Brave is a Chromium derivative, not Chrome. Can't imagine why any of this would imply they would need to stop deriving Chromium: they can develop and deploy whatever cookie policies and defaults they want.
Not to disagree with you specifically, but this seems a good context to make this point:
Maybe I missed the memo that we stopped hating monopolies? Every browser worth considering, except Firefox and Safari, is based on Chromium. Firefox and Safari make up about 20% global market share, meaning Chromium in about 80% [0]. A bug in Chromium is a bug in all of them. A backdoor in Chromium is a backdoor in all of them. A feature of Chromium, good or __bad__, is a feature in all of them. It baffles me that this isn't a bigger concern to more people.
This is one of those situations where "monopoly" is a very overloaded word in terms of what it means to different people in different situations, causing confusion when it gets broken down into specifics.
Most people were never worried, and probably will never be worried, with the points you're listing there. That's not to say they've stopped hating browser monopolies, just maybe not your definition of what a browser monopoly is or why they're problematic.
In general (not just browsers) most people treat "popularity" and "monopoly" as completely orthogonal concepts. I.e. something unpopular can still be a monopoly, something with 99% usage can still not be a monopoly. There is typically just a tendency for extremely popular things to also happen to be a monopoly.
Chromium can be forked. Minor browsers like Brave or Vivaldi do that, although they have to keep up with upstream, but they are shipping an ads-blocker that are blocking Google's search ads.
Note that Firefox or Safari aren't going after Google's business due to the search deal. At this point, Google is funding all 3 major browser engines, so they have a level of control going beyond just controlling Chromium.
At this point they likely have no choice but to keep building on a chromium base. However the cost of maintaining their changes and additions will likely increase.
I suppose. That is a matter of business model, whereas I was addressing purely technical aspects.
I've been using Brave as primary for years. At this point I'd pay for a license if it were necessary. Frankly that would be an improvement: if it's free, you're the product. Brave just monetizes you differently.
I no longer argue with the legion of Brave haters. I've decided they're a benefit: the more people that don't use Brave the less likely Google et al. will be compelled to destroy it.
> Can't imagine why any of this would imply they would need to stop deriving Chromium: they can develop and deploy whatever cookie policies and defaults they want.
Maintaining a very diverged fork can take even more work than building your own browser. I think they don't want to stop receiving upstream updates when the upstream is one of the biggest software projects in the world.
Maybe I missed the memo that we stopped hating monopolies? Every browser worth considering, except Firefox and Safari, is based on Chromium. Firefox and Safari make up about 20% global market share, meaning Chromium in about 80% [0]. A bug in Chromium is a bug in all of them. A backdoor in Chromium is a backdoor in all of them. A feature of Chromium, good or __bad__, is a feature in all of them. It baffles me that this isn't a bigger concern to more people.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share