> Microsoft wasn't able to keep developing a browser on their own, I doubt that Brave could. The problem is that a browser nowadays is so complex to develop that you need serious resources to invest in it. Without Google's ongoing development, Brave would not survive. And given Google's changes to undermine ads blockers, it's going to be interesting to see Brave struggling to maintain their fork.
IE was woefully out-of-date. MSFT then tried to build a browser from scratch. That was a lot of effort, so they decided to fork Chromium (like Brave) instead. What exactly do you think would happen in Google dissappeared tomorrow in their case? Do you think they would go back to trying to build their own browser from scratch? No, they'd just keep developing Chromium. Many (most) changes would probably be upstreamed. Forking a browser and maintaining it is orders of magnitude easier than starting from scratch in [current year]. As you point out, there are not multiple parties building on Chromium, so I'm sure slack could be picked up if Google switches gears. But you're right, maybe Brave won't be able to keep up with upstream changes that make ad-blocking harder. In that case, you can always just switch browsers. In the meantime, however, I'll use the browser that does a better job of protecting privacy by default.
> Right, keep telling yourself that.
Luckily, I don't need to. A browser that blocks ads by default is objectively better for user privacy and security than one that doesn't.
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> Btw, I actually wonder how what Brave is doing isn't copyright infringement, given they are directly profiting from blocking the ads of publishers. I guess they are small enough to not matter, for now.
They aren't directly profiting off of ad-blocking, so maybe that helps.
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> I worked on anti-ad-blocking technology. Nothing beats uBlock Origin running on top of Firefox, everything else was strictly inferior.
Have you actually tried Brave? Works better for me, and I've tried Firefox with uB0. Have also tried Chrome with uB0. Brave blocks both ads and tracking more consistently across the board. It occasionally breaks a webpage, but I have reported those to Brave and two of them have been fixed (out of like 5). This process is clearly better for users than everyone having to configure their uB0 Matrix and such separately. Brave is creating a web where all the privacy violating / attention grabbing shit is very much blocked by default in a much stricter way than other options. When this breaks the internet, they fix it and because this fix is part of the blocker it fixes it for everyone.