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Comment by err4nt | Hacker News Reader

For disclosure, for my work I must use the stock version of all current browsers so I'm not a fanboy of any one particular browser, and I can't really use forks or ad-blockers.

I would bet any money that the reason why they chose Chromium, and did not choose Gecko, was performance-related. Blink is technologically superior to all the others. And between Blink, Webkit, and Gecko: Gecko is the worst-performing choice. I imagine if they did not fork Chromium, they would likely have forked Webkit instead.

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That's a self-fulfilling issue, though. If no one is using Gecko why does Gecko have reason to improve performance. In theory one of the reasons to fork a browser is to add more eyeballs to its codebase. More eyeballs in theory mean more upstream delivered performance patches. If they had good performance engineers it wouldn't matter if they picked the "worst performing", because they could work to improve it and prove they had good performance engineers.

    "That's a self-fulfilling issue, though."

It's not self-fulfulling. The state of the Gecko codebase and its performance is not _because_ Brave didn't end up using it.

    "If no one is using Gecko why does Gecko have reason to improve performance."

This question is a valid question, but is unrelated to Brave which does not use Gecko.

    "If they had good performance engineers it wouldn't matter if they picked the "worst performing", because they could work to improve it and prove they had good performance engineers."

It would matter, because they would have chosen the most difficult task which is a sidetrack from the reason they were making a fork of a browser in the first place. The focus of Brave is not to improve the performance of a browser engine.

Brave is a weird example because it included several former Gecko engineers when it started up, so Brave not using Gecko did have some sort of material impact on Gecko. I have no idea if you can quantify how much "damage" was done, but some can be assumed.

"Fast" is the second priority listed in Brave's webpage ("Secure, Fast, & Private"), so it is very easy to assume that it was one of their reasons for making a fork of a browser in the first place. It is more than fair to criticize them for taking the ("paved with bad intentions") easy road in that stated priority rather than accepting the true engineering challenge of doing that work on the underdog engine in current last place. (The basic through line of lamenting that they didn't use Gecko: If they had succeeded in that challenge, they would have won a lot more acclaim and done a lot more overall good for the web than anything they have done in forking Blink.)

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