Comment by therealpygon 2 days ago
They absolutely can continue to support it, that is the entire point of open source. What Chrome or Chromium does by default may make it more difficult, but doesn’t mean it is something that “can no longer” be supported.
What “can” be done and what “will” be done are two entirely different things. I was simply correcting the fact they stated it couldn’t be supported.
There is a reason I stopped using Chrome-based browsers years ago. Killing V2 was never anything but a play to make sure people see ads under the guise of “security”. While there is some security benefit, the main benefit is making sure Google is the only one spying on user’s every move.
This is what you get when people trust their browser development to a monopolist instead of a consortium. You get fast and shiny bells and whistles with support for the latest whatsis, but you also get this.
I really am curious if that will hold up once bigger refactorings make the necessary internal APIs for ManifestV2 unavailable. Then Brave needs to maintain those APIs themselves, and every time downporting changes from the open source base becomes harder and thus more expensive in time and money.
I agree fully. We need to keep the idea of fully branching off from an open source project alive. But I also suspect that Google has incentives to make it extra complicated and difficult to maintain a fork of their codebase with adblocking implemented on top of it, over time. Resources are often very limited in open source and often comes down to one or a few people.
I'm not sure that that's realistic. A browser in 2025 is arguably more complicated than an operating system, and requires fairly large and expensive teams of engineers to maintain and grow.
Google has billions and billions of dollars to throw at Chromium; I doubt Brave has anywhere near that kind of money. The longer it stays fully forked from core Chromium, the harder it's going to be to pull in updates, and the more expensive it will be to maintain.