this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Google sure is. Brave is a chromium-based browser - a browser that is built off of Google Chrome, so anything Google wants to put in their web browser to track you and devour your internet-soul is also in Brave and all the other “web browsers” that are just chromium skins like Edge.
Just because Brave forks of Chromium, that doesn't mean they have to accept every change Google does and they can also do their own changes (ex: not supporting Manifest V3).
At least they are financially independent from Google, which you can't say about Firefox.
I absolutely love it when people bring this up.
It's always funny, mostly because Google is, let's see... A member of the GNOME Advisory Board, a financial supporter of the GNOME Foundation (scroll to the bottom to see their supporters), a supporting member of the KDE e.V., a Gold member of the Linux Foundation, and a major contributor to the Linux Kernel (you'll see some other companies you absolutely hate in that list as well).
Almost nothing in the major open source space is untouched by Google. But sure, Firefox in particular is evil because "Google money".
If you don't want to use something with financial support from Google, feel free to run FreeBSD and browse the web with, I don't know, Lynx or something. ~~Or Apple devices with Safari only. That's a pretty good option, actually, provided you like proprietary software and a super locked down system (except WebKit which is open source and I honestly believe more browsers should be based on it).~~ Lol, edit: Google pays more to Apple than Mozilla to be default on Safari, so nevermind that.
I just think it's stupid people are always crying that Chromium forks are "controlled by Google" when they can do whatever they want with the fork.
I'm not saying that Firefox is bad because they take Google's money.
I just think that if you consider that, they are more dependent on Google than Brave is.
And since one of the main complaints of people is that they want to turn away from Google stuff, that should be taken into consideration.
I think we're defining "dependent" in two different ways here. There's financial reliance (which applies to far more than Firefox when it comes to major FOSS projects) and software reliance. I don't particularly think either is better or worse, but there are significant differences in the result of either.
Financial contribution in exchange for defaulting to a specific search engine is very different from using a Google-led project as the base foundation of your software.
Unless Brave actually hard forks Blink/Chromium, they're literally depending on Google's work for the entire base of their flagship software.
They can choose not to implement certain features, but without Google, their browser as it currently is wouldn't exist. Theoretically (this is highly unlikely, but just as an experiment) if Google were to somehow move to a closed source model for future versions or ditch all work on Blink, Brave would very likely die.
If they wanted to keep it alive, they'd have to fork the last open source version of Chromium, maintain it alongside everything else, and still push out something secure that adheres to web standards. None of which is easy and requires a lot of work.
Financially, yeah. Firefox has more reliance on Google than Brave. So do GNOME, KDE, and the Linux Foundation.
When it comes to their software, Brave is far more reliant on Google than Firefox could ever be.
~~The only major browser not reliant on Google at all is Safari.~~ (Edit: ignore this; Google pays Apple a shit ton to be default on Safari as well.)
Despite my dislike of web monopoly, I don't particularly care what browser people use, provided they're being honest about it.
I don't like Google. I don't trust them. But it would be incredibly shortsighted to dismiss their contributions (financial or otherwise) to open source. Whether people like it or not, without them, we wouldn't have a lot of shit we take for granted.
If people want to "get away from using Google stuff", they might as well just ditch tech altogether. Google's fingers are in just about every big FOSS cookie jar, whether financially or via software contribution.
Think about it this way. Brave needs Google. Google doesn't need Brave. At all. Mozilla needs funding from Google. Google doesn't need funding from Mozilla. Google requires very little of either of them, but they both rely on it for different reasons. One approach isn't worse than the other, but the effects are very, very different.