Brave 0.55 released
brave.com
brave.com
This is what an announcement more than six months ago (from March 2018) [2] says:
> Brave for Windows, macOS, and Linux currently use the Chromium rendering engine, but (unlike Brave for Android) it uses a custom HTML and JavaScript user interface. Technical readers will know that we call the runtime for this user interface Muon, which is a more secure fork of Electron, and which therefore combines Chromium and Node.js to enable applications built using JavaScript and HTML user interfaces and Node modules for the application logic.
After getting rid of Chrome recently (not that I was using it much before), I’ve been using Firefox (my favorite browser), Safari and sometimes Brave.
[1]: https://github.com/brave/muon
[2]: https://brave.com/development-plans-for-upcoming-release/
Ew...
No problem with monetization but I want a browser that puts me first, not a middleman that tries to profit from the trend to subvert the open culture of the internet, pretending they put my privacy first. It’s an excuse, not the main purpose of this browser.
Using Firefox makes you the product, because Mozilla monetizes you with selling you to Google. That is not a browser that "puts you first" or promotes the "open culture of the internet".
Giving people the ability to chose whether they want to participate in the monetization makes Brave more of a browser that puts "you first".
Besides that, Mozilla is basically a company, and their non-profit organization is basically a fig leaf. Even if you don't agree with this assumption, the browser is as commercialiced as any other project, as proven by Pocket, Google search partnership and Amazon affiliate links.
The Brave browser also doesn't claim this is "what the internet is about". On the contrary, the default settings in Brave make the Web essentially non-commercial and ad-free.
Finally and philosophically, there is no collective "we" you talk about, only users who are free to chose from a variety of browsers and products.
Other than that, there is definitely some form of irony in the fact that the people on brave.com wear a cap with a corporate logo, but are implied as being free from corporate influence. The message would be more consistent if there were no logo on the cap, and one could argue this implies that Brave is at best a transition towards a better state.
That's hyperbole.
Firefox was the first browser that made switching search engines or dealing with multiple search engines easy. Firefox was also the first to have usable add-ons for blocking invasive ads and trackers, always promoted as the best add-ons in their addons.mozilla.org. The pro-privacy culture has basically grown on top of Firefox.
I'm using DuckDuckGo on Firefox and I installed it on iOS too, because it makes it easier than Safari to deal with multiple search engines.
As for Google Search, people forget that Google Search is first and foremost the best search engine and most people expect nothing less. And when they tried switching that default to others, people bitched and moaned about it. Google is so far ahead of everybody that for the general population it has no competition. The same reason for why Apple cannot replace Google's Search and cannot build their own search engine, so might as well make some money off of Google.
This is not selling the users to Google, this is simply providing a good user experience by default. If anybody wants to help and fight this, then the first step would be to provide a better search engine. Don't get me wrong, I like DuckDuckGo and will keep using it due to privacy concerns, but for many searches, especially local ones, the difference is night and day. Not to mention that DDG is also dependent on Microsoft's Bing and it will be a sad day when Microsoft closes access to its APIs. Because apparently it's pretty expensive to have your own web crawler ;-)
The answer will give you a clue about the question who is the product.
Irregardless of semantics, Mozilla is entirely dependent on the privacy invading ad system.
Everyone knows that default settings matter, as around 80% of users never change much in their browsers, and it is this majority user base which forms the foundation for the contracts between browser makers and search engines.
If Mozilla blocks ads by default, the question isn't what Google would do, the far better question is what will the publishers do.
If big publishers start to block Firefox's User-Agent, it's game over for Firefox. And yes, publishers are increasingly more aggressive in blocking users with ad-blockers installed.
Or did you think that the content producers will simply stand by while their revenue vanishes?
Nope, not going to happen and it will be getting worse, before it gets better. Ad-block users have been ignored only because they were a minority.
Want to bet that they'll try extending the DRM support to the HTML content itself and thus make it illegal to block ads? It's going to be fun.
Just a few things:
1. Mozilla did explore this a number of years ago, concluded that
a. if you block all ads, you break the revenue of pretty much the entire web, so that's probably not something you want;
b. if you block all ads, you break loading of many websites, and that's not something an established browser can afford to do;
c. if you do either, websites are just going to block your browser;
Also, to answer your specific question, Google pre-emptively reacted against any attempt of Mozilla by launching Chrome. If you recall, they launched Chrome pretty much because they could not buy Mozilla.
