[superkuh]

I don't want to pile on here but everyone who used Chromium while pretending they weren't supporting google's Chrome monopoly, pretending Chromium was something else, are getting the only outcome that was possible. It was entirely predictable from the start and if you play stupid games you win stupid prizes.

[jerheinze]

It's not like no one was making warnings about this.

[pkulak]

And every time there's a bunch of replies about how great Brave is, and everyone should just use that... Chromium wrapper.

[jorvi]

To be honest, I don’t understand why people keep acting like Google has control over Chrome(ium) with some iron fist. It’s dual open license. Microsoft is contributing so many patches that they have a decent amount of sway over it already. If Google ever truly steps over the line, Microsoft will just fork it and everyone will swap their upstream to Microsoft-Chromium..

[TremendousJudge]

I don't think Microsoft has any incentives to protect users.

[jacooper]

Mozilla only has themselves to blame.

I'm going to repost a previous comment here.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32741481

> I used to refuse Chromium for the Same reason.

> But honestly it already happened, Firefox is already irrelevant.

> Mozilla is mis-managed organization that is funded to avoid anti-trust investigations, they dont fully push for privacy because they are afraid of google, do out of touch changes, and focus on political advocacy.

> Compare that to brave, which builds its own independent search engine, ad network, and has privacy by default in its products.

>There is no hope that Mozilla and Firefox will change the status-quo anytime soon, Firefox is losing users at crazy rate, and Mozilla is absolutely failing to do anything to change Firefox's destiny towards irrelevance.

> Brave is almost everything Mozilla should've been.

> Actually do what they sey, no hidden google analytics in their products, no unique ID for each installer downloaded, push for privacy by default and independence from big tech, not being shy from google, because they are their only income.

> I would argue, that if Mozilla wants to turn its course around with their "limited resources" it should drop gecko, and anything irrelevant to the users experience.

> Fork Chromium, the best web engine out there by a mile, and remove any anti-privacy / anticompetitive code, while still taking advantage of the huge development resources directed to chromium from many parties, and maybe Mozilla can also influence Chromium's development.

> Start pushing privacy by default, its the reason brave is gaining users at such a rapid pace, its a browser I recommend to everyone, as just by installing it they already are much more private than with chrome.

> What matters is the users experience, its why brave is growing

[teawrecks]

I'm out of the loop. I've been using FF for years without any issues across multiple OSes and devices. I plan to continue doing that. I simply don't understand the negative sentiment I see about it, it's served me very well.

[Schroedingersat]

The negative sentiment is advertising for brave (an advertising company) to get people to switch to their ad delivery software.

[jacooper]

Yeah, when someone disagrees with your opinion, he paid to do so.

Brave ads aren't even enabled by default.

[pkulak]

Exactly. Perfect example, thank you.

[imbnwa]

Brave has publicly declared support for Manifest v2 in perpetuity, no? They even seem to be pondering how to distribute v2 extensions post-sunset in Google Chrome[0]

[0]https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/15187

[Caspy7]

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1534893414579249152

> Brave will support uBO and uMatrix so long as Google doesn’t remove underlying V2 code paths (which seem to be needed for Chrome for enterprise support, so should stay in the Chromium open source). Will Google Chrome Web Store really kick them out over V2? We will host if needed.

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1534905779630661633

> > I’d be interested to hear a plan for Brave on what will happen if upstream removes the code paths needed for pre-v3 ad blockers.

> We could fork them back in at higher maintenance cost. No point in speculating — I don’t write checks of unknown amount and sign them, and Google looks likely to keep V2 support for a year (thanks be to “enterprise”).

[imbnwa]

I see my misunderstanding, they're specifically maintaining the webRequest interface

[yoasif_]

> I see my misunderstanding, they're specifically maintaining the webRequest interface

They aren't specifically maintaining anything. Brave's CEO doesn't "write checks of unknown amount[s] and sign them".

[Caspy7]

I think you're thinking of Firefox.

[cpeterso]

Maintaining out-of-tree patches for a project as large and quickly-changing as Chromium will be a lot of work. I know someone who worked on Amazon's Silk browser team and they had an engineer (rotation) working working full-time to keep their Chromium fork up to date within Google's upstream. Brave doesn't have nearly the resources that Amazon does.

[UberFly]

Yea you've seen it tried in projects like Waterfox and Palemoon and it eventually becomes too much to deal with. (Following the old Firefox addons system that is)

[TremendousJudge]

Yeah it's clear that was never going to work -- the whole point of dropping the old addons was making big architectural changes that weren't possible with the old APIs. You can't merge the new architectural changes and the old APIs without running into the issues they were trying to avoid by removing the old APIs in the first place.

