alt Hacker NewsI knew the "elephant in the room" section of the article was coming before I started reading... but then it wasn't even about the right thing! The other different, bigger, angrier, elephant in the room is about Brave being YACB (Yet Another Chromium Browser). A browser built on the Chromium project is riding on top of that elephant trying to tell it where to go.
I think Google created a "moat" in terms of hyperaccelerating browser development with disproportionate firepower that nobody else could keep up with. And one potential non-terrible use of AI might be diminishing that moat and with it Google's ability to steer the whole web into their ecosystem. So if you want to be an optimist maybe that's a silver lining that will grow with time.
Replies
It's okay, soon everybody will switch to their own vibe-coded browsers, right?
(https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender this looks so dead...)
Main reason I keep using Brave is its "good enfough."
The CTO at my company recommended Brave in 2019; I figured why not and have found a compelling reason to change.
The "elephant in the room" paragraph actually is making me consider Vivaldi. Its still Chromium, so it will support all my plugins, and I use NextDNS so most of ads will be blocked anyway. And its not like its amazing, but I've just never heard anyone rave of a browser that was particularly efficent either.
It may be YACB, but that is precisely why it works for the author. Chromium browsers have the best compatibility because that is what is tested for. If it were any other way, then this post wouldn't exist.
I'd assume that isn't the elephant in the room since Vivaldi is also YACB
> A browser built on the Chromium project is riding on top of that elephant trying to tell it where to go.
You can give away all the insanely expensive base software to build a browser and you'll still get blamed for not encouraging enough competition.