Your desire for us or anyone to die on the Gecko hill would, had we acted on it, simply have helped Google cement the Chrome (not chromium) hegemony. The crucial battle right now is a layer up, at ads/donations/subscriptions/privacy -- where Firefox has been slow and weak vs. Brave and Safari.
There will be time for better engines later, once Google loses share due to innovations that attack its deep conflicts of interest with its users, along with likely prosecution of the open antitrust case.
> More significantly, in my book: it’s difficult to use Gecko and Firefox in these ways. Even the simplest app requires substantial and arcane boilerplate. And the docs are comprehensive but outdated. The platform may be powerful, but it’s hard to use.
There's also now qbrt[1], but the readme itself recommends not using it, and it was last updated 7 months ago. If this matures to a usable state, I can see Brave developers considering it.
AFAIK the only choice nowadays is between Chromium and WebKit. I honestly would like to see more WebKit based browsers instead.
Google is the steward of Chromium and Manifest v3 is just the beginning. When a single corporation has Total Control over what goes in to their codebase, we're going to see more and more abuses making it increasingly difficult to maintain healthy forks. Given the tipping point of users, certain websites now simply refuse to work with any browser but Chrome.
It’s just a renderer that calls home with hardcoded references to Google’s services. You can’t avoid Google if you use Chromium’s source code without patching it [1].
And unless you believe in ghosts putting the calls home back when you aren't looking, that isn't a problem for Brave [1].
[1]: https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff...
1. The decision to base on Chromium is a bigger negative for me than any feature. We're all going to regret contributing to the One True Engine someday and it's going to be so painful to fix.
2. BAT is a pure money play. There's no inherent utility outside buying and spending. And Ethereum is nothing if not the biggest utility crypto out there. This is always one of those things in the Ethereum ecosystem where I point out that you didn't have to make yet another ERC-20 if your only play is money.
It's too late now, of course. But man, it would have been terrific to recommend a browser that blocked ads out of the box and wasn't part of the engine hegemony.