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Comment by robbrown451 | Hacker News Reader

I'm impressed with Brave. I've started using it as my primary browser (after a couple false starts a year or so ago) and it has all the best of Chrome without the worst.

There is controversy about how Brave does stuff, and I agree there is some sketchy stuff they are doing (replacing ads with their own). I'm glad they are giving us a choice, though, and exploring different options for sites being able to makes some money.

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Switched from Firefox to Brave in the last year across devices and not looking back (though I do miss containers!).

Blocking ads and trackers by default is pretty much essential in 2019.

The myth about ad replacement doesn't seem to want to die though!

There is no ad replacement, though the roadmap says at some time in the future publishers who opt-in will have the option to have their ad-slots filled by Brave's privacy-respecting approach.

For now I think the only ad trials running are pop-up notifications if users opt-in, and that's only in a few markets at this stage.

Not something I plan to opt-in to, but looking forward to the Github / Reddit / Twitter tipping and integrated crypto wallet.

That's all rolling through in the next few months.

I just use Firefox with uBlock Origin on all my devices. Better blocking than Brave and no concerns about future monetization.

I'm currently using Firefox on all devices as my primary browser, but there is a single feature that I've gotten used to in Chrom* browsers on mobile - 'pull down to refresh' - that looks indispensable to me, and I'm planning to move to Brave on mobile just because of that (already replaced Chrome with Brave on Desktop as my secondary browser). Yes, there are add-ons to do that on mobile too, but they are all inconsistent and half-baked. Chrom*'s built-in pull to refresh is very smooth.

There's also Reload in Address Bar, which I prefer.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reload-in-add...

Or you can use the "double tap the dots menu" trick.

Thanks. The 'Double tapping dots menu' trick is neat indeed, sometimes we don't figure these things on our own :).

I primarily use Firefox on my desktop, but I use Brave on mobile. It seems somewhat easier on the battery than Chrome, which would make sense being as it's blocking content that can be CPU intensive.

You might like it, though. I've used Brave's mobile sync and it works for bookmarks across devices quite well. It's surprisingly simple to set up, too. I don't fret much about forgetting whether I opened a tab on my phone or desktop if I remember to bookmark it.

That said, I still use KDE connect to send links to my primary Firefox instance and vice-versa, but the bookmark sync is in some ways more convenient. I'd imagine they'll eventually synchronize more things, like tabs.

That's because bad developers focused on WebKit-only experience, forgetting about other browsers.

The same happens when some sites require Chrome to work, blocking all the rest. In 2019 it's unacceptable

Am I misunderstanding your comment or are you implying that the missing "pull to refresh" feature is somehow the website developers' fault?

Because it's 100% just a missing feature in Firefox mobile, there's nothing website developers should add to "make it work" on it.

Try Kiwi Browser for Android. Its a Chromium-based browser with built-in ad-block. If you want, you can even install uBlock Origin or any other extensions as it natively supports extensions.

I use this, though disclaimer, its not "really" open source.

I'm not a mobile dev so maybe this is a naive question, but wouldn't this be pretty easy for FF to add?

Also, for developers, you can't inspect web-socket frames natively in FF yet, you have to use an extension.

That was my setup, and much prefer integrated blocking and the additional polish and features. The yubikey integration coming is particularly interesting: https://brave.com/ios-yubikey-support/.

Future monetization: that was actually an incentive for me. Having been in the belly of the beast on ad-tech I'm cheering the new ad model Brave proposes for the industry.

If you're not aware how messed up the industry currently is, keep an eye on Ad Fraud Historian on Twitter: https://twitter.com/acfou.

On the crypto front, proposing ideas like staking / slashing on their extension store for extension authors is also very interesting: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1143630584310202369

The new browser wars are certainly spurring innovation again: good for everyone regardless of personal browser preferences.

Firefox needs to respect the OS certificate store instead of using its own. Without it client-cert authenticated sites cannot be accessed. IT admins usually have policies on Windows and MacOS that prevent export of client cert+priv key.

