Exactly. Brave just takes Chromium (from Google) and adds weird crypto stuff to it. None of the Chromium forks are "different browsers" in my eyes. They all depend on upstream for everything important. They couldn't develop the browser on their own.
Just use Firefox. It works just as well as Chrome (*), but it's based on a completely different engine which was built from the ground up.
(*) On desktop at least (on Android I still use a Chromium fork for now)
> Brave just takes Chromium (from Google) and adds weird crypto stuff to it
That's a really unfair(and untrue) statement. Brave also removes some code they find privacy violating, built in a best in class adblocker, built a full cross-device sync system that works perfectly, some UI tweaks and enhancements, built Tor connectivity in, etc. Probably a lot more that I'm leaving out.
I am def not a fan of crypto or BATs or whatever they were pushing, but you can use it fine ignoring all of that.
To be fair, you can also disable Microsoft's built-in VPN. The problem is trusting people who don't have your best interests at heart, and using Brave products just kicks that can further down the road.
Normally this might just be a platitude of the sort, "Go check it for yourself." But in this case that's not what I'm saying. Brave is going to be used by large numbers of tech focused users with a privacy/security bent. And they are also competing against Google who will make sure even the slightest slip by Brave is promoted across the entirety of the web.
That code is scrutinized heavily. That the worst you can find about Brave is people making false statements about crypto stuff (it is entirely optional and opt-in with 0 coercion or dark patterns to push you there) speaks incredibly highly as to the current state of the Browser. Might that change in the future, as you seem to be suggesting? Yip! And when it does there will be a new Brave. But for now they continue to stay on an excellent path forward.
Many sites are broken on non-Google browsers though. But the advantage of being able to use adblockers in Firefox alone outweight that - not even taking privacy into consideration.
The thing I like most about Brave is actually the crypto stuff, and I hate almost all crypto. This is actually a good use case for it - you have a distributed system (users browsing) across untrusted hosts (users).
People like to shit on advertising, but much of the internet exists today because of advertising. Do you think Youtube could exist at that scale without ads? I don't think so, personally. At least, not without another way to monetize.
Brave is the only player providing an alternative monetization strategy. Crypto or not, to me, that is by far the most interesting thing a browser has done in a long, long time.
Blink (Chrome) is a fork of WebKit which is a fork of KHTML (Konqueror), but that is a very much different situation. None of the Chromium/WebKit-based browsers are full forks but rather merge custom patches with upstream development. They don't have the development capacity to go against any Google changes except for a few things here and there. Meanwhile Google isn't relying on KDE to develop new features - in fact KDE isn't developing any new KHTML features but instead is switching (or has switched) to WebKit/Blink.
> (on Android I still use a Chromium fork for now)
What chromium fork is on android and actually better than Firefox for android? I use Firefox for the best possible experience on android and would like to be aware of another option.
From my (anecdotal) experience, Bromite is faster than Firefox on my phone, but your mileage may vary.
I was originally using Firefox due to its uBlock Origin support, but Bromite has ad-blocking built-in (unfortunately it's not quite up to par with uBO but it works well enough).
I would suggest that you try both and see which one you prefer.
I have at least three sites I use that i have to open in edge since they don't work properly in Firefox. Local bank, credit card issuer, and employer's guest wifi login portal.
>Just use Firefox.
No.
Well, I'm not so rude, so "No, thank you".
>It works just as well as Chrome ()
Not on anything* I use, it doesn't, so "No....thank you".
Tbf, I do keep trying ff, but...clunky, jeepers!
'Fraid I'll hang on until my Brave jumps it's particular shark and then maybe I'll hop over to something else, but for now, and as long as I can still use UblockO, Brave it is.
>not even Microsoft can afford to maintain their own browser engine
We don't know that. Maybe Microsoft could maintain their own browser engine if Google hadn't provided one on permissive open-source licensing terms that met their needs.
They gave up way too easily though. I don't think they ever had an interest in actually making a good browser engine. They've never managed one in their entire history. Microsoft love mediocrity, the "just good enough" mindset. Nobody takes their products on because they really excel at what they do. Just because they have a huge installed base, they're not so bad there's really a problem to use them and they integrate with everything else (e.g. Windows) nicely. For example Slack is so much better than that turd called Teams but nobody wants to pay the extra because Teams is free with O365 and user frustration doesn't cost anything on the bottom line.
This is why Apple really came out of the blue with Steve Jobs' razor focus on quality above all. Microsoft's goal is never to be 'best in class'. Because they don't need to be. People will buy it anyway.
So what's the solution? I hate this status quo as much as you do, and standing here in a Mexican Standoff is not viable forever. You're right. "The web" as a platform has been twisted and perverted beyond real usability at this point. There is no path forward where we undo Google's damage and preserve the qualities of the web we enjoy today. So, how do we fix this?
The solution (to me) is simple - fix native app distribution. Make platform targets operate the same as they used to, and give people control over their computer again. The only ones preventing us from a platform-agnostic utopia is Apple and Google, both of whom profit off the artificial difficulty of distributing applications.
So, here we are. Google is poisoning the web while Apple refuses to swallow their pride. Everyone is hurting, and nobody stands to gain anything but the shareholders. A hopeless situation, but let's not pretend like everything here is morally grey.
For starters, if a company makes a web browser with market share exceeding 50%, and also produces web sites and web apps, if those web sites and web apps to do any sort of user agent testing or require non-standard features of the aforementioned browser, it should be treated as ipso facto monopoly abuse.
The solution is already impossible. When Mozilla had browser domination they had a chance to dictate something. The moment Chrome became popular, now another company, just as MS and IE did before, could just do the feature creep of "add feature, subtly break/slow down opposition, get more users that just want browser that works"
Can you please give a concrete example of what Apple should do, in your opinion, to expand their API targets? And how is that related to web standards complexity?
People complain about excess functionality being added to web browsers (HTML5, WebXR, WebRTC, etc) and many of these complaints are valid. Web browsers don't need these features, they should be relegated to native apps.
Except they can't be. Native apps don't offer the same freedoms that the web does. And so, we keep stacking technologies on top of web browsers to alleviate the problem. It's a bad situation, and both Google and Apple are gruesomely complicit in making this situation worse.
> Can you please give a concrete example of what Apple should do, in your opinion, to expand their API targets?
Stop browser lockdown. Allow sideloading. You know, the basics of computing that we had figured out since the mid-90s or when we sued Microsoft.
Yes but being able to use all of Chrome's extensions in Brave is a huge win to me. And most Chrome documentation, Q and A, tutorials are mostly relevant to Brave as well. I see Google and other behemoths contributing to an open source project as a good thing. The product may not be where it is today without their help, including paying people to work on a free product. Still, yeah don't trust them.
