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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

The comments in this thread are ironic considering the content of the post.

Brave exposes controls for all of its privacy and crypto features and you can easily opt in or out of anything that concerns you, making it a great choice for privacy.

It really smacks of hypocrisy that everyone is all for multitude of open source solutions, except when it comes to browsers. Mozilla has made many misteps regarding privacy and I've never seen attacks like this. To say that browser wars are political is an understatement.

Even assuming the worst, that being that Brave is trying to track you and build an ad network rivaling Google, that still seems in sum total a good thing. Google has gone down a dark path completely unchecked with their unimaginable omniscience and ad revenue, and I welcome an attack on their monopoly.

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I am using firefox and I dismiss Brave because Chrome already is a monopoly. Firefox only has a tiny minority in total traffic and it's mostly from more technical users (a "technical user" would be anyone able to download an install a different browser). It is impossible to fight the current monopoly which spans across devices. The only chance we have right now. There is no way Brave or any other browser can gain enough market share to counter this except FF and even for FF the odds are slim.

The second reason I dismiss Brave is that it doesn't really provide anything innovative. It's not just about ad-tracking. We need also decentralization and new ideas on how we consume and organize information. Brave is just another for-profit organization which also makes a poor root of trust. (while Mozilla isn't any better here and also depends on questionable sources for funding the point is Brave doesn't disrupt here).

I'm not saying Brave is bad because any contender that can reduce the share of requests from Chrome vs the "Rest" is welcome. Maybe one day we have a world where 50% or less is Chrome and the rest is a mix of many different implementations. For this to happen the whole web would have to be re-envisoned because right now companies can't even bother to support the testing of more than one browser. So practically with how things are right now we will probably not have more than 2-3 contenders at any one time. And for this reason my personal vote is for FF.

> I am using firefox and I dismiss Brave because Chrome already is a monopoly. Firefox only has a tiny minority in total traffic

The only solution is to create a new web standards organization, since Google controls W3C. For example, WebAssembly has a lot of privacy issues.

The standards are created by many organisations, not just Google. And then more than one major browser must implement and provide feedback on a proposed standard. We just hear more about Google’s input since they are by far the biggest and have a much larger engineering team than most.

What privacy issues does webassembly have?

I’ve not heard of any, and spent the last 15-20 minutes looking for any and still haven’t.

I don't directly know of any, but I think there is concern of the possibility of privacy issued due to the compiled, non-available source code that web assembly presumably provided.

Privacy issues in webassembly should not be any harder to detect than minified JS. It doesn't really change the calculus.

> Google has gone down a dark path completely unchecked with their unimaginable omniscience and ad revenue,

Google has always been an ad company whose utility is to maximize ad dollars per user. What changed?

Once they secured their monopoly, they stopped maintaining the facade that they were anything but what you described, which allows them to get away with a lot more.

I don't use Brave and I'm not either the author of the article in question, but it's funny the fact you appointed. If only those people read Mozilla and Firefox privacy policies ...

Brave is not even a browser, it is just a rebranded Chrome that advertises itself to users as a "browser" while its main publicity is nothing but an unhinged attack on the very same company that built the browser it's rebranding. On the other hand Firefox IS A browser and Mozilla is a non-profit.

Nice revisionist history you got there...

Chrome is just a rebranded KDE Konqueror if your logic holds.

Brave didn't make any changes to the underlying engine. Chrome has, at this point, basically rewritten it.

No but it made a lot of changes I terms of ad blocking and privacy.

Brave seems like another Opera. Other browsers re-skin/re-factor the layout engine such as Edge, Vivaldi, etc.

Isn’t one of the main benefits of open source projects - like Chromium - that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, and can instead focus on innovation or differentiation beyond the status quo?

But most people use Chrome, which is proprietary, not Chromium.

It's the exact same rendering engine.

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