brave-core VS WebKit

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

Multiple engineers are working on adding it back: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed...

Since 2023 Chrome announced the View Transition API, and it looks like Safari is also going to support it soon.

One heap per type.

Here’s an allocator optimized for that use case.

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/bmalloc/li...

To use this in Bun, you’d have to start Bun with the environment variable “BUN_JSC_useDollarVM=1” and then $vm.createBuiltin(mySourceCodeString)

When using this intrinsic, if any of the arguments are incorrect or it cannot otherwise enable it, the entire process will probably crash. In debug builds of JSC it will have a nicer assertion failure but that is not enabled in release builds

Example code: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/17351231b4dedb62d81721...

also happy to answer any questions about Bun

Ah, good, let me introduce you to the wonderful world of the Chrome Devtools Protocol! (fka Chrome Remote Debugging Protocol)

I love this API for almost everything browser related. I built my RBI product atop this (BrowserBox: https://dosyago.com), and I think it's a drastically underrated API.

Also, it works out of the box in Edge, Brave, Chromium, and many parts of CRDP are supported by Firefox and Safari^1

1: See for example: https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/tree/main/Source/JavaScript...

No, it's unrelated.

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/commit/064df1a9f395f8c6e32c...

It's being worked on now: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/17320

It is different. The cross-site navigation flag is a couple of years old. It was enabled by default for iOS in November 2018 for example https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/commit/e191fc8c412850cb9fd0...