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Comment by AntiImperialist | Hacker News Reader

I had been using Firefox as the primary browser since before it was v1.0 until some time in 2016, which is when I switched to Chrome. The reason was mostly usability related. Chrome felt faster and easier to use.

With the reach of Google, Firefox had to be that much better to keep up, like it was compared to any version of IE. Unfortunately, Firefox kind of remained the same while Chrome became better and better.

In hindsight, they could have done what Opera did. But then they didn't. I don't think they did anything particularly wrong. Firefox just aged beyond its usefulness and will die, just because it's not needed anymore.

I see Brave as the spiritual successor of Firefox. Just like Firefox challenged the then status quo and made way for better browsers to come, Brave is challenging the current status quo Chrome and Google's business model at the same time.

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Unless Brave is forking Chromium, Google owns them. Google controls what gets merged into Chromium. Brave can talk the talk all they want, but they merely exist as a Chrome skin with crypto added in and a few privacy features included.

I know they are committed to supporting Manifest v2 (I think), but more and more decisions are going to have to be made where they differ from upstream Chromium. I have doubts this will be sustainable forever.

Google doesn't own us (Hello, I'm Sampson from Brave). We don't have to get anything merged back into Chromium (though we do contribute up-stream, and have landed commits). We do a soft-patch on top of Chromium, removing that which is against our commitment to privacy-by-default, and user control. If we never land another commit in Chromium, that would be okay. We continue maintain our patches (as does Microsoft and others who build upon Chromium).

Brave is basically a chrome with preinstalled extensions, which would wither away the second chrome stopped being developed.

Firefox is a treasure we should keep alive, because otherwise the web would turn into the same closed source walled garden, as most other things do.

Firefox made a mistake of getting paid by Google and getting too comfortable with it. I think they won't have much happening for them.

I mean something could still happen, who knows? Maybe Huawei or Xiaomi or Canonical or IBM will see some value in it and make something out of it, but I fear it might be too late for them.

And Brave is not Chrome. It's based on Chromium. Many other companies depend upon Chromium codebase for their browsers, companies like Microsoft, Samsung, Amazon, Tesla. If Google does stop the development, there is a good chance that someone else will pick it up and keep it shared and open to distribute the work required to develop and maintain it.

Out of these, only Microsoft could reasonably develop a browser enginge - and they stopped doing so, decreasing the available web implementations by one. I’m not worried about google stopping chrome, it is way too big for that - just firefox is unique in what they are doing, and is irreplaceble from a freedom of web perspective.

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