Brave

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grooveman · Post by **grooveman** » Tue Jan 21, 2020 12:57 pm

I have just become aware of a new Web browser called Brave. It looks like it is based on chromium, but allegedly has some very powerful privacy features. It claims also to be 8x faster... they all claim to be faster, so I'm not going to hold my breath on that count... but private by default interests me.

I notice that there is no ebuild in portage for it... I'm wondering if anyone has tried it... any thoughts... opinions... and of course, if it ever will be brought into mainstream portage.

Anyone want to weigh in?

G

Post by **fedeliallalinea** » Tue Jan 21, 2020 1:12 pm

There is an ebuild in brave-overlay but look it

Budoka · Post by **Budoka** » Tue Jan 21, 2020 3:30 pm

I've been using it for some time now on my mobile devices and I like it so far. Privacy by default is nice but I am on the fence about the Advertising model. I find it a bit confusing but one can opt-out of it.

It also doesn't do anything, privacy/security-wise, that I wasn't getting done in Chrome and Firefox but with carefully selected extensions. For those that don't want to tinker too much with their browser of choice, I think Brave is a reasonable alternative.

I have been testing out the overlay binary. I really don't like running applications on my box that I can't build from source but at the moment this is the only option for we Gentoo users.

I actually also had some concerns about Overlay QA and integrity that I asked about in another thread. I was satisfied with the replies I received and would give Hu's reply particular consideration. AntP also seems to have some concerns about Brave but I didn't ask him to expand on it. Take a look and feel free to commnet.

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8 ... ml#8411520

Post by **Juippisi** » Tue Jan 21, 2020 5:59 pm

Budoka wrote:I've been using it for some time now on my mobile devices and I like it so far.

I use firefox on mobile. I like it much better + you can install ublock origin on it.

Privacy by default is nice but I am on the fence about the Advertising model. I find it a bit confusing but one can opt-out of it.

I don't trust any more than I trust Google. And their ad policy? They take from content creators and replace it with their own ads, getting money in their own pockets while ignoring content creators. Yes, you can 'tip' the original site, but so few sites are affiliated it's basically stealing.

It also doesn't do anything, privacy/security-wise, that I wasn't getting done in Chrome and Firefox but with carefully selected extensions. For those that don't want to tinker too much with their browser of choice, I think Brave is a reasonable alternative.

Read: Only few extensions have been ported to work with Brave.

I have been testing out the overlay binary. I really don't like running applications on my box that I can't build from source but at the moment this is the only option for we Gentoo users.

This is just a feeling, but I believe Brave isn't 100 % open source and they have some binary/DRM parts that are installed after compiling the base chromium. So I don't see much benefit in compiling it, I don't think you can change so much from the base chromium that runs those blobs. But just a feeling. When I wrote the ebuild for brave-overlay I did study possibility to make it source-buildable but gave up on it quite fast.

grooveman · Post by **grooveman** » Wed Feb 05, 2020 3:56 pm

thanks. I just wanted to check it out... but I don't think I will be doing an overly. Every time I do that, I wind up in dependency hell at update time and I simply don't have the time to dwell there. It isn't that important to me

I'll look at it on another system, or just wait.

I don't really have high expectations of it. It sounds like consumer-grade BS to me... but I was asked about it from an executive, so I thought I would check into it.

Thank you all for your input.

G

dhinds · Post by **dhinds** » Fri Feb 14, 2020 3:21 pm

I have Brave and Opera Touch installed on an Android cel.

Opera Touch will link with Opera (also now based on Blink with privacy features) on a desk or laptop machine.

A.S. Pushkin · Post by **A.S. Pushkin** » Fri Feb 14, 2020 6:33 pm

How do you install Brave?

I've also heard another browser called Tracefree. Anyone know anything about that?

Linux Mint offers still another called Tor Browser. I run that on my laptop, Linux Mint, but have not been able to install
this browser.

Thanks

philmb · Post by **philmb** » Fri Feb 14, 2020 6:38 pm

hi folks! I have made a Brave ebuild for gentoo. Testing it now, it is pretty speedy and seems to work fine.

