>Google bought widevine last year.
Google bought widewine in 2010
>Google didn't invent that particular DRM, but now that it's widespread, they have bought it outright.
It invented most of it, in the last 10 years it owned widevine.
As for how open widevine is:
>I'm sorry but we're not supporting an open source solution like this
https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/widevine/gmail-thread.html
Or as Brian Bondy, of Brave, put it:
>This is a prime example for why free as in beer is not enough. Small share browsers are at the mercy of Google, and Google is stalling us for no communicated-to-us reason.
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/10449#issueco...
So yeah, you can fork chromium and make your own nifty browser. But do not expect being able to play any video from any paid streaming service any time soon or ever.
In FLoC Away from Chromebrave
browser-laptop
JavaScript2016–2022
brave / browser-laptop · Archived
browser-laptop
[DEPRECATED] Please see https://github.com/brave/brave-browser for the current version of Brave
35Distinct people
44Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
7.9KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
[DEPRECATED] Please see https://github.com/brave/brave-browser for the current version of Brave
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
- brave/muon · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- brave/brave-browser · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 8:03:49 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 year44 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-01-20 16:01:34 UTC to 2022-03-18 11:02:54 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 1 | 7 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 1 | 11 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 0 | 13 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Brave Browser
Desktop browser for macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Deprecation notice: this repository is for the older Muon (our fork of Electron) version of Brave.
The newer version of the browser (brave-core) can be found here.
Development is being wound down on this version as issues are migrated to the new code-base
If you're experiencing issues with Brave or would like to contribute, please check out the new code-base instead
For other versions of our browser, please see:
iPhone - brave/browser-ios
Android - brave/browser-android-tabs
Downloads
To download the latest release, see our releases page.
You can also visit our website to get the latest stable release (along with a more user-friendly download page).
The Muon version of Brave has only one active release channel: Release. This will be deprecated as we move to brave-core. Both the Beta channel and Developer channel are already using the brave-core code-base.
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.
Useful documentation
See CONTRIBUTING.md for tips and guidelines about contributing.
See docs/style.md for information on styling.
See docs/tests.md for information on testing, including how to run a subset of the tests.
See docs/debugging.md for information on debugging.
See docs/translations.md to learn how you can help us with translations (localization).
See docs/linuxInstall.md for information on installing the browser on Linux distributions.
Running from source
If you're setting up using Windows, please see the Building on Windows wiki entry for a full walkthrough.
For other platforms (macOS, Linux) You'll need certain packages installed before you can build and run Brave locally.
Prerequisites
the current LTS version of nodejs
Install from your package manager, nvm, or download from https://nodejs.org
npm version 5 or greater (to make use of the package-lock.json)
On Debian / Ubuntu /Mint
apt-get install build-essential rpm ninja-build
On Fedora
dnf install rpm-build
dnf group install "Development Tools" "C Development Tools and Libraries"
Installation
After installing the prerequisites:
Clone the git repository from GitHub:
# For beta testers:
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop
# For devs over HTTPS:
git clone https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop
# For devs over SSH:
git clone git@github.com:brave/browser-laptop.git
Open the working directory:
cd browser-laptop
Install the Node dependencies:
npm install
Instead of npm install you may also install with yarn running yarn install.
Troubleshooting
Additional notes on troubleshooting installation issues are in the Troubleshooting page in the Wiki.
Preconfigured VMs
Some platforms are available as pre-configured VMs. See the readme for details.
Running Brave
To run a development version of the browser requires a few steps. The easiest way is just to use two
terminals. One terminal can be used just to watch for changes to the code
npm run watch
Now actually run Brave in another terminal
npm start
Some errors related to brave/electron update can be fixed by doing a clean install:
rm -rf node_modules/
npm install
If this does not work, please clear out your ~/.electron first and try again.
Running webdriver tests
To run the webdriver tests
npm run watch-test or npm run watch-all
Now run tests in another terminal
npm test
See docs/tests.md for more information.
Port
Brave uses port 8080 to communicate between its client and server sides by default. If you are using port 8080 for something else (e.g. a web proxy) then you can set the node config to make it use a different one.
e.g.
npm config set brave:port 9001
Additional notes on troubleshooting development issues are in the Troubleshooting page in the Wiki.
Running inside of a development version of Muon
By default, we provide pre-built binaries when you npm install with our own fork of electron-prebuilt.
If you want to modify the code to Muon (Brave's Electron fork), then you'll need to build it. An example of why you might do that would be exposing a new event to the webview (from Muon).
To start this process, you'll want to check out our browser-laptop-bootstrap repo. From there, you can follow the steps in our wiki to get up and running.
Packaging for bundles, installers, and updates
Please see our wiki entry for more information about packaging.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
3 sourcesThe Widevine team themselves suggested building the same exact system on top of a proprietary Electron fork.
> The Castlabs Electron implementation would be your only path of support. Otherwise, we don't have the resources to support at this time.
So Electron is not the reason this request was denied.
You're not wrong that Google is blocking login from embedded webviews, but the thing is that Google is separately blocking logins from embedded webviews. It's a different situation that's unrelated to their Widevine licensing. If what you were saying was correct, then the Castlabs Electron framework[0] wouldn't have Widevine support, and it does.
It's not about embedded engines, it's about Open Source.
----
> which is why the inclusion of DRM in webstandards was widely debated in the first place.
My take on this is that you would be right -
Read the rest
- it would be weird to complain about Google refusing to set up a licensing scheme for Widevine -- if not for the fact that:
A) they were a part of the campaign for DRM inclusion in the first place, even while people argued that it would hamper browser innovation, so the problem we're in is in no small part their fault,
B) the fact that they control both Widevine licensing and the dominant desktop browser (and the fact that they have used that control to harass even mainstream browsers like Brave[1]) constitutes something at least adjacent to anticompetitive behavior,
and C) the fact that they're willing to license Widevine to Open Source browsers like Brave and Firefox suggests that there isn't a fundamental problem with Open Source that means it couldn't interact with this DRM in a way that's acceptable to Google.
Add those 3 points together, and I feel like it's reasonable to ask Google what they're doing and why they're doing it, and to expect them to have some kind of answer as to how they're going to maintain control of Widevine without cutting off the legs of browser innovation and using web standards to shut out competitors.
[0]: https://github.com/castlabs/electron-releases
[1]: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/10449#issueco...
Brave also started out this way—building a browser on top of Electron. [0]
Building something on top of the Chromium project is still building a browser. You're right that it's not building a rendering engine and JavaScript interpreter though.
[0] https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop
In I tried creating a web browser and Google blocked me (2019)