8 ms·

Fork or not, they obviously integrated almost everything from the upstream. Keeping a long-running fork that's increasingly diverging is not a simple task. Doe

Fork or not, they obviously integrated almost everything from the upstream. Keeping a long-running fork that's increasingly diverging is not a simple task. Does Brave have the man-power to sustain their fork if it diverges sufficiently that they can no longer integrate upstream changes? EDIT: My broader point being, Brave's mission is less compatible with Google's and as such it's unfortunate they aren't basing Brave on Gecko. I know the whole history with Brendan Eich and Mozilla, as well as the problems with extending and embedding Gecko. Still, seems like an unfortunate outcome

deleted 3y ago
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soupbowl 3y ago
They've been handling it fine so far.
- evasb 3y ago
  They are handling "fine" because they only do low complexity changes. I remember that people asked, some years ago, to Brave team add add-ons in their Android reskin and they, after some time, rejected because they said that what Kiwi Browser were doing was too complex for them because it required too many patches. They were not even able to modify Mv3, they just said that they already added an adblock. Brave and Vivaldi are mere reskins, and they don't do anything more than Ungoogled Chromium do, but adding their own bloat.
  - dimitrios1 3y ago
    > but adding their own bloat. Brave runs faster and consumes less memory for me. Perhaps their additions aren't bloat at all?
  - rejectfinite 3y ago
    >Brave and Vivaldi are mere reskins, and they don't do anything more than Ungoogled Chromium do, but adding their own bloat. Brave has an excellent adblocker with Brave Shields built in and now just added vertical tabs native. Vivaldi has the best tab and window management in a browser by far, and even has an internal command line/launcher in pressing F2.
  - joshmanders 3y ago
    > Brave and Vivaldi are mere reskins I can tell by this line that you're biased against Brave because you wouldn't have said this if you had you know, even read the title of this discussion, let alone clicked the link and read the tweet. > They are handling "fine" because they only do low complexity changes. You realize the author of the tweet, who is the CEO of Brave is Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript and one of the main developers for Netscape Browser (arguably one of the reasons we have the web today), co-founder and former CEO of Mozilla... I'm sure maintaining a fork of Chromium is not a massive undertaking for them.
    - Knee_Pain 3y ago
      What is this appeal to authority about? He is a guy. He cannot maintain Chromium with too little of a team
      - aydyn 3y ago
        Yet, you criticize this post instead of the GP who made a claim completely without evidence.
      - deafpolygon 3y ago
        I hear he is 50 ft tall, and can shoot lasers out his arse.
  - lostmsu 3y ago
    This should be the top comment. Following Mv3 changes and being unable to do by the user is a clear indicator they are just a reskin.
  - antonok 3y ago
    What exactly do you mean by "modify Mv3"? Brave committed to continuing support for Mv2 [1]. Adding native adblocking capabilities is also definitely a more complex change than just bundling an adblocking extension. Brave maintains patches in a very specific way [2] to ensure maintainability. My impression is that Kiwi's patches are structured in a way that technically works but isn't easy to keep rebasing on top of upstream changes. Kiwi's been chronically outdated compared to upstream Chromium whereas Brave generally gets updated within a day of a corresponding Chromium release. [1] https://twitter.com/brave/status/1574822799700541446 https://twitter.com/brave/status/1574822799700541446 [2] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Patching-Chromium https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Patching-Chromiu...
