HR to scale, some day they’ll get Google Docs to work “hurray we did it, looks like it is possible” then they’ll try to get Spotify working. Next thing you know Google Docs will break again. It’s gonna be that times 100+ other apps that people use.
You can call me pessimistic, hell even antagonist, I don’t care. I’m being honest in order to outline how unrealistic it’s become to write a browser from scratch for the modern web.
Andreas or whatever his name will get the apps he wants working and maybe some more, but it will NEVER be something people can just jump on and expect to use as a functional browser. It’ll be some Reddit Discord HTML4.5 viewer.
I’d say if they wanted to make something usable, they’d fork WebKit and bolt on SpiderMonkey, QuickJS, JerryScript or whatever and build up from there. But they care too much about their stupid pride “look what we did”. And that “roll your own” nonsense isn’t attractive to corporate adoption unless they’re some project like OpenBSD that does it with a real purpose, not HN front page gratitude. SerenityOS is advertised, not as a microkernel, not architecture portability , but as a “90s operating system”. That is some hipster bs that only depicts the Amish rate of development Ladybird will take unless they really think about the goal they want to achieve. Because right now, they want a usable browser and they want it from scratch and I can only see one of those happening.
Linux might’ve initially been “Just for fun” but now they clearly mean business
A specialized one? Not so. You don't need to fork chromium to render some HTML on the screen of a specialised hardware. Nor do you need to fork chromium for rendering the "about.html/css" in your mobile app. And so on. For some reason people do this anyway: good chance your smart fridge is running full chromium to show its temp and some images. But it could use a simple rendering engine optimized for embedded hardware just fine.
Modern browsers support a lot of most definitely not modern features. I believe it would be feasible to create an entirely new browser from scratch if those older features were ignored. Take for instance Mozilla's experimental Servo rendering engine and Deno for ECMAScript - these were created in mere years with (relatively) small teams. I would be quite comfortable using a web browser that supported, say, CSS Flexbox and Grid quite well but didn't implement every historical way of centering text on a page.
With HTML <5 (and excluding XHTML from the discussion) the browser has no clue what all those <div> and <table> elements are supposed to be, so CSS and JS are necessary to reproduce basic things like screenreader flow for all but the most basic page layouts.
Ironically, the opportunity for users' browser to apply stylesheets on generic, semantically meaningful sites was one of the original concepts behind CSS (hence 'cascading' in the acronym - the browser takes precedence), which is now usually employed to overwrite the browsers' defaults!
Stopped reading right here.
If you want tons and tons of customization, it won't be your thing. Would recommend Vivaldi.
So yes, the Brave project is much more than a reskin, or rebrand. They put way too much effort in for that. But the intent of the communication, that Brave absolutely depends on Google, is valid nevertheless.
Good on battery laptop too, there's a cool little feature to disable fancy stuff like smooth scrolling / fluid motion on battery or even a certain battery percentage.
Brave and Vivaldi are exactly that, at least they could use Ungloogled Chromium codebase instead of repatching things.