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Comment by _8j50 | Hacker News Reader

Brave is based on Chromium, it lacks some of the privacy centric features that are found in Gecko browsers. 1st party isolation,tracker blocking, containers, anti fingerprinting measures and SNI encryption are some things I can think of right now (maybe chrome as caught up now?)

Plus, Google controls Chromium and Firefox is literally the only alternative now. They push changes that are against or in in ignorance of of web standards because they can. Downstream browsers like brave,edge and opera basically have to accept whatever Google says. This isn't good for the web at all. Frankly there should be an anti-trust suit against Google for this because it is very anti-competitive.

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You also have Safari (and GNOME Web on Linux) using the WebKit engine, developed by Apple as an alternative...

But that's not available on Android or Windows (the WebKit port exists there, but no good UI frontend as far I know)... which are the two big platforms. (because Apple doesn't care enough about those I guess?)

Wasn't Chrome originally a fork of WebKit when G and A are still buddy buddy?

Yes it was. WebKit and Blink then diverged massively after the fork.

GNOME WebKit definitely isn't Safari. A lot of websites that work in Safari were broken in WebKit last time I tried it.

It does replicate a lot of buggy behaviour in Safari so from what I can tell you can be reasonably sure that your website works in Safari if it works in WebKit, but that's the only use I've found for it so far.

As for a good UI on Windows, I think you should be able to compile GNOME's WebKit browser for Windows. It'll look terribly out of place like any GNOME application in a different environment, but I think it should work well enough to use?

> A lot of websites that work in Safari were broken in WebKit last time I tried it.

If you used it in the past from the Debian repos, they didn't use to do security or feature update servicing for WebKit in their repositories. That's no longer a thing nowadays.

You can use both the Technology Preview at https://webkit.org/downloads/ or check if the version is recent on your distribution however.

I've used the webkit browser on Manjaro, which seems to pull it from the AUR which in turn is quite close to upstream.

Recently I've found the opposite to be true. I've on more than one occassion chased bugs that weren't reproducible on Epiphany and I don't own an Apple device to test Safari. The end up back-burnered because the testing situation is bad.

> Brave is based on Chromium, it lacks some of the privacy centric features that are found in Gecko browsers. 1st party isolation,tracker blocking, containers, anti fingerprinting measures and SNI encryption are some things I can think of right now (maybe chrome as caught up now?)

What? One of the main points of the project is to build a browser with a whole bunch of tinfoil like tracker blocking and anti fingerprinting measures. They wrote their own built-in adblocker with Rust so it won't get fucked by Manifest v3 since it's part of the browser. They're the only Chromium browser that does CNAME uncloaking, something that uBlock Origin can only do on Firefox.

Containers are unique to Firefox, Chromium browsers handle that via separate user profiles.

I use both brave and firefox daily. Nothing against brave, it has privacy protections as you mentioned, but ff also has privacy centric features that are not in brave. I have not made an empirical evaluation to measure which is better. That said there is a ton I normally configure in about:config that I just can't in Chromium. I only use brave because Firefox isn't good at handling memory intensive sites.

That is fair, but your original post basically implied that brave doesn't have a bunch of privacy features it very much has and that go beyond basically every other Chromium fork.

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