I think, unfortunately, you are right. I'm glad Brave is putting themselves out there, but ultimately the browser codebases are controlled by big tech, and small fry just can't compete. What is now the Chromium codebase was originally Apple's Webkit codebase, which was derived from the KHTML libraries of the KDE project. So what was an open source project got turned into a project mostly controlled by one corporation, until another corporation essentially took control away from them.
The browser itself has never been the product. The big corporations support the browser development in order to support their other monopolies. Trying to put censorship directly into the browser codebase? I wouldn't put it past them.
Please correct your misstatements.
Brave is based on Chromium which is open source. It's not "owned" by Google. And Brave itself is open source.
I think, unfortunately, you are right. I'm glad Brave is putting themselves out there, but ultimately the browser codebases are controlled by big tech, and small fry just can't compete. What is now the Chromium codebase was originally Apple's Webkit codebase, which was derived from the KHTML libraries of the KDE project. So what was an open source project got turned into a project mostly controlled by one corporation, until another corporation essentially took control away from them.
The browser itself has never been the product. The big corporations support the browser development in order to support their other monopolies. Trying to put censorship directly into the browser codebase? I wouldn't put it past them.