Gab is well known for causing controversy in the digital world, and it has gone one step further and has pissed off the Brave browser community with its latest move. Gab has forked the Brave browser in a bid to fight the censorship ban on its platform. Currently Gab has been banned by most web hosting providers and payment processors refuse to work with the platform. In a bid to skirt round the censorship, Gab is hoping that using its own fork of the Brave browser will let users interact with it for the foreseeable future.
Brave Isn’t Impressed
Brave is an open source browser, meaning its code is available for download so others can fork it and create their own browser. Gab downloaded the code, cut out a few parts that it dislikes and has added in a few ideas of its own, creating its own browser that’s valubal to its users. However, Brendan Eich – Brave CEO – hit out at Gab, saying
Answer this: what kind of parasite forks an open source browser to get an extension distributed to people who can already work around silly AppStore bans? Brave is for users who dare to take back control of their data. Some who wants a detached comment system can use Dissenter.
Removing BAT and Adding Bitcoin
Currently, Brave allows users to be rewarded in BAT for interacting with advertisements. However, Gab doesn’t like how it empowers advertisers rather than users. So, to fix this Gab has pulled out BAT from its browser and is implementing Bitcoin payments and is working on a Lightning Network integration. Gab has teamed up with an unnamed Lightning Network developer to help develop and integrate the second layer scaling solution to make payments faster and more efficient.
A War of Words
In response to Eich’s comments, Andrew Torba – Gab CEO – pointed out that Brave is in fact a fork of the Google Chrome browser – a claim that is completely accurate. The whole point of open source projects is that new developers can come along, download the code to use as a base, and add value to his or her new community of users. That’s exactly what Gab is doing with the Brave code. Torba said:
I can’t imagine any legitimate reason why Brendan or anyone else would have a problem with this.
Gab might not be a very popular site with centralized platforms that keep control of user content – cough, cough Brave – but it does have a niche userbase. This new browser will allow it to finally start accepting payments and develop into a better social media platform.
