Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

If you have to use Chromium, at this point it is clear that Brave is a better Chromium than Chrome [0][1] despite its BAT shenanigans. The UX is super nice, and adblocking just works without having to install any extensions. Hopefully Brave doesn't buy into the whole PrivacySandbox thing Google proposed [2].

For everything else, Firefox should be the default [3][4].

It'd be great if Firefox bundles a content blocker like uBlockOrigin [5] in its distributions and introduces First-Party Isolation [6]. DoH is a welcome addition, esp since it can be used with AdGuard DNS [7] for another layer of content blocking. Firefox Private Network [8] is yet another step in the right direction, as are the anti-fingerprinting techniques [9] it has been upstreaming from the Tor Browser. With WASM around the corner, it'd be wonderful when native apps could be run from within a privacy-friendly sandbox like Firefox. Imagine using WhatsApp/Instagram on Android within Firefox with content blockers...

Next up: Strike partnerships with Android OEMs and bundle the browser as default.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18052923

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19263649

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20767891

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20052623

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17361168

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874006

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20783339

[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18788410

[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20927832

[9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20054831

> It'd be great if Firefox bundles a content blocker like uBlock Origin in its distributions

No thanks. Firefox is a great web browser platform. Instead, it should focus on improving web extension apis, allowing users to build their own extensions upon it.

I’d rather trust Google than Brave.

Same. Plus, even with Brave, you'd still need to install the latest uBO from github, so there's no benefit aside from "I hate Google but I'll still use a fork of their open source browser"

Is there anything that uBO blocks that isn't covered by Brave's integrated adblocker?

Yes,

uBO is a wide-spectrum blocker, not merely an adblocker. It has powerful context-sensitive blocking that's surpassed only by uMatrix (also from gorhill), as well as cosmetic filters that I find invaluable for cleaning up the dumpster fire being passed off as "the web" these days.

Floating header bar that follows you down the page of an article you're trying to read, wasting your vertical screen space? Remove it permanently with uBO's cosmetic filters and never see it again. Tired of the sidebar with links to clickbait articles on the site? Cosmetic filter. Wikipedia nagging for donations despite a history of irresponsible spending and ample cash reserves? Cosmetic filter.

We don't have uBO's cosmetic filters. That's about it.

In other words, Brave is "wide-spectrum" too. We block tracking, fingerprinting, and other bad scripts -- not ads _per se_. This has the effect of blocking 3rd party ads and most 1st party (since 1st party ads still rely on tracking "pixels" AKA scripts for confirmation).

We don't block 1st party ads by default where they work without tracking cookies and scripts. A prime example are the search ads you find on Google and other search engine result pages. These are about as clean as you can get, and yet some of our users want to block them on principle, for aesthetic reasons, etc. So we are adding options to do so.

Cosmetic filters have a high performance cost that we have not been willing to take by default, but we're working on them.

>there's no benefit

Brave doesn't have all the Chrome telemetry (etc) as I understand it.

Yes they have their own telemetry (like Firefox).

They were using Mixpanel before, but they got complain from users, so eventually they added a proxy in front of Mixpanel (but that doesn't change anything since Mixpanel generates an UID, so what's the point of hiding the IP ?).

https://github.com/brave/metric-proxy

It's used for tracking user performance when distributing BAT (otherwise you would have no referral program possible), that's how they distributed the initial 5 USD

That was for the website, not for browser telemetry -- we switched to self-hosted Piwik (now Matomo) instance.

For in-browser telemetry, please see https://brave.com/privacy-preserving-product-analytics-p3a/. Low-dimensionality data (a few bits of answer) given to randomly timed unlinkable survey questions; anything hi-D is in the future and will use PROCHLO.

Whenever Google pushes out the manifest v3 changes, ad blocking on Chrome will be hobbled. uBlock Origin already stated they are dead on Chrome whenever that happens.

Is that because of the opt-in BAT crypto bullshit, or because Eich is the boogieman?

Why would Firefox block Google ads or Google trackers by default ? It doesn't make sense, it's their almost only source of revenue (>500 million of USD).

Firefox has recently started blocking Google’s third-party cookies by default.

Not a problem for the Google Search ads nor YouTube Ads since both domains are whitelisted.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1582752#c1

If Firefox blocks Google search ads, then Firefox is dead ;) It's that simple.

Why would Firefox block Google’s ads on Google’s own site? That’s not what Firefox’s tracking protection is about. Firefox protects people from third-party tracking, it’s not an ad blocker.

If a website wants to show its own ads -- let’s call them first-party ads -- then Firefox is completely fine with that; and so it every other browser, including Brave.

"BAT shenanigans": https://batgrowth.com/ -- this is already bigger than alternative micropayment-like schemes. It's opt in and will remain so for our default builds. If you don't like it, don't use it.

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