muon

No, it was based on Blink: https://github.com/brave/muon

I didn’t understand what this meant until I dug up more information, especially since I thought Brave was already based on Chromium. Turns out that so far only the browser engine was Chromium based. Now its user interface is also transitioning from an in-house open source framework called Muon [1] to Chromium. This is what an announcement more than six months ago (from March 2018) [2] says: > Brave for Windows, macOS, and Linux currently use the Chromium rendering engine, but (unlike Brave for Android) it uses a custom HTML and JavaScript user interface. Technical readers will know that we call the runtime for this user interface Muon, which is a more secure fork of Electron, and which therefore combines Chromium and Node.js to enable applications built using JavaScript and HTML user interfaces and Node modules for the application logic.

Brave moved away from that to Muon[1], which (IIRC) was originally very close to Electron, but now[2] actually is just a minorly-patched version of upstream Chromium. They've since moved from Muon to Chromium for the browser chrome[3]. [1]: https://github.com/brave/muon/blob/master/README.md [2]: https://github.com/brave/muon/blob/master/docs/tutorial/movi... [3]: https://brave.com/development-plans-for-upcoming-release/

They run on a fork of Electron: https://github.com/brave/muon https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop

To be fair, Brave uses Muon, which is not really electron[1]. Muon is similar to Electron, in that it uses Chromium, but different as in, it's really pretty much Chrome[ium], not some hacked together fork, avoiding branches like 'upgrade-to-chrome-61' [2]. It also puts back in the security features from Chromium (ie, the Sandboxes[6]) and allows for Chrom(e|ium) extensions to run inside Muon directly. The Brave team have been working[3] pretty hard to re-unify Chrome[ium] into Electron. You could make the case that the UI is written in Javascript for Brave, but then again[4], Chrome calls Javascript code when you open a new tab[5], and renders out the New Tab content as HTML, so, what's the diff?... 1: https://github.com/brave/muon 2: https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/10213 3: https://github.com/brave/muon/commit/5e32814490ae33ee

The question is not about "XUL functionality" specifically, XUL is just an implementation detail, and html could work in its place just as well. The question is how much the extensions can do, in the old model they could do anything firefox code could do, in WebExtensions model, they can do only very limited set of things. On one hand it is quite sad to see firefox extensions go, on the other hand the old model was a maintenance hell both for firefox developers and for addon developers, because smallest changes in firefox ui were breaking bunch of addons, and even changes in addons themselves were breaking other addons, which all had incompatibilities and had to do lots of subtle hacks to work together. I have worked on firefox addons for several years, and had to quit firefox when they started ignoring addons and investing in old addon s

See http://kaiostech.com/. B2G lives, for now -- the "G" (for Gecko) part is not likely to last. Blonk, not Gonk, coming, I hope with Muon (https://github.com/brave/muon/) included, but the "Muonk" name goes too far ;-).

No need to fork Brave, we will collaborate on extensions APIs as we scale. We're supporting tested chromium extensions that we curate and fetch from our own S3 (essentially a cache backed by the Chrome Web Store). For an extension to get support, we need to rank it as in-demand, and then try adding it to Brave to see what missing chrome.* APIs it might need. https://twitter.com/bravesampson is leading this charge, using https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/projects/1 to keep track and engage with developers. For future extension APIs that go beyond the chromium ones, we won't support XUL, but I'd like to take advantage of our Muon (https://github.com/brave/muon - we forked Electron, because security) React.js-based front end. In 2Q2017 I'll hope to have more to say about extensions and where we'll go. Interested extension developers ar

Though the team working on Brave seems to have a few ex-Mozilla engineers, they have chosen to fork browsers other Firefox. (Also, nice to see so many Canadians!) 'Brave browser promises faster Web by banishing intrusive ads' | Jan 20, 2016 http://www.cnet.com/news/ex-mozilla-ceo-try-braves-new-brows... > Eich and his team built Brave out of Chromium, which is the foundation for Google's Chrome browser, which leaves most of the actual development and security support to Google. Why not use Firefox, into which Eich poured so much effort? Because Chrome is more widely used and therefore better tested by developers who want to make sure their websites work properly, he said. "Chromium is the safe bet for us," he said. * The desktop browser is a cross-platform desktop application created with a fork of Github's Electron framework that is itse