Note that Brave does not develop its own engine, piggybacking on Chromium instead. It's easy to play the righteous game when you're piggybacking on other people's work. DuckDuckGo and all alternative search engines are in the same boat.
It can be argued that Brave has a harder dependency on Google than Mozilla does. Because Mozilla has not outsourced their core competencies.
Just to give an example, with Manifest V3, Google is deprecating extensions like uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger. What will Brave do? Maintain their own fork? Well that can get expensive fast. So if it was a business-driven decision to piggyback on Chromium, I don't see why they wouldn't adopt Manifest V3 as well. Manivest V3 will offer mediocre means to block ads too and the average user will not know the difference.
When Brave implements its own engine, or maintains an actual fork of Chromium, or when DuckDuckGo implements a web crawler and stops leaking data to Microsoft, that's when they can play the righteous game.
> often hidden behind menus that your average user will probably never visit
The average user will not install Brave either so this point is moot.
Brave is already substantially modifying Chromium to remove undesirable 'features' on top of adding the slew of Brave features. Manifest V3 is just another 'feature' that will be removed. The more significant issue there is that there might end up being conflicts between some Brave and Chrome extensions following this change.
I do not agree that writing a renderer from scratch is a wise idea. I mean in theory it's a great idea, but in practice? The Chrome renderer is very well done but, much more importantly, is also going to be what what 100% of web devs will test their sites with. Even browsers with quite large userbases, including FireFox/Safari/etc, tend to get B-tier treatment, if that. Of course standards alone should mean all sites ought render/behave the same with any compliant browser but... again, that whole theory vs practice thing.
There are also a couple of other major issues. Google can use their clout to rapidly change standards that third party projects must play keep-up on. But perhaps the biggest issue is Google using their monopoly in other fields, such as with YouTube, to change their products in ways that 'coincidentally' end up rendering poorly or slowly on third party renderers, as they have done multiple times. This [1] being one particularly stark example of such behavior.
The future of web usage is always difficult to predict. We've gone through numerous phases of seemingly unbreakable web domination from Netscape to Internet Explorer to Chrome. In my opinion Manifest V3 could finally be the tipping point of Chrome, but that may idealistic - we'll have to just wait and see.
It can be argued that Brave has a harder dependency on Google than Mozilla does. Because Mozilla has not outsourced their core competencies.
Just to give an example, with Manifest V3, Google is deprecating extensions like uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger. What will Brave do? Maintain their own fork? Well that can get expensive fast. So if it was a business-driven decision to piggyback on Chromium, I don't see why they wouldn't adopt Manifest V3 as well. Manivest V3 will offer mediocre means to block ads too and the average user will not know the difference.
When Brave implements its own engine, or maintains an actual fork of Chromium, or when DuckDuckGo implements a web crawler and stops leaking data to Microsoft, that's when they can play the righteous game.
> often hidden behind menus that your average user will probably never visit
The average user will not install Brave either so this point is moot.