[BrendanEich]

We would not do that on principle, but imagine we're the mustache twirlers you fantasize we are: we'd light our brand on fire doing any such thing, lose all our lead users, stop growing and start shrinking. Think / Type / Post is the Ready / Aim / Fire analogue you seek.

[kikokikokiko]

I know that you probably went with Chromium based on the way your relationship with Mozilla ended, but man... I'll never have a Chromium based browser as my daily driver, I simply never trusted the ad company to not do what they ended up doing in the end (killing ad blockers). Brave will always be a no go for me for this reason. And now more than ever, we really need some company with real fire power to take the reins of the Firefox source code and create a real trustable fork.

[BrendanEich]

Separate reply that ritual impurity or blind black-box rejection of open source Chromium/Blink seems also to suffer from emotionalism over reason. See

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...

This is a choice we made. As I wrote in my last reply, I think we would have died trying to get Gecko/Graphene with a Web front end up to competitive scratch vs. Chrome (nm Firefox).

A Firefox fork would have gone over badly with some potentially large number of Mozilla/Firefox fans, and we'd still lack key elements not part of the Mozilla open source (at the time, e.g., Adobe's CDM for HTML5 DRM). On the upside we'd have more UX customizability.

But our choice of Chromium/Blink (via Electron, so we had Web front end upside without Firefox extensions) was not a slam dunk choice. It involved trade-offs, as all engineering does. One downside is we have to audit and network-test for leaks and blunders, which often come from Chromium upstream:

https://x.com/BrendanEich/status/1898529583546421322

[soundnote]

Huh, I was under the impression that you were forking Chromium itself instead of building over Electron. Or are you talking about a past, post-Gecko decision that had to be dropped as well?

[BrendanEich]

Yes, please read https://brianbondy.com/blog/174/the-road-to-brave-10.

[BrendanEich]

No, we started with Gecko (on Graphene, a sandboxing multiprocessor framework from b2g/FirefoxOS). We switched for hard-nosed wins of Chromium (as part of Electron) because out of the box vs. Gecko, most rows in the spreadsheet favored Chromium decisively. This is covered in

https://brianbondy.com/blog/174/the-road-to-brave-10

Why do you write "probably... based on... relationship ended"? Brave as a startup does not have time for feels not realz, pathos-over-logos nonsense. I recommend you avoid it in your work efforts too.

[kikokikokiko]

Thanks for the replies. I did not knew that you started with Gecko. Anyway, Brave is my go to advice when a regular user asks for a mobile browser, it just works out of the box. Not for me, and I still hope to see a Firefox fork becoming the main Chrome competitor in the future.

[BrendanEich]

Firefox reborn will be a tough turnaround job —- Ladybird could be the better path.

[jlkuester7]

I get it. I run FF as my primary browser (mostly because I don't want to see the internet devolve into a Blink mono-culture).

But, I always recommend Brave for less-technical folks. It just works! My FF setup includes a number of extensions, some of which need a bit of tuning to be useful. Then you have to deal with issues in websites that just don't properly support FF, etc. My grandmother can install Brave and simply start browsing. Things just work without extra config or tinkering.