> Irregardless of semantics, Mozilla is entirely dependent on the privacy invading ad system.
While we live in a world where ads = privacy invasion, this doesn't have to be the case. If you look at recent versions of Firefox and ongoing projects, Mozilla has stepped up on privacy protection and keeps doing so.
Again, it's hard to do without breaking the web. But some can be done, one step at a time, and Mozilla is working on it.
> Everyone knows that default settings matter, as around 80% of users never change much in their browsers, and it is this majority user base which forms the foundation for the contracts between browser makers and search engines.
True.
I don't blame or rate Mozilla, I was just trying to explain why they are unable to move, due to their ties to Google.
I don't think it's a good or bad thing, but it's the reality.
Mozilla is probably trying it's best under this conditions.
Besides that, solving technical problems is possible if there is the will to do it.
Right now, the problem is that it breaks either the web or the browser.
The alternative currently being pursued by Mozilla (and the W3C) is WebPayments, which should pave the way for websites paid for by micropayments, rather than ads.
I disagree. I don't have anything against paid software but it's not the only possibility, a lot of the software I use are open source projects maintained by volunteers, not products. I ideologically refuse to consider that every piece of software is a product.
Now regarding Firefox things are not really clear cut, Mozilla is effectively non-profit but clearly their well being (and the salaries of the people working for it) clearly revolves around their browser having a decent market share. The whole "selling you to Google" stems from that.
1. Who pays for the hosting? How do they pay for it?
2. Who pays for the site development? How do they pay for it?
3. Who pays for the site content? How do they pay for it?
The vast majority of sites out there are commercial products, in some forms or another. Even Wikipedia is, they're periodically begging for money.
Since we have this problem that running websites costs money, how are they going to pay for it? The ad model is quite reviled by techies. What's the alternative? How do websites make money to keep running?
Regardless, hosting is a separate issue. You have open source projects who provide a piece of software that you're free to host yourself or pay somebody else to host for you. See for instance the Roundcube webmail.
It's similar to how I need to buy a computer to be able to run Emacs, that doesn't mean that Emacs itself is a product. Of course many web services are actual products and you pay for both the development and the hosting.
Here we're talking about a web browser though so the point is moot anyway.
There's the ad model, which people don't like, the subscription model, which almost no one uses (it's used successfully for webapps, but not by websites, there's maybe 10 or 20 successful subscription based sites in the billions of sites out there).
What else is there that doesn't involve somehow turning the browser into a product?
Well in the case of Brave that might not be completely true because they have this whole agenda regarding ads but that's specific to this particular browser, not a fundamental aspect of web browsing technology. ELinks is not a product because you can use it to view ads for instance.
We need to turn this whole ecosystem on its head. How do we do that? I'd rather have the browser manage payments to the sites I use based on some usage statistics, but in this case, we still need some sort of payment system, probably centralized. It might not be turning the actual browser into a product, but it does make it put it awfully close to one.
Why not? The idea of being targeted with more effective ads based on what I look at is microscopic when compared to the things that got me excited about the internet originally, and it doesn't even seem to contradict them.
The most objectionable thing is tracking specific users, which results in a lot of data that can be abused, and further power imbalance of companies and states vs. citizens. The latter clearly does contradict early internet ideals.
I mean, their business case evolves around advertisers paying users to watch adds instead of paying Facebook or google. But Facebook only earns a few dollars per user per year, who in their right mind would turn off their adblocker for a few dollars? Probably not people that have an income which is attractive to advertisers...
Then there is the part where they want users to pay for content, but that already exists with superior tech, lower middleman fees and better consumer safety. I know, I know, crypto will get there or whatever, but when is the last time an inferior option ever disrupted anything?
One the other hand, if they didn’t put their premise/vision of a revolutionised web ahead of their users, then they might as well be working on Firefox.
This is a good point and it is interesting to think about the economic logic of advertising. It seems to me the burden it places on it's viewers is far greater than the (often questionable) value it brings to the advertiser. A huge unaccounted-for externality.
In fact, when you consider the huge psychological weight that a consumerist society places on it's citizens, and the attendant healthcare costs, you could easily make the case that even strictly in economic terms, advertising is a huge net negative, before even considering the social costs.
