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brave
brave-core
C++2018–2026
brave / brave-core

brave-core

Core engine for the Brave browser for mobile and desktop. For issues https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues

38Distinct people
45Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Core engine for the Brave browser for mobile and desktop. For issues https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year45 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-09-13 00:00:52 UTC to 2026-10-12 03:28:21 UTC.

0369122018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 1 submissions, 7 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 2 submissions, 3 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 1 submissions, 10 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC817
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC523
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11110
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Brave Core Brave Core is a set of changes, APIs, and scripts used for customizing Chromium to make the Brave browser. Please also check https://github.com/brave/brave-browser which only holds the issues, releases and the wiki. Overview This repository holds the build tools needed to build the Brave desktop browser for all platforms. In particular, it fetches and syncs code from the projects defined in package.json and src/brave/DEPS: Chromium Fetches code via depot_tools. Sets the branch for Chromium (ex: 65.0.3325.181). brave-core Mounted at src/brave. Maintains patches for 3rd party Chromium code. adblock-rust Implements Brave's adblock engine. Linked through brave/adblock-rust-ffi. Resources Documentation and guides Issues Releases Wiki Downloads You can visit our website to get the latest stable release. Contributing Please see the contributing guidelines. Our Wiki also has some useful technical information, especially about setting the development environment. Security Policy Please see the security policy. Community Join the Q&A community if you'd like to get more involved with Brave. You can ask for help, discuss features you'd like to see, and a lot more. We'd love to have your help so that we can continue improving Brave. You can also ask questions and interact in the community-guest channel on Brave Software's Slack. Help us translate Brave to your language by submitting translations at https://explore.transifex.com/brave/brave_en/. Follow @brave on X for important news and announcements. Install prerequisites Follow the instructions for your platform: Android Linux iOS macOS Windows Clone and initialize Once you have the prerequisites installed, you can get the code and initialize the build environment. Clone the repo. brave-core must be checked out into ./src/brave within a pre-existing project folder: git clone git@github.com:brave/brave-core.git path-to-your-project-folder/src/brave cd path-to-your-project-folder/src/brave Initialize the build environment. This step will download the Chromium source, which has a large history (10's of gigabytes of data). This might take a really long time to finish depending on internet speed. # Most builds: pnpm run init # Android builds (replace `arm` with whichever CPU type you want to build for): pnpm run init --target_os=android --target_arch=arm # iOS builds: pnpm run init --target_os=ios Additional config needed to build are documented at https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Build-configuration Internal developers can find more information at https://github.com/brave/internal/wiki/Build-configuration Build Brave The default build type is component. # start the component build compile pnpm run build To do a release build: # start the release compile pnpm run build Release brave-core based android builds should use pnpm run build --target_os=android --target_arch=arm brave-core based iOS builds should use the Xcode project found in ios/brave-ios/App. You can open this project directly or run pnpm run ios_bootstrap --open_xcodeproj to have it opened in Xcode. See the iOS Developer Environment for more information on iOS builds. Build Configurations Running a release build with pnpm run build Release can be very slow and use a lot of RAM, especially on Linux with the Gold LLVM plugin. To run a statically linked build (takes longer to build, but starts faster): pnpm run build Static To run a debug build (Component build with is_debug=true): pnpm run build Debug NOTE: the build will take a while to complete. Depending on your processor and memory, it could potentially take a few hours. Run Brave To start the build: pnpm start [Release|Component|Static|Debug] Update Brave pnpm run sync [--force] [--init] [--create] [brave_core_ref] This will attempt to stash your local changes in brave-core, but it's safer to commit local changes before running this pnpm run sync will (depending on the below flags): 📥 Update sub-projects (chromium, brave-core) to latest commit of a git ref (e.g. tag or branch) 🤕 Apply patches 🔄 Update gclient DEPS dependencies ⏩ Run hooks flag Description [no flags] updates chromium if needed and re-applies patches. If the chromium version did not change, it will only re-apply patches that have changed. Will update child dependencies only if any project needed updating during this script run. **Use this if you want the script to manage keeping you up to date instead of pulling or switching branches manually. ** --force updates both Chromium and brave-core to the latest remote commit for the current brave-core branch and the Chromium ref specified in brave-core/package.json (e.g. master or 74.0.0.103). Will re-apply all patches. Will force update all child dependencies. **Use this if you're having trouble and want to force the branches back to a known state. ** --init force update both Chromium and brave-core to the versions specified in brave-core/package.json and force updates all dependent repos - same as pnpm run init --sync_chromium (true/false) Will force or skip the chromium version update when applicable. Useful if you want to avoid a minor update when not ready for the larger build time a chromium update may result in. A warning will be output about the current code state expecting a different chromium version. Your build may fail as a result. -D, --delete_unused_deps Will delete from the working copy any dependencies that have been removed since the last sync. Mimics gclient sync -D. Run pnpm run sync brave_core_ref to checkout the specified brave-core ref and update all dependent repos including chromium if needed. Scenarios Create a new branch: > cd src/brave src/brave> git checkout -b branch_name Checkout an existing branch or tag: src/brave> git fetch origin src/brave> git checkout [-b] branch_name src/brave> pnpm run sync ...Updating 2 patches... ...Updating child dependencies... ...Running hooks... Update the current branch to the latest remote: src/brave> git
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

45 sources
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
Read the rest
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
In Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive
Tor Browser does letterboxing for anti-fingerprinting of usable window size, which can be kinda painful, with sometimes large margins of lost display space. Any current thoughts on this, and on Brave's approach? I see a request for letterboxing in Brave, and a PR that does randomizing of some values instead: * https://community.brave.com/t/feature-request-letterboxing-i... * Bug 23170: anti-fingerprinting: hide screen size and window position #13737 https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/13737 (Incidentally, that PR number is not quite elite. :)
In Brave browser simplifies its fingerprinting protections
> If you actually care about privacy rather than want to pay lip service to some marketing, 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? I'm not saying I like the company but I think it's incorrect to say they don't do anything for privacy. EDIT: better link - https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Fingerprinting-P...
In Brave appears to install VPN Services without user consent
> or an autocomplete tagging a referrer - that was patched out in less than 24 hours That functionality (which would modify some literal URLs typed in by users, not just make autocomplete suggestions!) was present in the source repository for roughly a month and a half until it was disabled by default, and remained present as an option for over a year after that. https://github.com/brave/brave-core/commits/master/component... You may mean that it was modified less than 24 hours after users noticed it and raised an outcry, but that still doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
In Tor’s shadowy reputation will only end if we all use it

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