  - soundnote 3y ago
    > Brave and Vivaldi are mere reskins, and they don't do anything more than Ungoogled Chromium do, but adding their own bloat. At minimum both add an encrypted, independent sync service in lieu of Google's one. And of course a ton of useful new UI customizations, built in adblockers and other mere reskin stuff. I, too, hear "built-in adblocker written in Rust" and think "reskin".
    - kaba0 3y ago
      Reskin, with default installed plugins.
- sdesol 3y ago
  They seem to be throwing decent resources at this as well. If you you click on "+500 code churn" in the contributors chart at https://devboard.gitsense.com/brave?repos=brave-browser,brave-core https://devboard.gitsense.com/brave?repos=brave-browser,brav... for brave-browser and brave-core, you can see there is a decent number of contributors. I would say there are probably 30+ full time employees working on this. And if you look at the merged pull requests, at https://reviews.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=merged%3Atrue%2Bpull-age%3A%3C%3D120&t=crc-insights&tb=closed&v=brave%2Fbrave-browser%20----%20brave%2Fbrave-core%3A%3Agithub%3Abrave%2Fbrave-browser%2Cgithub%3Abrave%2Fbrave-core%3A%3A%3A%3A%3A%3A1690489346472 https://reviews.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=merged%3Atrue... you can see many contributors are 1 year+ contributors (look at the gift icon for this information) Full Disclosure: This is my tool
gochi 3y ago
It's far more work to do what they currently do which is nitpick the things they don't like to remove/disable/replace them. Increasing divergence is a benefit for them here, but the main concern with chromium forks isn't the effort required it's the lack of coherent vision. Except for maybe Arc, but that's closed source, the rest of them feel like chrome but dirtier. Giant bing buttons, crypto wallets, new tab ads, it's absurd how much of them are willing to sacrifice the user experience. To the point where I can understand why a user would just stick with chrome despite what they're doing.
- kaba0 3y ago
  Can they implement some new web standard in a shifted away codebase? Or fix a zero day? You seem to vastly underestimate the complexity of a browser engine. Just letting it stay afloat is a huge task in itself — remember, Microsoft itself decided against doing so. They can maintain a soft fork, but from a much smaller company, it is not a trivial feat at all.
augusto-moura 3y ago
Most of the divergences are already compile flags or command line flags on upstream. They are just disabling it by default. Is not a Brave-only thing, but different browsers have different settings disabled, the community that compiles the browser from source also pushes those features to be conditionally added. Eg. Debian, Arch or other distros, could have WEI disabled on their chromium distribution, forks like Edge and Vivaldi could disable GAIA, etc. Just give a look at the divergence issues and the PRs solving them [1], most of them are just single file or small changes to compilation/default flags [1]: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove) https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
- fabrice_d 3y ago
  They have much more changes than just compile flags. Here's the repo where they maintain their patch set: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches
  - augusto-moura 3y ago
    If you open the patches and see their content, a good part of them are just one liners, or small file changes
    - bravetraveler 3y ago
      Cumulatively they have 8879 lines of patches, the largest being 172 /tmp/tmp.KVE7aSEvue/brave-core/patches $ wc -l *.patch | sort -rh | head 8879 total 172 third_party-blink-renderer-modules-webgl-webgl_rendering_context_base.cc.patch 112 chrome-BUILD.gn.patch 104 chrome-installer-linux-debian-build.sh.patch 76 chrome-android-java-AndroidManifest.xml.patch 72 components-vector_icons-aggregate_vector_icons.py.patch 68 chrome-android-BUILD.gn.patch 61 chrome-installer-linux-BUILD.gn.patch 57 chrome-browser-resources-settings-privacy_page-personalization_options.html.patch 55 net-socket-socks5_client_socket.cc.patch Not insurmountable, but not as easily hand-waved, either. One might say -- "but a lot of that's just context!" Those are significant lines of code that these changes must play nicely with. There's actually more, these numbers do a disservice to everyone
