Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

Re:Brave disables Chromium FLoC features by simias on Saturday April 10, 2021 @06:03PM (#26765572)

That's a very interesting move. The patch seems fairly small, but now it's a patch that Brave needs to maintain and update every time they merge a new upstream version.

That's what makes me wary of the whole Chromium fork concept. Every time Brave/Vivaldi/Edge/etc decide to take a different path from Google's they effectively add to their maintenance burden forever, even if like in this case they actually disable an unwanted feature.

How long until the list of patches to backport for every new version of Chromium becomes so large that they have to pick and choose which one to keep maintaining and which one to give up on? If tomorrow Google decides to push a very deep change to the way, say, extensions are handled that makes them less effective at ad blocking, will Brave accept the burden to suddenly have to maintain a very deep fork of the browser in order to maintain old functionality?

I'm effectively FUDing right now, but my concern is genuine. I'm very perplex that you can make an effectively anti-ad, pro-privacy browser based on the source code of one of the biggest ad companies in the world.

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Re:Brave disables Chromium FLoC features by miedpo on Saturday April 10, 2021 @06:19PM (#26765699)

From what I'm remembering, Eich said that once they got big enough, they'd be willing to fork a browser if necessary. I wouldn't put that past Brave considering how many changes it's had (used to be on a different browser engine, also used to use Electron). They'll probably have to grow a bit before this happens though.

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Re:Brave disables Chromium FLoC features by TwoBit on Saturday April 10, 2021 @07:57PM (#26766439)

I maintained a fork of webkit ~12 years ago and it was a nightmare to maintain because every couple months they would massively reengineer systems and result in hundreds of non-trivial file changes. And because webkit had a brain-dead way of implementing multi-platform support it meant you spent days or weeks re-integrating these changes.

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Re:Brave disables Chromium FLoC features by sounds on Saturday April 10, 2021 @06:13PM (#26765649)

Fortunately, removing a feature and removing code is pretty easy. It's when a feature is added that it requires much more thought and effort.

It's not zero effort, but pretty easy.

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Re:Brave disables Chromium FLoC features by bsclifton on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @12:36PM (#26795003)

(Brave employee here) We actually have a fair chunk of deviations that we maintain (link already shared by Brendan, but here it is again) https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...

We have a pretty comprehensive patching system which you can read more about here: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Patching-Chromiu...

There is a small team of folks here constantly working on rebasing the next Chromium version on Brave. They fight these deviations and try to minimize the patching as much as possible- so future versions are easier and easier. We even have some clever UI patching for the Polymer pages

There definitely have been challenges - for example, with Chromium 69, the network delegates were moved over to NetworkService which broke our shields code. But I'm really proud of the work done to minimize things. For a long time, the team rebasing Chromium was just one person... and we've always delivered Chromium upgrades and updates to Brave users within 24-48 hours of Google's stable channel

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Re:Brave disables Chromium FLoC features by furbyhater on Saturday April 10, 2021 @06:39PM (#26765881)

The idea of a fork is that it is independent from what it was forked from, you pull what you like and leave aside negative changes, if the license allows this. At least that's the idea. Of course companies with huge manpower such as google can evolve "standards" in a pace that a small independent fork can't keep pace, but we shouldn't just give up.

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Re:Brave disables Chromium FLoC features by julianlam on Saturday April 10, 2021 @08:03PM (#26766473)

I think the type of fork that OC was referring to would be a project that forks to provide a change in feature set, yet still tries to remain up to date with upstream. So, not a hard fork.

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Re:Brave disables Chromium FLoC features by BrendanEich on Monday April 12, 2021 @04:17PM (#26784605)

Taking things out or disabling them at chokepoints is easier than doing an entire engine on your own.

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

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Re:Brave disables Chromium FLoC features by paulryanrogers on Saturday April 10, 2021 @06:17PM (#26765681)

My guess is they run the cost benefit analysis with every Chrome release. Then just give up and accept the change unless it's obviously low cost or in an area they've already forked.

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Re:Brave disables Chromium FLoC features by incompatible on Saturday April 10, 2021 @07:11PM (#26766133)

I'm curious about the value of maintaining something like this verses using Firefox.

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