[MasterYoda]

If this is a privacy first browser, why wasn´t Firefox used when it is much better out of the box for this approach? All security and privacy focused webbrowser use Firefox. Like Tor Browser, Mullvad Browser, LibreWolf etc.

Also, I think it is super important we have different "webbrowser engines" and that are independent from big tech companies. If we only have chromium it would be really bad and hurt use consumer really bad and also stop inovation.

We really need to support independentCbrowsers like Firefox more.

[felarof]

This was definitely a hard choice.

We spoke to folks who had built browser on top of webkit and they spent nearly 2years just fixing random bugs and getting sites to work. I'm sure firefox/gecko engine would probably work better than webkit, but the point still is: if we don't use chromium, a lot of work does have go into fixing website compatibility issues, adding support for extension. We're 2 person startup and chromium codebase was easier to build on top of and provides a solid baseline.

And Brave has shown that you can build a privacy-focused browser on top of chromium still.

In the agentic browser era, I think there are so many low hanging fruits on privacy which are more important to address -- sending all your sensitive data to Perplexity Comet to sell ads is a pretty bad option right now. Supporting local LLM, letting folks bring their own API keys is crucial.

[lelanthran]

I had exactly the same question.

You're privacy focused but use chrome as the engine?

[braebo]

Brave is one of the best privacy-first browsers around… more secure than Firefox, and it’s a chromium fork.