dimitrios1 3y ago
I believe the cofounder and former CEO of Mozilla and creator of the world's most popular web language can maintain a web browser.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
  Also the creator of JavaScript
  - berkes 3y ago
    > creator of the world's most popular web language
    - runjake 3y ago
      Technically, HTML would be the world's most popular web language and I presume TedDoesntTalk was making a quip.
      - dimitrios1 3y ago
        Intentions matter. HTML is a presentation layer at this point. No one "programs" in HTML in as much as they have to, if they do it at all (delegating it to their favorite framework to generate most of it). Most of programming for the web is done in Javascript. I like quips as much as the next guy or gal, but it feels like people are being intentionally obtuse in this instance.
    - travisgriggs 3y ago
      Maybe "Also the creator of JavaScript" is a tongue-in-cheek contention with assuming that JavaScript and "the world's most popular language" are one and the same. Popular itself is a squirrelly word here. Popular can simply refer to as "most used" (by this metric, Xi and Modi would be the world's most popular leaders, since they lead the world's biggest populations), or it could be "most liked" by some other measure (I have no analogous leader to nominate here).
smsm42 3y ago
That's how it should work. Almost everything, except for the bad parts.
3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
What'd be the point of basing it on Gecko. Firefox exists.
- JeremyNT 3y ago
  What's the point of basing it on Chromium when Chrome exists? Brave seems intent on actively trying to sabotage the Google ad distribution business model and inject their own ad distribution system. It's kind of weird to base their browser on the browser maintained by an entity with objectives that are at such odds with their own.
  - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
    Because it selectively merges only patches which don't affect privacy, security, questionable standards, and adds new features. Honestly I don't know why you're even asking this. It's literally the whole thread is about this: it's not a reskin, it's a fork. Is it "kind of weird" that it's at odds with Chrome's goals? No. Because if it wasn't at odds, it wouldn't exist, these people would be just Chrome/Chromium contributors. Chromium is open-source because they forked WebKit, and WebKit forked KHTML. Google were at odds with Apple when they forked WebKit to Blink, but the FOSS license allowed it. And lo and behold it has allowed it again. What's surprising here?
    - pkaye 3y ago
      > Because it selectively merges only patches which don't affect privacy, security, questionable standards, and adds new features. If they used Gecko then these issues wouldn't exist and they would just have to add new features.
      - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
        The point is to have Blink without the burden of Google's commercial interests. Firefox is already Gecko without the burden of Google's commercial interests (well, almost). Not sure why is everyone trying to sell Gecko here. Isn't Mozilla a good custodian to Gecko? Clearly if I take your opinion at face value, no. But why? Google is clearly not a good custodian for the most popular browser, their private interests are all over it. But the core engine is good.
boringuser2 3y ago
This is already a solved issue. They don't maintain changes that take too much manpower to maintain. You have to pick your battles.