I disagree.

OS certificate stores often come with the political baggage of the OS manufacturer. When a Chinese Gov't CA was found to have engaged in fraudulent behavior [0] Google and Firefox were quick to revoke/remove the CA cert from their products. Apple and Microsoft did not do the same, likely because they do not want to upset the Chinese Gov't. (IIRC Iphone users cannot even manually revoke CA's on their own phones.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Internet_Network_Informa...

Then FireFox has made the deliberate choice of excluding millions of users. There are millions of users who use identity management solutions where user-certs and priv-keys are put into the OS store of their devices.

Using the OS secure-store should be a preference option. The folks who don't want to use the "political baggage" of the OS manufacturer - as you put it - can continue to use their pristine gardens.

I've never used this personally, but it is a preference option?

https://serverfault.com/questions/722563/how-to-make-firefox...

Or am I totally misunderstanding this and that's something totally different?

I didn't know about this option - thanks. This option basically uses the OS cert store for server certificates, which is one part of the story.

Now, if they also did this for client-certificates then all the folks in companies that use corporate certificate-based single-sign-on can use FireFox!

I’m actually happy that Firefox uses its own store. This means that I can use it for browsing through the corporate proxy without having the corporate CAs installed in my OS. This way I’m always aware which data is inspectable by the company.

It would be nice however if Firefox had an option to use the OS store, including devices like yubikey.

Doing that gives me a weird, inexplicable feeling. I know Firefox blocks stuff, especially if you set tracker blocking to "Strict". It doesn't block all ads so I still want to use uBO... but do I disable Firefox's blocking to avoid doing the same thing twice? Or are there things Firefox handles better than uBO? It's really too much thinking so for now I'm using Edge Chromium with uBO, and that's not a solution :D

"Blocking ads and trackers by default is pretty much essential in 2019."

How is it better than a choice of plug-ins to block them?

I've never understood this either. I think a deep dive into add blocking as we enter web3.0 makes sense. Granularity is missing in the new "browser wars"

The article does briefly mention some reasons they perform better than plugins.

It's not as good as containers, but as a replacement I use SessionBox chrome extension in Brave.. it mostly accomplishes the same purpose.

> The myth about ad replacement doesn't seem to want to die though!

Just want to reinforce this from my experience. I've been using Brave since before they were based on Chromium. And a lot of comments were saying that Brave replaces adds with their own. But I never saw that.

Now they have a feature you can opt-in, to see adds and get BATs for that. I actually wanted to test this and opted in, but still never seen an add. I guess my location is not yet included.

So at least based on my experience from using Brave for a long time - it's hard to get adds even if you want to.

I'm going to plug 'ungoogled-chromium' here as well as I personally found it better and more stable than Brave.

Problem with both is that they are still Chrome at the core. Currently Google has way too much power dictating how browsers render the web for users and things don't get any better by using any Chrome(ium) forks.

Only real hold out is Firefox even Microsoft buckled under the pressure. If we lose Firefox then in the future don't be surprised when Chromium support suddenly stops and only game left in town is Chrome.

Now all the nay sayers will come in defense of open source and my only response is: don't be so fast to forget "embrace, extend, and extinguish"

Apple will keep developing Safari, luckily, so there's still a 3-way race in many ways.

Safari is only ~4% of desktop/laptop browsing but over 20% of mobile and with mainstream users slowly moving to tablets over laptops this presents an important and large user base.

If it comes down to Chrome or Safari, I will gladly use Chrome. Safari is far too wonky for me, and whenever I tried using it, I always had bad experiences. Google might be evil-ish, but I find their ecosystem far more pleasant than Apple's. And while Google might try to collect lots of data about my online behavior, I can always use something like a Pihole or other kinds of ad-block to stop them from getting that data.

