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tomaskafka

A simple guide to choosing your browser:

Does it make money by showing you ads?

Chrome: Yes Brave: Yes Firefox: No

If yes, then they need to track your behavior in detail. I'm sure you don't deserve to be tracked.

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Firefox makes money by its search deal with Google, in other words: by funneling their users towards Google. This pretty much also boils down to "making money by showing you ads". Google's search ads, to be precise. Now you can say: "But I can turn this off", but then you'd also turn off their source of revenue.

Brave's stated goal is to establish an alternative ad-based business model that's long-term viable without the user being tracked. Will this be successful? Who knows, but at least they're trying to find a business model that respects your privacy while being long-term sustainable. Firefox's model doesn't, at least the way it works now.

>Firefox makes money by its search deal with Google

Of course, development costs a lot. They will not need to rely on Google in the future if more people donate to them regularly. Consider donating to Firefox.

Considering most of their jobs are in mountain view, a very expensive col and developer salary area, they should consider moving somewhere more economical if they expect to live on handouts.

Why should we have to support their over priced office space?

I suspect that if you ask them, they're not in Mountain View for fun, they're there for the access to top tier tech talent. Browser rendering engines and java script engines are serious engineering, needing good engineers. It's not the only place in the world you can find them, but it's a good one.

Because they're still doing important work, and deserve to have nice things? Why does working at a non profit mean that you should have a bad quality of life?

You don't have to support them, but if their product provides value to you, it's worth considering

I think this miss the point. This seems more in the line to "Duolingo to Silicon Valley workers: Move to Pittsburgh, where you can actually afford a home" call[1].

That is, it's not about less good quality of life, just less high salary possible only in places with less high level of misc. inflation.

Plus passed some level, I doubt higher salaries make good corollary with high quality of life. Not that you can't have a sane happy life with a lot of money, of course. But : - it doesn't seem to to be a requirement, see for example the case of Matthieu Ricard[2] - large salary, or more generally acquiring a social status broadly recognized as great success doesn't prevent from terrible quality of life. Arguably, even you go with Camus saying "Un geste comme le suicide se prépare dans le silence du cœur au même titre qu’une grande oeuvre", not all people in [3] committed suicide out of a situation where they felt they had good quality of life.

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/23/duolingo-to-silicon-valle... [2] https://onbeing.org/programs/matthieu-ricard-happiness-as-hu... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicides_in_the_21st_c...

You're not wrong, but to many people, the appearance of a non-profit (notwithstanding the legal status of Mozilla Corp) operating in an extremely high CoL region isn't good.

If SV doesn't trigger that for you, think about, say, a non-profit headquartered in Monaco, that asks for donations so that its employees can have a nice home and QoL in Monaco with salaries several multiples of your own for comparable work.

This isn't true.

One, Mozilla has multiple offices across the world; see https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contact/spaces/

Two, a large percentage (perhaps even a majority?) work remotely.

This combination lets Mozilla hire talented people wherever they are.

(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla)

The Mozilla Foundation has multiple sources of revenue.

Firefox is persuing other revenue sources as well, such as a paid premium browser. My last hope against the advertising economy is this model taking off.

Same, I intend to pay for their premium browser. I've been using Firefox for years. Chrome couldn't get me to shift over. I only use Chrome when testing front-end code and I don't do front-end development anymore.

I would pay buckets of money every month for a computing experience devoid of advertising.

I already pay YouTube for no ads, so I agree. I would do the same for TV to an extent, too many Netflix competitors popping up, I don't have time to spend hundreds of dollars on those, I wont be consuming enough content to justify them. I do spend way too much time online, I usually pay for no ads on mobile games / apps.

To argue from an extreme point of view, neither of those choices are very good because the web in general is a terrible platform. The whole standard they implement (and its velocity of change) seems geared towards minimizing the potential for competition, and is implemented without a hint of concern for what identifying information the browser APIs might divulge by design or how much the attack surface for various malicious activities grows with their inclusion. It's an arms race, and adtech have found where all sides keep their guns.

The difference is any tracking Brave does is 100% local on your device, which eliminates any potential privacy issues that may exist with other advertising models.

yeah and apparently sending stuff to google IPs. So... not?

What are they sending to Google IPs specifically? Also what makes you think that has anything to do with advertising, and isn't, for example, a side-effect of the browser being a Chromium fork?

Brave Ads are opt in and give 70% of gross revenue to the users who opt in. Leaving this out while glossing over other browsers’ default search revenue model is doubly misleading.

As a user of Brave, I'm consciously making this decision, thank you very much. What's your idea as to how content creators should be supported?

The problem is that if you start paying content creators, then you're giving data to another party, i.e. your bank.

depends.. Brave has actually got it's own token that could be used to pay creators, not sure how the transactions are logged though but i'd imagine that you can privately pay without being tracked

Yes, but there's always a third party that can in theory collect all your data.

Who? I'm not really familiar with how Brave does it, but there are plenty of cryptocurrencies where that's definitely _not_ the case.

It's still not clear whether untrackable cryptocurrencies will be allowed by regulators.

Alternatives based on peer-to-peer (micro)payments are already staring to emerge, e.g. this guys is building patreon alternative based on Lightning Network (Bitcoin's second layer able to handle millions of tx per seconds for negligible fee):

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/aacw3h/im_creating...

Why do you need to be tracked to support content creators?

You don't. Which is why Brave's ads don't do that.

For me, the guide is more like:

Does it render text in an ugly manner?

Chrome: No

Safari: No

Firefox: Yes

The unfortunate thing is that many Firefox users prefer the Firefox text rendering.

There’s no solution to fix this (I’ve researched a lot). It’s just a divide in the users based upon preferences.

What do you mean by ugly? That GDI text rendering is used on Windows instead of DirectWrite for some font families? This can be disabled in about:config by assigning `gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families` an empty value. Or do you mean that there's no subpixel positioning on non-Windows/macOS? That one has no fix, except when the text rendering part of WebRender goes into production.

I'm confused. Doesn't Firefox use Freetype on Linux? Freetype has subpixel rendering.

AFAICT Firefox text rendering has always been fine on Linux. Chrome until a year or two ago had no subpixel antialiasing, different gamma for antialiasing, or whatever - its text rendering used to look ugly, or more neutrally: different from everything else.

Subpixel rendering is different from subpixel positioning.

See e.g. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=824153 for some gory details.

What platform do you see this on? Other than subpixel positioning on Linux/Android, Firefox should render text the same as Chrome.

Firefox follows my system font renderer settings. Am I missing something else?

I don't know why parent was downvoted. This is on top of the list of things that kept me from switching back to FF.

This is how every thread on this topic goes. 99% downvoted and hate directed towards me. A couple of people chime with “yeah I agree with you”. And nothing changes because it cannot. Because it’s based on preference.

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