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What would you have the Brave team do? Create a new html rendering engine from scratch? That is an incredibly challenging engineering project that would probabl

What would you have the Brave team do? Create a new html rendering engine from scratch? That is an incredibly challenging engineering project that would probably require years and many tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to do well, and what would be the benefit to Brave's users and investors? It would just lead to loads of performance and compatibility issues, and it is fundamentally irrelevant to the core value proposition of Brave, which is to monetize ads on behalf of users and content creators.

emptysongglass 7y ago
No, of course not. I would have had them base on Gecko.
- 1_player 7y ago
  Don't quote me on that, but Gecko must not be the easiest engine to build upon. How many browsers out there are based on Gecko, apart from Firefox? AFAIK the only choice nowadays is between Chromium and WebKit. I honestly would like to see more WebKit based browsers instead.
  - judge2020 7y ago
    I wonder if Webkit still have any resources behind using it on Windows since the documentation for building it[0] still says "Windows 8.1" (and I can't find links to the documentation or website SVN repo). 0: https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/ https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/
    - BrendanEich 7y ago
      We evaluated WebKit too. Nope, for the Windows gap you cite, among others (e.g., no free-as-in-beer DRM plugin).
- judge2020 7y ago
  As I understand it, Gecko is much harder to work with, so it would take a lot of time to make something like brave compatible with both Chromium and Gecko/Firefox's APIs (or to even only move to Gecko/FF). See the following comment from [0]: > More significantly, in my book: it’s difficult to use Gecko and Firefox in these ways. Even the simplest app requires substantial and arcane boilerplate. And the docs are comprehensive but outdated. The platform may be powerful, but it’s hard to use. There's also now qbrt[1], but the readme itself recommends not using it, and it was last updated 7 months ago. If this matures to a usable state, I can see Brave developers considering it. 0: https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/ https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/ 1: https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt
- jammygit 7y ago
  I suspect that Eich of all people was informed about the pros and cons of Gecko. Then again, I guess it could have just been bad blood
- BrendanEich 7y ago
  We started on Gecko -- see https://brianbondy.com/blog/174/the-road-to-brave-10 https://brianbondy.com/blog/174/the-road-to-brave-10. It lost on many dimensions, as it has for other newer browsers. Your desire for us or anyone to die on the Gecko hill would, had we acted on it, simply have helped Google cement the Chrome (not chromium) hegemony. The crucial battle right now is a layer up, at ads/donations/subscriptions/privacy -- where Firefox has been slow and weak vs. Brave and Safari. There will be time for better engines later, once Google loses share due to innovations that attack its deep conflicts of interest with its users, along with likely prosecution of the open antitrust case.

emptysongglass 7y ago

No, of course not. I would have had them base on Gecko.

1_player 7y ago
Don't quote me on that, but Gecko must not be the easiest engine to build upon. How many browsers out there are based on Gecko, apart from Firefox? AFAIK the only choice nowadays is between Chromium and WebKit. I honestly would like to see more WebKit based browsers instead.
- judge2020 7y ago
  I wonder if Webkit still have any resources behind using it on Windows since the documentation for building it[0] still says "Windows 8.1" (and I can't find links to the documentation or website SVN repo). 0: https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/ https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/
  - BrendanEich 7y ago
    We evaluated WebKit too. Nope, for the Windows gap you cite, among others (e.g., no free-as-in-beer DRM plugin).
judge2020 7y ago
As I understand it, Gecko is much harder to work with, so it would take a lot of time to make something like brave compatible with both Chromium and Gecko/Firefox's APIs (or to even only move to Gecko/FF). See the following comment from [0]: > More significantly, in my book: it’s difficult to use Gecko and Firefox in these ways. Even the simplest app requires substantial and arcane boilerplate. And the docs are comprehensive but outdated. The platform may be powerful, but it’s hard to use. There's also now qbrt[1], but the readme itself recommends not using it, and it was last updated 7 months ago. If this matures to a usable state, I can see Brave developers considering it. 0: https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/ https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/ 1: https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt
jammygit 7y ago
I suspect that Eich of all people was informed about the pros and cons of Gecko. Then again, I guess it could have just been bad blood
BrendanEich 7y ago
We started on Gecko -- see https://brianbondy.com/blog/174/the-road-to-brave-10 https://brianbondy.com/blog/174/the-road-to-brave-10. It lost on many dimensions, as it has for other newer browsers. Your desire for us or anyone to die on the Gecko hill would, had we acted on it, simply have helped Google cement the Chrome (not chromium) hegemony. The crucial battle right now is a layer up, at ads/donations/subscriptions/privacy -- where Firefox has been slow and weak vs. Brave and Safari. There will be time for better engines later, once Google loses share due to innovations that attack its deep conflicts of interest with its users, along with likely prosecution of the open antitrust case.