You can use my overlay at https://github.com/sinetek/gentoo-overlay

I'm looking for people with *fast* internet connection to test it.

You will need about 20GB of network bandwidth to pull in all the sources, and around 60 GB to build the software. To be safe make sure you have 100GB free space.
I made it so the build uses your local tools and also it will pull in your own CFLAGS. For now only GCC is supported but if there's a request i might change that.

I haven't had the time to fill in properly the Dependencies so, sorry about that. make sure you have 'nodejs' installed and all the dependencies needed for a normal chromium build..
last thing, you might need to turn off the network filter because the emerge sandbox will prevent the installation to fetch the sources properly via git.
something like FEATURES="-network-sandbox" in your make.conf or just before the emerge command will do.

Happy testing!

philmb · Post by **philmb** » Fri Feb 14, 2020 6:48 pm

should "+widevine" be on by default?? I think it's nicer to have it in so people don't need to go recompile when they need to watch video.

philmb · Post by **philmb** » Fri Feb 14, 2020 8:37 pm

Added disk and memory check, and proper dependencies.

Budoka · Post by **Budoka** » Sun Feb 16, 2020 5:46 am

philmb wrote:hi folks! I have made a Brave ebuild for gentoo. Testing it now, it is pretty speedy and seems to work fine.

You can use my overlay at https://github.com/sinetek/gentoo-overlay

I'm looking for people with *fast* internet connection to test it.

You will need about 20GB of network bandwidth to pull in all the sources, and around 60 GB to build the software. To be safe make sure you have 100GB free space.
I made it so the build uses your local tools and also it will pull in your own CFLAGS. For now only GCC is supported but if there's a request i might change that.

I haven't had the time to fill in properly the Dependencies so, sorry about that. make sure you have 'nodejs' installed and all the dependencies needed for a normal chromium build..
last thing, you might need to turn off the network filter because the emerge sandbox will prevent the installation to fetch the sources properly via git.
something like FEATURES="-network-sandbox" in your make.conf or just before the emerge command will do.

Happy testing!

Hi. I'm interested in testing this and have the bandwidth but what exactly is this version providing that the current brave-overlay doesn't?

Post by **Juippisi** » Sun Feb 16, 2020 6:21 am

philmb wrote: You will need about 20GB of network bandwidth to pull in all the sources, and around 60 GB to build the software. To be safe make sure you have 100GB free space.

Without attempting to build yet, these numbers feel wayyyy off. They look superweird.

Post by **Juippisi** » Sun Feb 16, 2020 6:22 am

philmb wrote:should "+widevine" be on by default?? I think it's nicer to have it in so people don't need to go recompile when they need to watch video.

It's only needed for DRM content. Normal h264 content should play without.

Some people care about that...

philmb · Post by **philmb** » Sun Feb 16, 2020 11:58 am

Budoka wrote: Hi. I'm interested in testing this and have the bandwidth but what exactly is this version providing that the current brave-overlay doesn't?

This one is building directly from sources using your toolchain instead of a binary distribution.

tnt · Post by **tnt** » Sat Jan 09, 2021 8:24 pm

Almost a year later, Brave seems regulary mainteined and pops up in many comparisons as one of the "top 5" browsers in general.

Any plans to add an official ebuild?

imajica · Post by **imajica** » Mon Jan 11, 2021 6:47 am

tnt wrote:Almost a year later, Brave seems regulary mainteined and pops up in many comparisons as one of the "top 5" browsers in general.

Any plans to add an official ebuild?

I would like to ask the same question.

The Main Man · Post by **The Main Man** » Mon Jan 11, 2021 9:59 am

atrix · Post by **atrix** » Tue Jan 19, 2021 6:43 pm

tnt wrote:Almost a year later, Brave seems regulary mainteined and pops up in many comparisons as one of the "top 5" browsers in general.

Any plans to add an official ebuild?

+1

TheGreatMcPain · Post by **TheGreatMcPain** » Wed Jan 27, 2021 2:26 am

I wonder if it would be possible to set up pre-patched tarballs of brave and then use a modified version of the chromium ebuild to compile/merge it.

