FWIW brave genuinely has multiple privacy patches that are useful and can't be done properly with extensions in chrome.
Several of these either can't be done via a js extension to chrome, or can be detected/bypassed. Brave does them in-engine which is the better way to do it.
...and then you click on that GitHub link and it explains that they fetch the Chromium codebase and then apply a set of patches on top of it. I wouldn't diminish that work by refering to it as just a reskin, but it's also not what I have in mind when I hear about something being forked.
They don't maintain a separate Chromium codebase, nor do they refer to it as a fork anywhere on GitHub. They do refer to it as a customised Chromium, which I think is a far more accurate description:
> Brave Core is a set of changes, APIs, and scripts used for customizing Chromium to make the Brave browser.
I also think of Chrome as a customised Chromium, not a fork of Chromium.
> I wouldn't diminish that work by refering to it as just a reskin, but it's also not what I have in mind when I hear about something being forked.
If the goal is to maintain compatibility with what you've forked, there are not a lot of other ways to do what Brave is doing... when you do the classic fork, the code tends to diverge and compatibility decays.
> I also think of Chrome as a customised Chromium, not a fork of Chromium.
I've started viewing Chromium based browsers as distributions instead of forks.
With me that's a straw man, I haven't been using the word "reskinned".
The way he mentions Chromium proves my point that it's a distribution of Chromium.
Chrome is a browser because Google has Chromium, and they've chosen Chrome as the name for their distribution of Chromium. But it is also a distribution of Chromium.
I wasn't talking to you when I used "reskinned". Diatomaceous_ooze used "skinned", so unless you are they, why are you replying here? If you are ooze, quibbling over my adding "re-" won't get you far.
"Chromium" is not a distributable binary blob, so you're wrong in your essential claim. We don't distribute the same Chromium bits in Brave as Google does in Chrome. Chromium is open source software. We disable and nullify a lot, as the first document linked in my tweet details:
Several of these either can't be done via a js extension to chrome, or can be detected/bypassed. Brave does them in-engine which is the better way to do it.
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Fingerprinting-P...