Could you add these features in your next update?

Brave Feature Requests Android Requests
1

I’ve been using Kiwi browser for a while, and there are some features I’d like to see in your next update

First: Card tabs layout, this was the main reason I switched to Kiwi, Grid tabs layout is so annoying

Second: Bookmarks Import/Export

Third: Chrome extensions support

2

Already been many feature requests for this. Should search for it. (I’ve actually been merging topics together, such as you can see at Extension support

They will be revisiting it this year. But yeah, you should look through stuff in that topic, especially as I’m about to move more topics into that one again, lol.

This is being worked on. But it’s going to be a while. To quote:

Hi everyone - a quick update on this. We have the requirements spec’d out and now have design items to work through. It’s still on our list - however we are pushing through updates to rewards, news, vpn and privacy hub first.

You can read more overall at the two Github below (first one is active project)

Part of that bottom link, I’ll quote below:

Thanks for your patience everybody. This is clearly a change a lot of people want and we’re hearing that loud and clear: In the Google Play Store reviews, here on GitHub, and I’ve even had folks DM me on LinkedIn and Twitter asking “What’s happening?” This might be a long post - but I want to be as transparent as possible.

Quick summary: Chromium used to have “Stack View” (also referred to as “Card View” here) and then they replaced it with Grid view. In order to keep offering “Stack View” to our users, we added a toggle for this in Brave version 1.23 (released April 29, 2021). With Chromium 99, the underlying code was finally removed. This meant it got removed in Brave also when we updated our Chromium version in Brave 1.36 (released March 8, 2022).

Our teammate @samartnik did a great job putting together a pull request for adding back this functionality removed in Chromium.
brave/brave-core#12684

For context, @samartnik is a member of our Chromium upgrade team and spends most of his time making sure the Android part of the upgrade is in great shape (functionality works, patches are under control). He was originally the person who added the option to keep “Stack View” (see brave/brave-core#8614) back in version 1.23. He spent about a week preparing this pull request (for re-adding “Stack View”). His work involved identifying and moving the code that used to live in Chromium and pulling this into the brave-core code-base. Reviewers have tested and it does work well.

There are a few problems though:

  1. This re-adds 7,101 lines of code into our code-base. This is a huge amount of code and we’re going to run into conflicts as new Chromium versions become available (Chromium 101, 102, 103, etc). This code would eventually stabilize after several upgrades.
  2. Before the remaining code was removed in Chromium 99, our app had a crash/ANR (application not responding) rate of more than 2% on Android 12 (which grew as Android 12 continues to be adopted). After merging Chromium 99 which removed the rest of this feature, our crash rate for Android 12 fell to below 1%. Examining the commits that Chromium team did (where the code was removed) helped shed some light.

For example, chromium/chromium@0d0895a mentions removal of LayerTitleCache which may have been causing startup “jank” (hanging, unexpected behavior). Removing this code may have helped stabilize the build.

It’s tempting to just add this feature back in, but we really need to consider the long term ownership of this and define some acceptance criteria. If we are going to add this feature back in, I believe we should do it properly, which will take some time.

To do that, I believe we need to:

  1. Make this feature “ours” (consider the design of it). Make it a first class feature.
  2. Minimize the impact for Chromium upgrades. We’ve been able to stay current on Chromium with a relatively small number of staff. We need to be clever about our patching strategies and picky about what we accept. Not only for this but for everything we merge.
  3. Properly investigate the crashes/ANR on Android 12 and make sure the patch does not make this worse. We’d need to let the fix sit on Nightly for a while, migrate to Beta, then Release.

These are some pretty big asks. At the moment on Android, we’re already committed to other high-priority work and don’t have bandwidth to properly dig into this. Our team is limited in size and we’d need to drop something in order to pick this up.

I’ve created a new issue to track this feature request:
#22028

We understand the importance of this feature for many of our users, so we’ll be prioritizing this alongside our existing work. Although we don’t have a date for this yet, you can subscribe there for updates.