[marwis]

There are few projects and companies that do exactly that, including CEF open source project. Perhaps they should join forces and make a joint OpenChromium project.

[TedDoesntTalk]

Someone warned years ago that proxy extensions would no longer be feasible on Chromium? I must have missed that message.

[lucideer]

> Someone warned years ago that <insert extremely specific thing>

No, the gp said:

> while pretending they weren't supporting google's Chrome monopoly

Monopoly means Google's interests will be served rather than the user's. This means taking away things that are of value to users / users losing control over features / etc. Like proxy extensions, yes.

[jerheinze]

Not that explicitly, but many warned about Google abusing their power if it started hitting their profits.

[moffkalast]

I'm more interested why it isn't possible to just fork the thing and maintain a version that's plugin enabled. Isn't Chromium completely open source?

Especially for Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, etc.

[heavyset_go]

The amount of work it would take to fork Chromium and maintain a working secure browser with MV2 hooks into the browser internals would be so large that you'd need a dedicated team whose job it is to constantly backport upstream Chromium changes and ensure they still work with the old MV2 subsystem. That would take a lot of time and money.

[moffkalast]

Well you don't need to implement every stupid thing big G thinks should be in it, just the really critical stuff. Even if you freeze all features right now you'll probably still have a better renderer than gecko for 5 years into the future.

I mean right now I bet a lot of people will simply not update to MV3 and continue using the last known MV2 build into perpetuity until certs break or something else. I sure intend to.

[heavyset_go]

Backporting from an entity that is hostile towards MV2 makes me suspect that Google isn't going to play ball and make maintaining an MV2-compatible Chromium fork easy.

[josefx]

>Isn't Chromium completely open source?

No, especially not if you want to watch videos, the DRM plugin is a binary blob that only Google approved browsers get to run.

Then there are all the Google services that will break in unexpected ways in your browser, sometimes just because your user agent isn't identical to Chromes if past reports from Firefox users are any indication. Basically expect to be shit on by the biggest internet giant around at ever possible corner.

[whoisthemachine]

Firefox supports all DRM content I have come across, clearly there are ways to implement DRM that don't involve Google.

[heavyset_go]

Depends on the browser and platform. WideVine support on Firefox for Linux is limited, one of the biggest effects of this is that some video platforms refuse to serve up high definition video to Firefox users on Linux. Netflix, for example, will only allow you to watch video at 720p on Firefox for Linux. The existing WideVine support comes directly from Google.

[josefx]

Open Addons an Themes, click on Plugins, by default you should see a line that says "Widevine Content Decryption Module provided by Google Inc." . Note the Google Inc. .

[ElCheapo]

I mean, if the DRM wasn't a blob it would be open source. Andnif it were open source it wouldn't be DRM...

[josefx]

It could be controlled by a third party that isn't trying to dominate the browser market. And Google already caused issues years ago when it side loaded that plugin on open source distros and initially refused to provide an option to disable this behavior in chromium.

[heavyset_go]

It's possible to have DRM that's open source using cryptography.

[marwis]

In addition to what others said, forks are not allowed to use Google services such as Chrome Sync or Translate.

[AshamedCaptain]

Developer effort.

[moffkalast]

Don't underestimate the power of spite.

[AshamedCaptain]

Spite is at times my main source of motivation, and still leaves me physically uncapable of following the rate of breakage of upstream Firefox (i.e. I cant keep my patches up to date), which I'm assuming it's actually a more sensible upstream when compared with Google.

[vlunkr]

And the stupid prize is what? You might have to use a different browser? Doesn't seem that serious to me.

[pkulak]

The stupid prize is that by the time you decide it's time to use a different browser, Firefox and Safari have been rendered totally unusable by developers only targeting Chrome because that's all they have to do.

[LegitShady]

I use firefox every day without issue.

[lolinder]

I use it every day as my primary browser, but there's definitely been an increase in applications that will not work except on Chrome. It's not text content that's ever the issue, it's SaaS products.

[vlunkr]

It's your anecdote vs. mine, but this is not my experience. I find that Chrome is better for Google Meet (not surprising.) Other than that FF is fine. In the last 4-5 years have become increasingly similar and easy to support as a developer.

[croes]

And then you realize all the web sites are optimized for chrome and you have problems using other browsers

[dvngnt_]

google maps is the only site that just didn't work

[lolinder]

Out of the ones that you use, maybe (I've actually never had a problem with Google Maps). There are several applications that I have to use for work that either don't work on Firefox or have limited functionality, Slack being one of them (huddles only work in Chromium or in the Electron app).

[croes]

And it was just a YouTube bug that killed EdgeHTML

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824

[tinus_hn]

As long as there is a different browser, of course.

[JohnFen]

And what would that different browser be? Aside from Firefox, which has become essentially unusable to me.