>There is controversy about how Brave does stuff, and I agree there is some sketchy stuff they are doing

I would be more open to trying/using brave if someone respectable packaged it. As of writing, not a single distro packages it. It would lower my barrier to entry a lot if it were packaged by debian/fedora/f-droid. It doesn't imply anything serious, just that it can be built from source and that it passed the distro's basic diligence and guidelines. This seems like low-hanging fruit from brave's standpoint, and yet multiple issues on their github tracker about packaging downstream have remained open for a while.

Nix packages it: https://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html#brave , which means you could use the Nix stand-alone package manager to install it on top of any distro. (I just tried this and am typing this from Brave, installed via the Nix stand-alone package manager running in Void Linux.)

It's fetching brave's binary. That's not what I meant by packaging.

src = fetchurl { url = "https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/download/v${... sha256 = "1lbajxnxqkd422rckfjm65pwwzl66v7anq4jrzxi29d5x7abl3c1"; };

Also, bad look for nixos. I was curious about nixos too, but it'll have to be debian and fedora for now.

Fair point, though I don't know what would go into properly packaging Brave.

They certainly don't package Brave in any fashion, but if you were curious about NixOS, you might look at Guix System.

If they care about both a fast development cycle and rapid adoption then spending time getting an official package for Debian/etc. makes no sense.

> It doesn't imply anything serious, just that it can be built from source and that it passed the distro's basic diligence and guidelines.

For a modern web browser it probably doesn't achieve the latter. Both Chromium and Firefox are too complex for Debian's meager backporting resources. So they make an exception to their guidelines and ship the LTS release. I suppose the userbase just hopes that bad things don't if the browser LTS upgrade happens before the OS's LTS upgrade is ready.

Firefox has an LTS release, but chromium doesn't. So distros just ship the update every month whenever chromium is tagged. In practice, it follows chrome's release cycle very closely. Since brave is based on chromium, I don't see why this model can't work for brave given that distos are able to build and ship chromium already. (Android is a more complicated story )

Then make a Flatpak.

Hi, in my sparetime I help some of the linux packaging for Brave. We are looking for people to help us do this very thing. We provide packaged for deb, rpm, and snap. I maintain the snaps for brave but have been disappointed with the performance. If you are willing to test an maintain distros we'd be more than happy to get you involved.

Brave is a private, for-profit company that has raised $42 million in venture funding—out of curiosity why do you bother doing free work for them in your spare time?

This same argument is true of nearly all companies, including "not for profit." For instance the chair at Mozilla/FireFox pays himself $1.1 million a year, the treasurer $1 million. [1] And those numbers are probably higher now. That's from 2016, the most recent published data on their site. Since 2013 [2] their CEO has increased his yearly compensation by more than $300k, and the treasurer increased his pay by more than $400k a year. And now with Mozilla planning to release a pay-per-month browser (because their half a billion dollars in revenue just isn't enough!), we can expect to see that executive compensation skyrocket even further.

What people like to imagine "not for profit" means is not what it means in practice.

[1] - https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Fo...

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101637

And ?

The Linux foundation heads have a similar salary range, like many other foundations and it is not an issue.

"Not for profit" means with a public stated goal, means that your share holder will not suddenly overcome your company strategy and make you sell all your client data, or make you sell bananas, because "it's more profitable on short term".

That is not an hypothetical scenario, many IT companies already felt into this trap. The foundation model of Mozilla protect you against that. This is something that Brave company does not... And the position of its CEO on publicity does not reinforce my trust into that.

Being non-profit does not somehow protect companies or their customers from making bad decisions. For instance Mozilla lately has been trying to take a position on privacy. They do this at the same time that they direct their users to Google search by default which is about as anti-privacy as you could possibly get. The reason is because they make a ton of money doing it.

Other recent bad decisions from them would include the decision to forcefully install a Mr. Robot related promo into the browser. And now most recently they plan to transition to a freemium model for FireFox where the regular FireFox will be free but "premium" features will now require a monthly fee. If you find these behaviors to those of a company who put mission ahead of profit, then we will have to simply agree to disagree.

