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Comment by dao- | Hacker News Reader

> and chromium based.

That may seem like a plus from a user's perspective when websites were only tested with / optimized for Chrome. From the perspective of someone who's concerned about Google's power as a monopoly, alternative browsers being Chromium-based is just part of the problem. Sure, you can fork Chromium in theory, but making changes that are incompatible with Google's vision is going to be a problem for you. So Google is still going to be in control as long as they ship the browser that dominates all others. Brave don't have the resources to maintain an engine by themselves anyway. Besides Mozilla, only Apple and Microsoft could do it, and Microsoft already gave up.

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>Sure, you can fork Chromium in theory, but making changes that are incompatible with Google's vision is going to be a problem for you.

Isn't Brave doing just that? They have created a whole new business model on top of Chromium that is incompatible with Google's vision. I'm not convinced that it's a better model, but that's beside the point. Brave has also said that they won't be supporting FLoC.

But if you mean Google's vision for the rendering and JavaScript engines then I agree with you. Only Google can really steer the core technology into any particular direction.

Is the engine really the thing you're worried about though?

I'm more concerned with things like Manifest V3, which Brave certainly has the engineering capacity to fork around, and plans to.

> Is the engine really the thing you're worried about though?

Yes. Google is unable to separate their ad business from making a browser engine (as any profit-seeking corporation in the same position would be). So far their power hasn't been absolute, so some of their less nice efforts have failed, but they'll keep trying.

Even if it gets worse, surely the effort to de-google Chromium must be lower than maintaining an entire browser engine, right?

Do they really have the engineering capacity to support a fork for years after divergence?

Also, I am personally not really okay with their shady crypto practice where content creators didn’t get their share made before their joining. Any reason to prefer it over Firefox?

I mean, everyone has more engineering capacity to fork Chromium than to build their own browser/engine from scratch, which is why I find a lot of this discussion so silly.

With regards to the crypto donations, that was an early version of the system which they improved after receiving feedback. Hearing feedback that your product is misleading and then fixing it is exactly the type of behavior I want to see, not sure about anyone else.

I prefer it to Firefox because of the best-in-class adblocking and because (for JS heavy workloads) I still find that V8 is far superior to SpiderMonkey.

Also because I don't think Mozilla has been a great steward, and most of their revenue comes from Google, so if your goal is to de-google I think Firefox is a worse bet than Brave.

> I mean, everyone has more engineering capacity to fork Chromium than to build their own browser/engine from scratch

That doesn’t contradict my question. If google does go through with crippling ad blockers at a deep level of the engine, how long till forks will break under backporting every security update, etc. And that is without thinking of any sort of malice. If google deliberately builds heavily on top of these changes, they will pretty much cripple every fork, except for perhaps edge.

And I do agree that V8 is a superior engine when it comes to performance, but for me the minimal performance gain is meaningless (especially with good ad blocking it is almost insignificant for the majority of websites)

And just because it is a symbiosis where Google won’t face anti-monopolism lawsuits if Mozilla is around and Mozilla gets some money, I doubt it would shine negative light on Firefox.

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