How much does my city make from all the billboards everywhere? It can't be more than a few dollars per person. I'd happily pay that much more in tax to have them all removed.
Not even close to the definition of an externality. Everybody involved in the transaction is there voluntarily.
Not to mention... ads affect us all. You’re delusional if you think it can be neatly packaged into a transaction.
The product Brave is actually peddling is akin to anti-cheat software: It takes steps to prevent fraud throughout digital advertising and improve the cost effectiveness of digital ad campaigns. That pitch means that they have the ear of advertisers already, and it's only a question of executing on the rest. Given prodding, advertisers will cooperate in order to fix up the market because what they really want is a "commoditize your complements" scenario. They are not there to become adtech wizards. They want to find qualified customers for their primary business. If Brave succeeds in forming a coalition, you'll start to see businesses from other sectors talk it up and give users and content creators hard incentives to sign on. They can even use such marketing efforts as part of their own speculative plays on the currency.
On the user end of things, that means that Brave engages in the click fraud arms race, but with higher-powered weaponry than can be accessed from within Javascript. They get a deal that is a definite improvement on the status quo: they choose exactly when and where they want to see ads. For the other parts of the system, the cryptocurrency marketplace replaces most of the middlemen and associated incentives for fraud. If you're in the business of total control either way(whether it be "never-again-an-ad" or "I want to access as many users as possible"), it's a devil's bargain, but if you're interested in getting the Web on a more sustainable path where quality is encouraged, this is something that could do it.
Maybe I am being overly harsh but are we saying that a browser like Brave is required these days?
I don't think the web would be worse-off if all commercial sites disappeared: There will still be enough hobbyists, amateurs and pro's with $10-a-month blogs to provide whatever information I need.
For those that have more in depth content, videos, films and so on we already have subscription models for those and I can pick and choose what I want (I don't subscribe to anything other than Pluralsight tbh).
Why do we have to assume that every site on the web is a commercial entity with staff and overheads and that the web will collapse if we don't allow adverts?
The web worked perfectly well without all this tracking and abuse and by using browsers like Brave we are saying that we are ok with it.
For a start, it's limited to people who are already rich enough to have the time to spare.
But certain types of content - deep investigative journalism for example - should always cost significant amounts of money. You want the best people in the world at that craft to be able to spend as long as takes, and travel to wherever they need to go, to uncover the truth in a story. This kind of work plays a crucial role in society, by keeping a watch on the political, legal and corporate worlds and helping to expose corruption and abuses of power.
It's likely already the case that too little good investigative journalism is being done these days. We should be looking for ways to have more of it, not less.
It's not like the web/society consists of one collectivist "blob" that speaks in unison.
Do we want a web where everything is gated and requires micropayments or would we rather use the web without tracking and micropayments?
Brave doesn't profit directly from advertising revenue. BAT is completely separate. The point is, specifically, to remove the incentive for the current trend of stealing your privacy by offering an incentive to directly pay content creators.
[1] https://brave.com/new-brave-browser-release-available-for-ge...
[2] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3129436/47203976-b...
[3] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3129436/47203978-b...
https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2005/08/mozilla-foundation-fo...
A small example has twice been ads in the browser (now using local targeting), and if it was 100% a non-profit foundation goodie-goodie, would probably go with a default search engine like Duck Duck Go, but survival as a corporation prohibits otherwise. And I think that's totally okay, but I don't think we can pretend they aren't a corporation.
Going Duck Duck Go by default would mean firing pretty much all the developers and letting Google win. Do you think it would be a good strategy?
Does ddg offer a paid option?
But no, DDG doesn't offer a paid option, as far as I know. (I also doubt there would be a sufficient market for that.)
Brave is supposed to protect the privacy but in reality, their business model is about ads. It's like pedophiles giving advices on how to protect your kids from danger.
Of course they know about it, and I wouldn't give my kids to them.
Brave is essentially trying to become a mix between a pay-to-surf and an rogue ad replacement software.
They have dozens of millions of dollars raised (= in debt), this is very big money to pay back at least 5 times.
By definition, since they are an ad company, they are ok to block the trackers, just not the ones that affects them.
For example, Brave doesn't block Yahoo & Bing ads and trackers, why ? Advertiser pays Microsoft Bing, who pays Yahoo, who pays DuckDuckGo, who pays Brave.