That would avoid the need to download 30GB of unneeded git history.

Also, I've been trying to reduce the initial 'npm run init' download by adding '--no-history' into the places in 'brave-browser' and 'brave-core' where gclient is being called, but despite it only downloading 1GB from chromium initially it still fetches 30GB of git history anyway.

szatox · Post by **szatox** » Thu Jan 28, 2021 6:00 pm

That would avoid the need to download 30GB of unneeded git history.

Git supports shallow clones, so you can make it only download the head.

TheGreatMcPain · Post by **TheGreatMcPain** » Fri Jan 29, 2021 3:03 am

szatox wrote:
That would avoid the need to download 30GB of unneeded git history.
Git supports shallow clones, so you can make it only download the head.

I was trying to do that by adding the '--no-history' gclient argument in the 'brave-core' repository which does exactly that.

This code starts at line 520 in the file 'brave-core/build/commands/lib/util.js'

Code: Select all

  gclientSync: (forceReset = false, cleanup = false, braveCoreRef = null, options = {}) => {
    let reset = forceReset

    // base args
    const initialArgs = ['sync', '--reset', '--nohooks']
    const chromiumArgs = ['--revision', 'src@' + config.getProjectRef('chrome')]
    const resetArgs = ['--with_tags', '--with_branch_heads', '--upstream']

By adding '--no-history' to one of the argument arrays it will perform a shallow clone, but it still pulls 30GB's of history, because it wants tags as well.

I did try to workaround this by creating my own chromium slimmed down git repo that only contained 1 commit along with the chromium release tag.
It worked, but with some errors. I'm not sure if the errors matter since 'npm run init' didn't complain.

Here's the errors if you're curious.

Code: Select all

> gclient runhooks
Running hooks:  19% (21/106) lastchange
________ running 'vpython src/build/util/lastchange.py -o src/build/util/LASTCHANGE' in '/home/james/git-repos/brave-browser'
ERROR:root:Failed to get version info: Git command 'git log -1 --format=%H %ct --grep=^Change-Id: HEAD' in /home/james/git-repos/brave-browser/src failed: rc=0, stdout='' stderr=''
Running hooks:  20% (22/106) gpu_lists_version
________ running 'vpython src/build/util/lastchange.py -m GPU_LISTS_VERSION --revision-id-only --header src/gpu/config/gpu_lists_version.h' in '/home/james/git-repos/brave-browser'
ERROR:root:Failed to get version info: Git command 'git log -1 --format=%H %ct --grep=^Change-Id: HEAD' in /home/james/git-repos/brave-browser/src failed: rc=0, stdout='' stderr=''

I'll let you know if it compiles.

EDIT: So, it does compile and run for the most part, but I'm having issues with the adblocker which doesn't work most of the time. I did find that running the binary version from the brave-overlay will fix the adblocker, but I'm not sure why the adblocker from the source based version doesn't work out of the box.

TheGreatMcPain · Post by **TheGreatMcPain** » Thu Feb 04, 2021 6:12 am

So it turns out a lot of features, notably "sync" and "adblock", are broken for non-binary versions of brave, because you need to have a service key in-order for them to work properly.

Apparently they're working on a way to share service keys.

Post by **pjp** » Thu Feb 04, 2021 3:59 pm

Any details on what exactly a service key is? For sync, I could guess that it might be something needed to use the service. That an ad blocker would require such a mechanism is unappealing.

TheGreatMcPain · Post by **TheGreatMcPain** » Thu Feb 04, 2021 6:12 pm

pjp wrote:Any details on what exactly a service key is? For sync, I could guess that it might be something needed to use the service. That an ad blocker would require such a mechanism is unappealing.

I'm not entirely sure what a service key is, but if you try to update the "Brave Ad Block Updater" component via 'brave://components' on the source version it will fail, but the binary package works just fine. I would assume the adblocker needs that for updating it's filterlist.

Post by **pjp** » Thu Feb 04, 2021 6:21 pm

Yeah, it might not be bad, but it certainly has a strong odor.

Brave

Brave

Opera Touch

Howto

Same question