Firefox.
I'm with you though, I really hope this opens back up into an all out competition between 3 or more big players. And I think firefox is in a great position to take up the "top" spot in terms of security, performance, and resource usage. They have been "paying their dues" for a while now working on that stuff, and it's starting to pay off. And if they gambled right, they might just have an architecture that is overall better than Chrome's, who will be stuck with the cruft they've slowly built up over the years.
I'm excited to try out the BAT payments feature! For those out of the loop, like I was a week ago, it's a way to pay what you want per month, divided proportionally by the time spent per site between the sites you visited, as a way of trying to compensate the publishers and creators for your ad blocking.
You use a crypto currency called Basic Attention Token (BAT).
If anyone has any questions about the setup process, I'd be happy to help.
As a side note: I live in Mexico, but I was happy to be able to fund a wallet and not be region-blocked for once.
Then they give everyone the opportunity to use a Patreon-Style support or view Ads, optionally.
Why isn't it ethical to target big Ad-Tech middle men like Google and Facebook and increase efficiency and privacy at the same time?
Of Firefox, Chrome, and Brave; Brave is by far the worst browser of the bunch. It's not even pretending not to be evil, let alone trying and failing like the others.
And that's also how the web was founded. No one agreed to anything. People just started to build.
If there isn't a law against it, they are allowed to do it.
Everyone who uploads free content on the web without a paywall essentially says "take it and display it however you like".
Besides that, Brave is essentially building a sustainable model in favor of publishers. They will be very thankful.
It is ad-blocker without an alternative model that is problematic for publishers, not Brave. So I don't see why anyone besides Ad-Tech has a problem with Brave.
You conveniently ignore that most publishers desparately want to see a new model succeed, because Google and Facebook take too much of a share of the publishers. Brave takes less then Google et al., so publishers get more. That's why publishers like the Guardian are already on board.
Brave isn't free of problems, but arguing from a moral perspective isn't legitimate. So where does your hostility come from? Do you work for some big ad-tech company?
Not the one you're responding to, but to say his/her reasoning isn't "legitimate" is a bit rich when the GP (me) was about ethics. I'm with you on Google/Fb getting all the ad spent, but I don't think another middleman and wannabe monopoly such as Patreon is going to solve it. I might be in the minority here, but I think its fair publishers get their clicks for their content-based, non-tracking ads; we need to drive tracking, targeting and other third-party crap out of the web under privacy regulations, though, because that's what breaks the feedback of ad spend to publishers/creators (apart from causing the general race-to-the-bottom trend).
I agree, I overlooked that.
Nonsense. The publishers agreed to sell their inventory to Google, just as the movie studios agreed to license their content to Netflix or sell it on DVD.
Everything else from your post stems from this fundamental misunderstanding about how publishers monetize their content.
> That's why publishers like the Guardian are already on board.
Then it's ethical for Brave to monetize The Guardian's content. It is not ethical for it to monetize everybody else's. The same with a piracy service. If a piracy service resells content it has an agreement from the owner to resell, that's kosher. It doesn't mean that it also gets to resell everybody else's content.
> Do you work for some big ad-tech company?
No. I'm just not stupid enough to accept Eich's stupid output.
Publishers don't "sell their inventory", since everything a website puts up on the web is essentially free. Consequently there isn't a licence involved, in contrast to your movie example. The publishers chose Google as their middle-man to make money with ads.
No it's not, at least in the EU as of last month's copyright reform. Meaning aggregator and search sites need to pay royalties for syndicating significant portions to publishers. That it's technically possible to scrape content doesn't mean scraping doesn't run afoul of copyright legislation and press norms such as proper attribution. You could also technically "scrape" written books; yet re-publishing your own book copies isn't considered legal.
Besides, it isn't even in effect yet.
Your second sentence contradicts your first sentence.
> Publishers don't "sell their inventory", since everything a website puts up on the web is essentially free.
They have spots on their web pages for advertisements that they sell to Google or other ad networks. Brave unilaterally takes those spots from the publisher for a price the publisher never agreed to.
> The publishers chose Google as their middle-man to make money with ads.
That's the point. They sold that inventory to Google, not to Brave.
We would not replace ads on page without both user and publisher consent.
We are focused first on user-private ads that go in the user's inventory (notification channel and private tab), paying the user in tokens which then flow by default to the user's top sites and creators on YouTube, Twitch, etc. These ads involve no publisher at all so we pay the user 70%. In either case: 1/ ad "inventory" owner gets 70%, way above the programmatic norm of 40% or much lower due to fraud; 2/ user gets at least as much as we do. HTH.
That's a gross misrepresentation.
Mozilla was an investor in Cliqz, so it's not precisely a full-on third party. And the data was (at least, according to the article) well anonymized.
I can see why Moz would want to try and keep up with the user advantages of collecting this information -- catching malicious URLs, etc -- but even if it's just appearance-wise, they've lost a bit of trust here.
Frankly I think they should have two distributions of Firefox, one that's bells-and-whistles for the best user experience, and another that takes a more aggressive pro-privacy stance. This can be little more than the set of preinstalled extensions + default config.
You could start by explaining how a privacy focused nonprofit is marginally worse than a multi-billion dollar advertising company with regards to privacy.
If a tobacco company makes a donation to a cancer research charity, do we now hate the charity?
Mozilla does not have a history remotely related to any sort of privacy violations, except in the eyes of those who think that literally anything to do with "telemetry" or "advertizing" is automatically evil.
Problem is, you can have non-privacy-invasive and non-malicious telemetry and advertizing.
Google and Microsoft are particularly nasty in this regard. But don't extrapolate their behaviour onto Mozilla.
edit: except when they're in a sprite :/