Hacker News Reader

Comment by nrjames | Hacker News Reader

I've been using the Brave browser for the past week or so. It feels like Chrome, without the ads and spying. This article recommends Firefox. Are there good reasons to choose one over the other?

View on HN

Brave seems more focused on their crypto currency than making a browser. And their ad-replacing shenanigans do to not exactly inspire trust[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Critical_r...

"Brave Rewards" is opt-in. Unless that changes, you don't have to participate if you don't want to.

I am interested to see how it works out.

Yeah, it is optional, but it might indicate that their priorities lie in something other than making the best privacy focused browser. Time will tell.

My understanding is that the two things go hand-in-hand. The ad-blocking is for users, while the cryptocurrency is to remove the incentive that sites have to show ads in the first place. Without the cryptocurrency component, you’d just see sites implementing anti-Brave’s-adblock features in a never-ending arms race, like we have with regular browser-extension ad-blockers today. With it, sites affected by Brave’s ad-blocking have something else they can choose to implement (a crypto paywall just for Brave users) that will give them even higher ROI than anti-adblock features would. It’s an “economic approach” to privacy.

> "Brave Rewards" is opt-in.

For users, but not for creators. Until Brave stops taking money in creators' names without their knowledge and permission, I won't consider (and certainly would never recommend) Brave.

I recommended Firefox mostly because it's been around longer and people have probably heard of it. For your average person, the steps in this article are already asking a lot so I wanted to keep things as familiar as possible. Even if someone doesn't use Firefox currently, they've probably heard of it, and that decreases the friction of taking actions to switch.

Brave uses Chromium under the hood, so if you're paranoid you could assume that Chromium has some kind of backdoor integrated.

Also, to my knowledge Brave Software Inc. is a For-Profit organisation.

Despite those facts I am personally using Brave. In my opinion you already cut out most of the "bad stuff" of Chrome with this choice.

If you're paranoid, you could read the source of Chromium and confirm it doesn't have a backdoor integrated.

I take your point, but it's really not practical.

Any large codebase is nearly impossible to scour for this kind of thing, particularly a web browser which is an immense mound of source. There's so many ways to build in a backdoor, so many ways to build a way for you to later load a back door, that it's not plausible, even for a seasoned developer, to reliably find it.

You have to stop such things with source control. The surface area of a new fix or feature is much easier to analyze for vulnerabilities, intentional or not. I do this on a daily basis, and it takes work.

Yeah let's just spread conspiracies because you don't want to put in the time to prove them.

well if you don't trust chromium, as a consequence you cannot trust any apps built on electron (slack, github desktop, etc) and you can't trust a single thing on android. that's pretty steep.

why brave over opera (also based on chromium)?

it seems that brave is setting the table for its own advertising once it has enough market share. the roadmap includes "opt-in" ads which will "respect your privacy". so clearly an advertising model is their source of revenue - exactly what people are switching from chrome to get away from. i personally don't buy into the idea that ads (which in the modern world are targeted) and privacy are compatible.

I made the switch to Brave this week. I had tried it last year and ended up moving back to Chrome. But now that it is using Chromium under the hood the move from Chrome to Brave is very easy. It feels like the same browser and everything functions in the way I expect it to.

I also started using Firefox recently as well. And the latest updates to it are good as well. It doesn't feel so foreign like it did in the past when I tried moving from Chrome. But, I prefer Brave for now.

Aside from what others have mentioned, Firefox also has the Tree Style Tabs extension, which is not privacy related but for me has changed the way I browse the internet.

Using Brave for some months now, mostly satisfied.

Just my personal story: Moved away from FF because of their privacy concerning unwanted plugins and marketing campaigns.

> Just my personal story: Moved away from FF because of their privacy concerning unwanted plugins and marketing campaigns.

How did they violate your privacy?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com