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Comment by soupbowl | Hacker News Reader

They've been handling it fine so far.

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.

> but adding their own bloat.

Brave runs faster and consumes less memory for me. Perhaps their additions aren't bloat at all?

>Brave and Vivaldi are mere reskins, and they don't do anything more than Ungoogled Chromium do, but adding their own bloat.

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.

> Brave and Vivaldi are mere reskins

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.

What is this appeal to authority about?

He is a guy. He cannot maintain Chromium with too little of a team

Yet, you criticize this post instead of the GP who made a claim completely without evidence.

I hear he is 50 ft tall, and can shoot lasers out his arse.

This should be the top comment. Following Mv3 changes and being unable to do by the user is a clear indicator they are just a reskin.

What exactly do you mean by "modify Mv3"? Brave committed to continuing support for Mv2 [1]. Adding native adblocking capabilities is also definitely a more complex change than just bundling an adblocking extension.

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...

> Brave and Vivaldi are mere reskins, and they don't do anything more than Ungoogled Chromium do, but adding their own bloat.

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".

Reskin, with default installed plugins.

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)

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