deleted 3y ago

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soupbowl 3y ago

They've been handling it fine so far.

evasb 3y ago
They are handling "fine" because they only do low complexity changes. I remember that people asked, some years ago, to Brave team add add-ons in their Android reskin and they, after some time, rejected because they said that what Kiwi Browser were doing was too complex for them because it required too many patches. They were not even able to modify Mv3, they just said that they already added an adblock. Brave and Vivaldi are mere reskins, and they don't do anything more than Ungoogled Chromium do, but adding their own bloat.
- dimitrios1 3y ago
  > but adding their own bloat. Brave runs faster and consumes less memory for me. Perhaps their additions aren't bloat at all?
- rejectfinite 3y ago
  >Brave and Vivaldi are mere reskins, and they don't do anything more than Ungoogled Chromium do, but adding their own bloat. Brave has an excellent adblocker with Brave Shields built in and now just added vertical tabs native. Vivaldi has the best tab and window management in a browser by far, and even has an internal command line/launcher in pressing F2.
- joshmanders 3y ago
  > Brave and Vivaldi are mere reskins I can tell by this line that you're biased against Brave because you wouldn't have said this if you had you know, even read the title of this discussion, let alone clicked the link and read the tweet. > They are handling "fine" because they only do low complexity changes. You realize the author of the tweet, who is the CEO of Brave is Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript and one of the main developers for Netscape Browser (arguably one of the reasons we have the web today), co-founder and former CEO of Mozilla... I'm sure maintaining a fork of Chromium is not a massive undertaking for them.
  - Knee_Pain 3y ago
    What is this appeal to authority about? He is a guy. He cannot maintain Chromium with too little of a team
    - aydyn 3y ago
      Yet, you criticize this post instead of the GP who made a claim completely without evidence.
    - deafpolygon 3y ago
      I hear he is 50 ft tall, and can shoot lasers out his arse.
- lostmsu 3y ago
  This should be the top comment. Following Mv3 changes and being unable to do by the user is a clear indicator they are just a reskin.
- antonok 3y ago
  What exactly do you mean by "modify Mv3"? Brave committed to continuing support for Mv2 [1]. Adding native adblocking capabilities is also definitely a more complex change than just bundling an adblocking extension. Brave maintains patches in a very specific way [2] to ensure maintainability. My impression is that Kiwi's patches are structured in a way that technically works but isn't easy to keep rebasing on top of upstream changes. Kiwi's been chronically outdated compared to upstream Chromium whereas Brave generally gets updated within a day of a corresponding Chromium release. [1] https://twitter.com/brave/status/1574822799700541446 https://twitter.com/brave/status/1574822799700541446 [2] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Patching-Chromium https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Patching-Chromiu...
- soundnote 3y ago
  > Brave and Vivaldi are mere reskins, and they don't do anything more than Ungoogled Chromium do, but adding their own bloat. At minimum both add an encrypted, independent sync service in lieu of Google's one. And of course a ton of useful new UI customizations, built in adblockers and other mere reskin stuff. I, too, hear "built-in adblocker written in Rust" and think "reskin".
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Reskin, with default installed plugins.
sdesol 3y ago
They seem to be throwing decent resources at this as well. If you you click on "+500 code churn" in the contributors chart at https://devboard.gitsense.com/brave?repos=brave-browser,brave-core https://devboard.gitsense.com/brave?repos=brave-browser,brav... for brave-browser and brave-core, you can see there is a decent number of contributors. I would say there are probably 30+ full time employees working on this. And if you look at the merged pull requests, at https://reviews.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=merged%3Atrue%2Bpull-age%3A%3C%3D120&t=crc-insights&tb=closed&v=brave%2Fbrave-browser%20----%20brave%2Fbrave-core%3A%3Agithub%3Abrave%2Fbrave-browser%2Cgithub%3Abrave%2Fbrave-core%3A%3A%3A%3A%3A%3A1690489346472 https://reviews.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=merged%3Atrue... you can see many contributors are 1 year+ contributors (look at the gift icon for this information) Full Disclosure: This is my tool

gochi 3y ago

It's far more work to do what they currently do which is nitpick the things they don't like to remove/disable/replace them. Increasing divergence is a benefit for them here, but the main concern with chromium forks isn't the effort required it's the lack of coherent vision. Except for maybe Arc, but that's closed source, the rest of them feel like chrome but dirtier. Giant bing buttons, crypto wallets, new tab ads, it's absurd how much of them are willing to sacrifice the user experience. To the point where I can understand why a user would just stick with chrome despite what they're doing.

kaba0 3y ago
Can they implement some new web standard in a shifted away codebase? Or fix a zero day? You seem to vastly underestimate the complexity of a browser engine. Just letting it stay afloat is a huge task in itself — remember, Microsoft itself decided against doing so. They can maintain a soft fork, but from a much smaller company, it is not a trivial feat at all.

augusto-moura 3y ago

Most of the divergences are already compile flags or command line flags on upstream. They are just disabling it by default. Is not a Brave-only thing, but different browsers have different settings disabled, the community that compiles the browser from source also pushes those features to be conditionally added. Eg. Debian, Arch or other distros, could have WEI disabled on their chromium distribution, forks like Edge and Vivaldi could disable GAIA, etc. Just give a look at the divergence issues and the PRs solving them [1], most of them are just single file or small changes to compilation/default flags [1]: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove) https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...

