Brave furious over Gab forking its browser

Brave isn't happy with right-wing social media network Gab forking and altering its browser. Gab, which has been booted from many social media platforms and recently saw its Dissenter commentary tool being removed from Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, has copied the Brave browser and removed the BAT token system to launch its own browser. Brave CEO Brendan Eich calls Gab a 'parasite'.

Gab CEO Andrew Torba shrugs at the criticism. He points to Brave's own history, as the project is based on Google's open source Chromium project. Brave is open source as well. "The entire point of open source is to allow others to build upon an existing code base and add more value."

Yet, Eich isn't happy with Gab at all. He believes the fork by Gab is only done to be able to distribute its Dissenter application to people. "What kind of parasite forks an open source browser to get an extension distributed to people who can already work around silly AppStore bans?”

Torba criticized Brave in the past, and the Basic Attention Token especially. He believes BAT is more empowering to advertisers than ordinary web users. "Today [browsers] are built to empower advertisers to reach and track people, Brave included, even if their tracking is anonymous", he said. Gab needs to become a free speech browser, without Silicon Valley companies looking over your shoulders as you surf the internet.

Andrew Torba and Gab aren't free from criticism. The shooter behind the October 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue massacre was an avid user of Gab's alternative to Twitter. Here he expressed his hatred of Jews. After this came out, Torba had difficulty generating revenue. PayPal, Stripe, Square, Cash App, Coinbase, Bitpay, credit card companies, and crowdfunding platforms, all cut him off. He now relies a company called 2nd Amendment Processing, bitcoin payment over the lightning network and a BTCPay Server.