Brave-browser: Document in the FAQ why Firefox or its forks are not used as a base for Brave instead of Chromium

[KOLANICH]

Description

It is completely unclear why Chromium was preferred against Firefox. Firefox currently is one of the most privacy-friendly browsers: it has prefs to disable features used for tracking and it has prefs enchancing privacy. Its forks, especially Tor Browser, are even more privacy-friendly. So if you based your work on them you would had got these features already implemented.

Also in my experience (2 GiB of RAM on my PC) FF (and even Chrome) consumes less RAM than Brave and is much less laggy.

So it is completely unclear why Chromium is preferred over Firefox and it would be nice to have the rationale for it being placed into the FAQ.

Steps to Reproduce

Visit https://brave.com/faq/

Actual result:

Brave is based on Chromium. Rationale for that is missing from the FAQ.

Expected result:

Rationale for the choice of the base is available in the FAQ.

Reproduces how often:

Easily reproduced

Brave version (brave://version info)

Any

Version/Channel Information:

Any

• Yes.
• Yes.
• Yes.
• Yes.

Other Additional Information:

• No.
• No.
• N/A

Miscellaneous Information:

N/A

[bsclifton]

Looks like we DID have info about this previously... but it was fairly limited:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180320170224/https://www.brave.com/faq/

Why aren’t you using Mozilla’s Gecko engine on laptops?
We were, under a partially sandboxed, multi-process architecture called Graphene. But we did a careful head-to-head comparison and by every measure, Electron/chromium won.

This was removed when we went from Muon (fork of Electron) to Brave Core. It has been answered on Reddit, but we could use help capturing this for our FAQ:
https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/9l0gnx/if_founder_of_brave_is_originated_from_mozilla/e74fcuo/

Please see the answers I provided below (from another post). They're referenced from Brendan himself.

From Brendan Eich (CEO):

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/959909542246019072

We started w/ Gecko in 2015 at Brave, counted compatibility problems vs. switching to chromium, made the switch. Business decision, we agreed. Stop arguing for us to impair our growth with compat bugs that our users cannot fix.

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/950209816902774785

No real choice on mobile. On desktop we started in 2015 w/ Gecko, did full evaluation against chromium, latter won. No benefit in going back to Gecko (Firefox faces diff tradeoff but on back foot now breaking XUL addons). WebKit lineage + Chrome market power => de facto standard.

Many of the people at Brave are from Mozilla, including the founder of Mozilla & Firefox himself, Brendan Eich (BAT/Brave's CEO) and our CTO Brian Bondy. You can be sure that if the team chose Chromium, it was for good and arguably advanced reasons.

Thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/9jpqde/brave_browser_and_chromium/

[Brave-Matt]

Is this article still desired/up for grabs? I'd actually started drafting something similar to this in HC already -- would be happy to finish it :)

[bsclifton]

@Brave-Matt absolutely- all yours! 😄

[KOLANICH]

Any progress on this?