To verify it, you can make a search on DuckDuckGo using Brave and check where the ads link point to by copy-pasting it ;)
Of course technically they could block these trackers but they are never going to do it.
The is the main revenue source of Brave, and this is one of the big reasons why DuckDuckGo is growing fast.
Monetize your search history like the old school toolbars. Looks like they forgot to disclose this little conflict of interest.
If you check the commit history, there are really funny discoveries (woops adobe.com is whitelisted)
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/10020
Almost all their commits in some other repos: https://github.com/brave/browser-android-tabs/commits/master are around analytics and tracking installs.
Good marketing speech, shady business.
For anyone (like me) wishing to have a default browser per use case (surf, work, dev, hangout, etc.), have a look at this project (dynamic default browser switch, based on URL): https://github.com/netgusto/bowser
Disclaimer: It's a pet project of mine.
Since brave is just a browser, it does not need all of those extra patches and features. So it is simpler and easier to just roll with chromium directly.
It works fine for their intended userbase. For a browser that might be an issue due to exploits and vulnerabilities.
The W3C has been working on WebPayments [1] for several years. Once it lands on most browsers, it should enable websites to offer a choice between ads and micropayments.
But there are lots of problems to solve first, ranging from finding the right APIs and UXs to make sure that users won't end up paying by accident, or that children won't pay with their parent's browser without their agreement, to the fact that people don't use the same mechanisms for paying al over the world, to security issues, etc.
Maybe it was a rendering issue?
Now, I set it to default browser in all my devices.
It's basically a chrome copy plus future abilities (for now). So Chrome is a better choice until now for me.
I was a huge Firefox fan, but having 50+ tabs open made the browser unusable - even the latest versions. I then switched reluctantly to Chrome, but always hated the UI.
Having downloaded Brave, it was love on first sight, looks good, works good, blocks ads. I very much miss all the Firefox extensions, I hope a lot will get ported eventually.
Oh, and Mozilla? You need to reboot your company/non-profit. I don't know what goes wrong there, but all the projects I found interesting got stopped (Persona), and the browser is no longer really great. It just /feels/ clunky.
Really? I haven't had any such problem with Firefox in years, and I tend to browser with a few hundred tabs open. What platform are you using?
> Oh, and Mozilla? You need to reboot your company/non-profit. I don't know what goes wrong there, but all the projects I found interesting got stopped (Persona), and the browser is no longer really great.
The process is actually very simple: if nobody uses it, it gets stopped :)
> It just /feels/ clunky.
Are you talking about versions more recent than 57? Because the performance boost during the last year has been huge.
Windows at work and Macos/Linux at home. The situation has gotten better since browser extensions that save and restore all tabs reliably don't work with FF anymore. Now the browser usually forgets about 50% of my open tabs when I restart it...
A must have extension if you tend to keep a lot of tabs open.
It's so good at this I've uninstalled multiple apps (especially news and weather ones) and have started saving links to web pages instead and the whole experience is better (because blocking adverts and tracking in apps is a real pain).
I still switch to chrome when I'm working, because the developer tools are better in chrome (debugger, integration of lighthouse ect..)
For the most part, it's just another browser.
Pros: + I can disable Javascript per-site and reload the page in two clicks. I think that's possible with FFox or Chrome extensions, but it's built in to Brave.
+ UI looks cleaner.
Cons: - A few videos have refused to play. (Can't characterize that yet.)
- Reopening a closed tab only opens the last page on that tab, not the page history. I.e., the back button doesn't work.
- I don't know when, which or how publishers will get paid in BAT.
- I don't know how hard or expensive it will be to buy more BAT when my free ones are gone. Apparently I will have to open an account at a cryptocurrency exchange? Yuck!
Pros:
+ Useful info on how many ads are blocked
+ Tor is the really useful for private mode
+ Metrics on hours per websites is cool info too
Cons:
+ Importing bookmarks/passwords from FF didn't worked
+ Sometimes it blocks, only keys work, not the mouse scrolling
+ Pressing X on the last tab sometimes doesn't work
If you were frustrated by the recent “signing in” changes and the backtracking of that in Chrome, you should try Firefox and Brave.
Love it for casual browsing (I use the anonimity by default) and am happy to be greeted by the "Hey you are a first time visitor of our site, please accept the cookies" every single time I visit a site (yes, I close the browser after browsing).
I like the mostly adfree experience.