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I personally think they should think about maintaining a chromium fork. It will relieve a lot of resources to be spent on other things like user experience, an

I personally think they should think about maintaining a chromium fork. It will relieve a lot of resources to be spent on other things like user experience, and they will benefit from all the development resources devoted to chromium, while being able to remove anything they don't like, like MV3 limitations on adblockers. I really like what brave is doing, I switched because I lost hope Mozilla is going to do anything, they are funded by google, and therefore afraid to do anything impactful. While brave has privacy by default, has an independent search engine, an independent ad network(that is privacy friendly and isn't enabled by default), and they aren't afraid to do anything against big tech, like banning AMP, removing social trackers and other things. Brave is almost what Mozilla should've been.

iggldiggl 4y ago
> while being able to remove anything they don't like, like MV3 limitations on adblockers. … which might actually not be as easy as it sounds. Sure, as long as Chrome/Blink internally retains MV2 compatibility behind a configuration setting for enterprise customers you job is easy – just hard-code that setting back to enabled for everybody instead of just enterprise users and you're done. However once Google starts ripping out the MV2-related code from the Chrome/Blink code base, all that code suddenly becomes your responsibility to maintain – and from that point on there's always the risk that Google suddenly decides do to some large scale refactoring or internal architectural change that radically conflicts with your attempts to maintain those old features alive. Once you reach that point, you've then got the choice to either spend ever increasing amounts of effort on maintaining those features on top of the current code base, doing a hard fork and therefore having to suddenly maintain the whole shebang, which would be an even larger effort, or instead giving up and dropping those features after all.
- asddubs 4y ago
  not to mention that google still controls the chrome extension marketplace, and will stop accepting mv2 extensions by the end of the year. So not only do you have to maintain the mv2 related code, and keep reintegrating it whenever google moves a bunch of code around (which from what I hear they do quite aggressively) or hard fork, you also need to maintain your own repository of browser extensions, and get developers to actually develop them for your browser specifically, rather than just for chrome, too.
- fariszr 4y ago
  Would maintaining such a feature be harder than maintaining a complete browser engine?

iggldiggl 4y ago

> while being able to remove anything they don't like, like MV3 limitations on adblockers. … which might actually not be as easy as it sounds. Sure, as long as Chrome/Blink internally retains MV2 compatibility behind a configuration setting for enterprise customers you job is easy – just hard-code that setting back to enabled for everybody instead of just enterprise users and you're done. However once Google starts ripping out the MV2-related code from the Chrome/Blink code base, all that code suddenly becomes your responsibility to maintain – and from that point on there's always the risk that Google suddenly decides do to some large scale refactoring or internal architectural change that radically conflicts with your attempts to maintain those old features alive. Once you reach that point, you've then got the choice to either spend ever increasing amounts of effort on maintaining those features on top of the current code base, doing a hard fork and therefore having to suddenly maintain the whole shebang, which would be an even larger effort, or instead giving up and dropping those features after all.

asddubs 4y ago
not to mention that google still controls the chrome extension marketplace, and will stop accepting mv2 extensions by the end of the year. So not only do you have to maintain the mv2 related code, and keep reintegrating it whenever google moves a bunch of code around (which from what I hear they do quite aggressively) or hard fork, you also need to maintain your own repository of browser extensions, and get developers to actually develop them for your browser specifically, rather than just for chrome, too.
fariszr 4y ago
Would maintaining such a feature be harder than maintaining a complete browser engine?