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4 browsers that will continue to support uBlock Origin and other ad blockers with Manifest V2
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
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Brave is not completely independent of chrome. It’s completely and entirely dependent on it. Brave developers don’t and probably can’t develope a modern web browser. All they do is adapt chromium to have a few extra features.
There is only three major web browsers. Firefox, safari and chrome. Everything else is just a few addons, preconfigured settings and UI changes. Even chrome was largely safari until Google forked their web engine.
That's from the Brave website: https://brave.com/compare/chrome-vs-brave/
Yes there are plenty of changes, but it's built on it, and shaped by it, and Chromium is heavily influenced by Google. If chromium doesn't support v2 manifests it is unlikely that Brave will. In this particular case it may be that Brave's ad blocking and privacy features are equivalent to uBO, but it's still underpinned by an engine that Google has strong influence over, so it can't completely shake their influence.
Look, I'm not attacking them over this, as you rightly said, it has plenty of other drawbacks and concerns, I'm just emphasising that Google do have a large degree of influence over them. For instance, Chromium is dropping manifest v2 support, so Brave pretty much has to do the same. They've said that, as Chromium has a switch to keep it enabled until June (iirc) they've enabled that, but after Chromium drops manifest v2 the most they can do is try to support a subset of it as best they can. The Brave devs may not want to drop support, but Google have decreed it will be dropped, so they end up dropping it and having to put in extra work to keep even a subset working for some period of time.
If Brave gets even a moderate market share, Google will continue to mess them around like this as they really don't like people not seeing their adverts.
Ultimately it's software, so the Brave devs can do pretty much whatever they want, limited by the available time and money. Google's influence extends to making that either easier or harder, it much the same way as they influence the Android ecosystem.
Here's the point since you clearly missed it:
Brave may not be particularly affected by this change, but that's besides the point. If Brave starts becoming a viable threat to Google, Google can easily start making changes to Chromium that target Brave and breaks the changes they make, just like they targeted uBlock Origin and broke it with manifest v3. Brave might be able to work around these changes, but it costs time and developer labor (i.e. money) that would have been spent elsewhere, and if Google makes things hard enough on Brave they could be forced to abandon the project.
You literally haven't, except maybe by sticking your fingers in you ears and going "NUH UH"
but go on king