Brave Browser Uses Chromium's Code Base: Supporting Chrome Extensions

Starting version 0.57, privacy-focused browser Brave, announced that it switched to Chromium code base.

Chromium is an open-source web browser project from Google. It provides the core code base for Google Chrome and many other browsers. They include Vivaldi, Opera, and also Microsoft Edge after it ditched its very own EdgeHTML.

Brave actually used Chromium's backend code since 2016 on the browser's first iteration. However, it used the Muon library for its UI, which gave it the benefits of custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript user interface.

This UI was described by Brave as "a more secure fork of Electron."

However, developing UI framework can be a time-consuming effort. This is why back in March 2018, Brave announced that the browser was giving up on Muon as its frontend framework, and chose the standard bits provided by the Chromium project.

A first full Chromium version of Brave was released as an alpha and beta for developers in September and starting with October 18, with version 0.55.

With version 0.57, Brave goes all in, and saw performance improvements to up to a 22 percent. This is a huge gain that according to Brave, users should notice a 8-to-10 second gain on website loading time, as compared to previous version.

But the main benefits of using the standard Chromium frontend code base means the support for standard WebExtensions API, which is used by all modern-day extensions, and the API that Muon never really got.

Because Brave 0.57 uses Chromium, the browser can also support Chrome extensions.

And this is where some of the tweaks happen.

Brave browser
A comparison between Brave Core and Brave Muon when browsing Reddit

Brave is a privacy-focused browser, and here it categorizes Chrome extensions in three categories for users’ safety: 'allowed and vetted', 'allowed and unvetted', and 'blocked'. Brave said that it has plans to add more categories in the future.

The company also gave a Google a jab by saying that the Brave browser won’t connect to Google in the background. This includes the disabling of Google Accounts and Google’s sync function.

In short, Brave isn't integrating any of the Google-based features that Chromium includes.

Furthermore, the browser also doesn't sync any user data to its servers without their permission.

"…but unlike Google’s browser, Brave doesn’t make any connections to Google in the background. We’ve disabled Google Accounts and Sync and removed all the Chrome-specific telemetry and reporting code. Google isn’t used for search suggestions either — Brave relies on an offline Alexa top sites list in addition to your open tabs and history stored only on your device."

These attempt and gains could lure more users in using the Brave browser, especially from those Chrome users who are willing to try out a new browser, but without giving up the whole Chrome goodies they have all liked.

Published: 
14/12/2018