And still I prefer all these decisions to a pseudo-compagny that try to create a monopoly on publicity by rebranding Google-chrome (WebKit). Brave could almost be qualified of a scam.

They have all ingredients of a scam, including an ICO.

> The Linux foundation heads have a similar salary range, like many other foundations and it is not an issue.

Being common doesn't mean it's not an issue.

A day job without hazard pay should never be making more than 5x median income.

What is the difference between having the share holders taking decisions for the users against user wishes, or having the heads of a non profit organization doing the same (like Mozzila did quite some times)?

On the flip side, what people seem to want “not for profit” to mean is “employees work for below market rate for some reason”.

I don't get it. I would expect employees at a non-profit to be compensated along the same lines as those at a for-profit. It's a constant easy story for shitty journalism in the UK – "oh my god this head of a charity makes far less than the head of an equivalently–sized private company! what a bastard!"

Take the ideological (and incorrect) definition of not-for-profit vs for-profit companies. The for-profit company is supposed to be willing to utilize any sort of money-making opportunity to improve their bottom line which is supposed to be their goal. The not-for-profit company is supposed to sidestep opportunities that do not necessarily align with their mission, resulting in less profit but greater integrity, as maintaining their mission is supposed to be their goal. If this were the case, not-for-profit business would invariably end up with substantially less funding than comparable for-profit businesses. As a consequence of this, it would be fiscally impossible for them provide the same sort of compensation.

This is of course fallacious. But the reason for this is that not-for-profit and for-profit companies operate in mostly the same way. This is something that most people do not understand. This is precisely what I was aiming to point out to the person who initially said 'why would you ever contribute your time for free to a for-profit?' It's an intuitive, but incorrect understanding of the differences between the sort of a companies.

I guess it's more like how many devs could be paid a decent salary from the millions that he Mozilla "leadership" pays itself.

You’re saying the same thing but wrapping it up in scare quotes.

You’re suggesting it would be better if Mozilla did… what? Had no leadership team, perhaps using some kind of non traditional management structure? Paid their leadership team below-market rate? Or is it just the general idea that high-level leaders are paid too much throughout society, and that this needs to be fixed? (Which is totally true, but not at all specific to Mozilla).

Maybe the effort isn't for the company, but for the distros and their users. Is nvidia packaging its proprietary drivers for Ubuntu?

No it's for the project.

I also contribute to linux kernel, and tons of open source projects. In this case, I am pushing that users should manage the packages as it gives the distro a bit of independence. this is also the apache way which i am a member of.

Maybe to help insure that a mono-browser environment is not in our future?

What is required in terms of testing?

> and it has all the best of Chrome without the worst

I mean, what is the "worst" stuff it doesn't have? Account sign in?

It seems like there are plenty of other Chromium embedders to get that without the sketchy stuff.

I can't tell that I'm seeing "their" ads. The way I see ads is a notification type prompt where I have to click view and navigate to a sponsored page. Do you have a side by side where Brave replaces a site's ad with their own?

I don't think that's a thing they do, so I'm curious to hear from GP. And in terms of the notification prompts, that's something you have to enable (disabled by default) if you want to "earn" tokens.

As soon as an ad-blocker starts trying to monetize with ads, it's like the death knell.

This is what AdBlock Plus did with the "Acceptable ads" program, which is their main source of revenue. Arguably with some reasonable criteria for what an "acceptable ad" is, but to me entirely unreasonable because the software doesn't by default do what it says on the tin.

That's years ago, I believe, and there are still ad blockers that don't seem to accept compromise.

Can you give Brave your own dir of install in win64? Thats the only thing from stopping me to use it on my streaming #DAW since it has a small SSD, which I refuse to install non-critical software on.

Over here brave just dumps itself on c: in win64

I wonder how that might work in combo with PiHole or similar on my network. Like, if they are replacing ads are those ads then blocked anyway or slip streamed through?

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