Extension support

@GiveAndroidextension
Does Kiwi update Chromium more than 2 or 3 times a year?
If Brave updated Chromium only a few times a year then they could add extension support. The resources and manpower of Brave would be enough to add extension support to chromium and the most important test everything properly to make sure nothing os broken if they updated chromium codebase 2 or 3 times every year.
Brave takes security seriously, so they need to always have the latest chromium release and the latest security fixes.
Brave is not Microsoft or Samsung or Yandex(Russia’s Google) to be able to do it, I am not sure they have the resources to do something like that at least 2 times every month, in every new Brave release which will have to come with the latest chromium. I hope they find a smart way to do it, but I don’t believe there is.

If I’m not mistaken the maintainer of kiwi was 1 dude, that’s why they only updated it a few times having extensions doesn’t mean the security patches stop or are less. Heck even if brave approved a hand full of extensions ever few months that’s good enough, or have a split mode (security but no customization (like with html5 video players and other useful plugins , or full security but recognition that extenisons might break due to higher security)

Generally if given the initial template or how to make an extension, independent extenison devs to to work on making the extensions work well even with the heighten security feature’s,

Casting everything aside saying it can’t be done is nonsense (they literally have them for desktop) the just have to work on making a framework to incorporate it to android if every other browser can do it brave has a lot more , very well trained developers that can get it done,

@GiveAndroidextension
Yes, there are less.
Security patches of chromium come with a new version of chromium.
Granal is like you say, 1 person, and basically not a company.
He is an individual and he doesn’t have the responsibility of a company like Brave Inc has.
He has no problem go with upstream only 2 or 3 times every year.
Nodoby said it can’t be added, they know how to add it.
The issue is that they will have to add it at least 3 times a month.
Normally Brave has 2 or 3 stable releases every month and they come with a new chromium version. So they will have to add 3 times every month all the extension code from desktop and test everything to make sure nothing is broken because of that.
Microsoft can do it, the Edge team has thousand of employees.
Unfortunately they don’t make Edgium code open source, Brave could use that, MS likes open source when it fits their agenda.
I would love if they add extension support, but I don’t think they don’t add it because they don’t want to, I think they just can’t at least for now.

It seems now syncing groups causes my android browser to synchronize the PC tabgroups. Tabgroups is my dealbreaker causing me to stay dependent on firefox addons.

Brave for android was doing really bad by having tabgroups in the background being completely mixed up in one long line opf tabs in the foreground (working area). Now the groups have become clear by a great color line added to the tabs. At the start of the color-line there is a tag in the same color of the group. Very nice.

Now the only thing still making it hard to manage, is the fact we cannot open or close the group by f.e. touching the group label tab. If that would work, it would be the first browser ever that exceeds firefox’s most valued quality since 2006.

Downloading videos however is a strong second for a media-creator. As with ublock and tabgroups it does not seem to be a need to have this as an addon though I am not sure if this could be a sort of third party liabitliy. In the latter case, yes, please find a way to allow addons.

Hello! Just wanted to drop in and provide some sort of “official” response here, as it’s been quite a while since anyone from the team has responded here and this specific request is brought up quite frequently.

Interestingly enough, half the work is already done for me, as @erebus really hit the nail on the head here:

This is more or less a great summary of why this hasn’t been implemented yet. We have explored adding extensions into Brave on Android and what it would take to implement. And while the actual implementation in and of itself isn’t a blocker, the main issue here is the upkeep. It would require a non-trivial amount of work in order to patch these additions for every update as well as every Chromium bump.

Lastly, while we may have a larger team than some other browsers (Kiwi seems to be the top example here), that does not grant us unlimited time/resources. The release cycle can be difficult/time consuming as is with all the existing changes we’ve implemented that need to be patched, security considerations, Chromium changes, project deadlines, bug fixes, etc. It is not as simple as “implement extension support, push it to release then move onto the next thing” — it requires consistent management, testing and [potential] code changes every month just to maintain it.

So at this time, there is no work currently planned to support extensions on Android. That said, it does not mean that it will never happen. I (personally) believe that we should work to push new features/additions to the browser that users show strong demand for and will continue to advocate for these features to the team on their (your) behalf, but I’m not blind to the other side of this equation.

I encourage you all to respectfully continue to voice your desire for this and other features you want to see in Brave on any platform, while simultaneously requesting your patience and understanding of our teams bandwidth, limitations and expectations.

2 Likes