fabrice_d 3y ago
They have much more changes than just compile flags. Here's the repo where they maintain their patch set: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches
- augusto-moura 3y ago
  If you open the patches and see their content, a good part of them are just one liners, or small file changes
  - bravetraveler 3y ago
    Cumulatively they have 8879 lines of patches, the largest being 172 /tmp/tmp.KVE7aSEvue/brave-core/patches $ wc -l *.patch | sort -rh | head 8879 total 172 third_party-blink-renderer-modules-webgl-webgl_rendering_context_base.cc.patch 112 chrome-BUILD.gn.patch 104 chrome-installer-linux-debian-build.sh.patch 76 chrome-android-java-AndroidManifest.xml.patch 72 components-vector_icons-aggregate_vector_icons.py.patch 68 chrome-android-BUILD.gn.patch 61 chrome-installer-linux-BUILD.gn.patch 57 chrome-browser-resources-settings-privacy_page-personalization_options.html.patch 55 net-socket-socks5_client_socket.cc.patch Not insurmountable, but not as easily hand-waved, either. One might say -- "but a lot of that's just context!" Those are significant lines of code that these changes must play nicely with. There's actually more, these numbers do a disservice to everyone

dimitrios1 3y ago

I believe the cofounder and former CEO of Mozilla and creator of the world's most popular web language can maintain a web browser.

TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
Also the creator of JavaScript
- berkes 3y ago
  > creator of the world's most popular web language
  - runjake 3y ago
    Technically, HTML would be the world's most popular web language and I presume TedDoesntTalk was making a quip.
    - dimitrios1 3y ago
      Intentions matter. HTML is a presentation layer at this point. No one "programs" in HTML in as much as they have to, if they do it at all (delegating it to their favorite framework to generate most of it). Most of programming for the web is done in Javascript. I like quips as much as the next guy or gal, but it feels like people are being intentionally obtuse in this instance.
  - travisgriggs 3y ago
    Maybe "Also the creator of JavaScript" is a tongue-in-cheek contention with assuming that JavaScript and "the world's most popular language" are one and the same. Popular itself is a squirrelly word here. Popular can simply refer to as "most used" (by this metric, Xi and Modi would be the world's most popular leaders, since they lead the world's biggest populations), or it could be "most liked" by some other measure (I have no analogous leader to nominate here).

smsm42 3y ago

That's how it should work. Almost everything, except for the bad parts.

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago

What'd be the point of basing it on Gecko. Firefox exists.

JeremyNT 3y ago
What's the point of basing it on Chromium when Chrome exists? Brave seems intent on actively trying to sabotage the Google ad distribution business model and inject their own ad distribution system. It's kind of weird to base their browser on the browser maintained by an entity with objectives that are at such odds with their own.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  Because it selectively merges only patches which don't affect privacy, security, questionable standards, and adds new features. Honestly I don't know why you're even asking this. It's literally the whole thread is about this: it's not a reskin, it's a fork. Is it "kind of weird" that it's at odds with Chrome's goals? No. Because if it wasn't at odds, it wouldn't exist, these people would be just Chrome/Chromium contributors. Chromium is open-source because they forked WebKit, and WebKit forked KHTML. Google were at odds with Apple when they forked WebKit to Blink, but the FOSS license allowed it. And lo and behold it has allowed it again. What's surprising here?
  - pkaye 3y ago
    > Because it selectively merges only patches which don't affect privacy, security, questionable standards, and adds new features. If they used Gecko then these issues wouldn't exist and they would just have to add new features.
    - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
      The point is to have Blink without the burden of Google's commercial interests. Firefox is already Gecko without the burden of Google's commercial interests (well, almost). Not sure why is everyone trying to sell Gecko here. Isn't Mozilla a good custodian to Gecko? Clearly if I take your opinion at face value, no. But why? Google is clearly not a good custodian for the most popular browser, their private interests are all over it. But the core engine is good.

boringuser2 3y ago

This is already a solved issue. They don't maintain changes that take too much manpower to maintain. You have to pick your battles.