Chromium-based Browsers Will Now Prevent Removal of Default Search Engines

amarok · January 15, 2022, 4:24pm

Things that make ya go “hmmmm…”

amarok · January 15, 2022, 5:25pm

In other news…

I think the Brave browser team have said they will not implement it.

fsflover · January 18, 2022, 11:18am

At some point keeping new things out of Brave will get unbearable. I wonder if they will use Firefox as a base then.

pajuky · January 20, 2022, 12:55am

They used to be based on Firefox, but switched to Chromium in 2015

We started with Gecko in 2015, but it lost on many dimensions in a head to head comparison enumerating gaps vs. Chrome. DRM is just one example. We don’t like DRM, but users want Netflix to work, and Google makes WideVine free-as-in-beer; whereas at the time, Mozilla had an Adobe deal that did not extend to non-Firefox Gecko embeddings.

So we switched to chromium/Blink in late 2015. Much later, when I visited Apple in early 2017, a devrel friend asked why we couldn’t use WebKit. A WebKit founder in the meeting agreed with me that there was no way for Brave to do so on Windows w/o running out of capital. DRM again was an issue too, without WideVine. Don’t blame startup for not carrying a full engine — that needs deep pockets. While MS does have deep enough pockets, it is starting by using chromium/Blink and slow-forking.