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Comment by armitron | Hacker News Reader

Isn't Chromium open source? How hard would it be to fork and restore Manifest V2? I'd expect the functionality to be fairly isolated so that easily tracking upstream becomes manageable.

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Brave is a Chrominum fork that has pledged to keep supporting manifest V2 (at least partially) beyond the removal in 2025: https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

They don't have a separate addon marketplace. The browser may still support the API but distributing the addon will be a problem.

We need an altstore

Brave's shady crypto strategies [1] and history of injecting headers and affiliate codes in your navigation [2] makes it an untrustworthy browser to me.

[1] https://coinfomania.com/brave-browser-users-monthly-bat-rewa...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-aff...

Do you also say that about Firefox's shenanigans, like that one time when they shared the browsing history without user consent?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox

How about more recently, when they enabled “privacy-preserving attribution” without user consent?

https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/

It's like them, after all, they also include a unique ID with each download, that then they send in their opt-out telemetry.

How about Firefox's sponsored links in the New Tab page?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy

I am asking because this community has a serious double-standard. This isn't about any “shady crypto” or affiliate codes being inserted, issues which were promptly fixed. It's about something else entirely, and people are being disingenuous about it.

I think you underestimate how complex browsers are, it's not as if it's just an isolated part of the browser, it's huge and full of moving parts, good luck maintaining your own fork of Chrome especially if you want to also get security updates.

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