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Comment by m_a_g | Hacker News Reader

I tried migrating from Chrome to Firefox with the recent developments. The user experience of Mozilla could be better, imo.

After not liking Firefox, I tried four more browsers: Orion, Arch, Brave, and Vivaldi. I finally landed on using Brave.

After you turn off everything related to crypto, it becomes a great and user-friendly browser with adversarial interoperability with Chrome. It's the only browser with an actual chance of beating Chrome by convincing its users to migrate.

I'm hoping they can continue maintaining the Chromium fork (it's an actual fork, by the way), as it'll get harder and harder as it diverges more and more.

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It's not an actual fork, by the way. Them saying so doesn't make it so. It uses chromium as a base and applies quite a lot of patches. Otherwise every chromium based browser is a fork, despite all pulling in more or less all upstream patches?

More importantly: being a fork or not doesn't matter! As long as the Brave team is not able to write their own browser engine that could compete with chromium, they are stuck with whatever development goes into chromium. "Oh it's just patches and things", but it won't be forever, and we WILL see work go into chromium that is deep enough to be difficult to untangle and subtly designed to to force you into whatever path google wants. There will be a day where Brave is unable to degoogle chromium to a useful point. Participating in a chromium browser is only helping google, and there's no way around that.

OK it's a branch.

… Taking an upstream project, and then applying your own patches to it, along with a commitment to not ship anti-user changes (like manifest V3) is a fork by any objective definition.

I find nothing saying they didn't implement manifest V3. The only info I can find from them is that their own adblocker, which isn't an extension, will continue to work[0] and that, for example, ublock will continue to work as long as google doesn't remove manifest v2 support.[0] Seems odd to me that what Google does to manifest V2 matters at all to Brave, if Brave is indeed a fork and not just chromium with a skin.

0: https://twitter.com/brave/status/1574822799700541446

1: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1534893414579249152

What's wrong with the user experience? To me they're all the same there: you have tabs and a toolbar and the rest is the webpage. Little else I actually interface with in a normal day.

Maybe I'm naive, but Brave doing anything with crypto doesn't inspire confidence in their long-term product vision. Why does a browser need a business model?

Why do developers need to be paid?

What was your experience with Orion and why do you think it does not have a chance of convincing Chrome users to migrate?

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