I'm still surprised they did not just fork Firefox. Did they ever do a write up as to why they went with a Chromium codebase?
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.)
"just fork Firefox" lol
Why did Opera, Microsoft, Vivaldi and Brave all base off Chromium if Gecko was so good?
*I do use Firefox
And MS uses Chromium because Google tampered with YouTube to hinder Edge. MS just gave up.
On Chromium I can't do that.