brave-core VS EdgeDeflector

Unrelated but about Brave and interesting to me: I recently found myself having a large upstream project that I need to maintain some custom patches for, and there's a need for deeper customizations and I worry that my rudimentary system of applying .patch files will turn into an unmaintainable nightmare of merge conflicts after every rebase. I was thinking about possible solutions, and it occurred to me that Brave being Chromium-based must have this same challenge but an order of magnitude more difficult, so I looked for their code to see how they solved this issue.

It's pretty interesting! They do basically the same thing for core Chromium, applying a (big) set of patches[1].

Incidentally, I'd be interested to hear any ideas/approaches to this problem. I'm guessing if there was something clearly better, Brave would be doing it, but it seems like there should be a better way even if I can't think of one.

[1] https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches

https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/13737

(Incidentally, that PR number is not quite elite. :)

I disagree that it's lip service Brave has a ton of engine level privacy patches https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches

To my understanding you can't match it with just js extensions.

Only firefox on the highest security mode comes close I think?

Or ungoogled chromium? (brave has most of their patches IIRC)

Are there other options that have this number of patches?

Chromium is not 100% Google's forever and always, though they do currently lead the way, and with the most used/backed fork.

https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/19476

They have much more changes than just compile flags. Here's the repo where they maintain their patch set: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches

Brave Private Ads toggle controls just Push Notification ads at this time. So, if you are still seeing Push Notification ads, that would be incorrect. However, it's normal to still see New Tab Page image ads, and/or other ad formats. We are introducing a new UI that helps you better toggle on/off specific ad units, and removing the "Brave Private Ads" toggle that can be confusing: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/18938

Yes, being fixed. Github at https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/18922

I used to use Bing to DuckDuckGo in conjunction with EdgeDeflector to ensure all links that open Edge and Bing redirect to Firefox and DDG instead, but EdgeDeflector no longer works now, so I guess I don't need that extension anymore. Thanks for pointing that out, I hadn't realized till now that the extension wasn't necessary anymore.

There's also the dark bit where changing your default browser in Windows doesn't apply globally.

That is, some UI widgets will still open Edge even if you change the default.

There used to be an awesome open source project called EdgeDeflector that would fix that. Microsoft got wise to it and found a way to neutralize it, which killed the project. https://github.com/da2x/EdgeDeflector

1) Install EdgeDeflector. (Note: Edge deflector is deprecated without the next fix. You no longer need to browse into Default Apps to select EdgeDeflector).

It’s a very intentional thing that Microsoft ignores the default browser in many cases. They’ve already killed one workaround tool that fixes this: https://github.com/da2x/EdgeDeflector

Idk if Edgeeflector can actually overcome this but it worth a try yk

*cough* edgedeflector *cough*

It probably opens Edge anyway, so you could use EdgeDeflector to handle the browser opening.