> Is the engine really the thing you're worried about though?
Yes. Google is unable to separate their ad business from making a browser engine (as any profit-seeking corporation in the same position would be). So far their power hasn't been absolute, so some of their less nice efforts have failed, but they'll keep trying.
Do they really have the engineering capacity to support a fork for years after divergence?
Also, I am personally not really okay with their shady crypto practice where content creators didn’t get their share made before their joining. Any reason to prefer it over Firefox?
I mean, everyone has more engineering capacity to fork Chromium than to build their own browser/engine from scratch, which is why I find a lot of this discussion so silly.
With regards to the crypto donations, that was an early version of the system which they improved after receiving feedback. Hearing feedback that your product is misleading and then fixing it is exactly the type of behavior I want to see, not sure about anyone else.
I prefer it to Firefox because of the best-in-class adblocking and because (for JS heavy workloads) I still find that V8 is far superior to SpiderMonkey.
Also because I don't think Mozilla has been a great steward, and most of their revenue comes from Google, so if your goal is to de-google I think Firefox is a worse bet than Brave.
> I mean, everyone has more engineering capacity to fork Chromium than to build their own browser/engine from scratch
That doesn’t contradict my question. If google does go through with crippling ad blockers at a deep level of the engine, how long till forks will break under backporting every security update, etc. And that is without thinking of any sort of malice. If google deliberately builds heavily on top of these changes, they will pretty much cripple every fork, except for perhaps edge.
And I do agree that V8 is a superior engine when it comes to performance, but for me the minimal performance gain is meaningless (especially with good ad blocking it is almost insignificant for the majority of websites)
And just because it is a symbiosis where Google won’t face anti-monopolism lawsuits if Mozilla is around and Mozilla gets some money, I doubt it would shine negative light on Firefox.
I'm more concerned with things like Manifest V3, which Brave certainly has the engineering capacity to fork around, and plans to.