Brave Browser and the Wayback Machine: Working Together
blog.archive.org
blog.archive.org
I can only speak for myself but I find that Brave as a daily driver is a wonderful browser. Since it's built on Chromium, it has all the common extensions I use with Chrome (Dark Reader, uBlock Origin, etc.). It has built-in Tor and a rich set of default privacy features. The ads it provides are opt-in and the way that it allows the user to choose which website/content creators to reward allows a level of freedom to users that other browsers typically don't.
I don't know about the ethics behind everything Brave is doing - but this built in functionality of 404 redirects with the help of the IA/Wayback Machine is, to me, an interesting and welcome feature. I did not know, before reading this thread, that other browsers had plugins/extensions available for this. The fact that Brave is simply building it in natively seems to be a bold move. If other browsers adopt similar functionality natively, we'll know that it was a winning move. When all is said and done, despite any missteps Brave may be making, it is trying a different approach, and I think that in the end, whether or not Brave succeeds, that's healthy for a competitive browser ecosystem.
Edit: One thing I'd really like to see for Brave's mobile browser in the future is the ability to use Chrome extensions - it seems completely strange to me that this hasn't been implemented yet (if I'm slow on the uptake and this capability has been added, please correct me)
The Wayback machine feature is an interesting move, especially in the world of A/B tests and feature flags. I hope this bolsters support for IA initiatives and ends up powering some cool products, because I can think of a few ideas already (leaning heavily on competitive intelligence, inferring feature performance based on longevity/time-in-test, etc.)
In practice, though, I wish it were more stable, with basic working features. Instead it seems like basic functionality is buggy[0], and major breaking changes could crop up at any time[1].
[0]: https://community.brave.com/t/brave-sync-temporarily-disable...
That apparently only covers Chromium changes to allow an HTML UI, not the actual interesting bits of the browser.
Vivaldi generates revenue from partner deals with search engines and default bookmarks.
I predict that if Brave happens to become popular, the IA will become a lot more popular and people would want to delete a lot of IA pages for privacy reasons.
It now lives on as an extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wayback-machi...
And here's the report: https://medium.com/firefox-test-pilot/test-pilot-no-more-404...
Basically if you look at the results, they aren't so encouraging, because the archive has results for only ~20% of URLs that aren't found and when it does have results, a majority of the time users tend to dismiss or ignore the notification.
Still, it's a useful extension that I keep installed in my Firefox.
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Adding something natively to the browser isn't a virtue, because the browser maker can have perverse incentives due to the nature of the business. I personally don't understand how some people can trust Brave for ad-blocking (given they are a company whose business model is still the serving of ads) instead of just installing uBlock Origin in their favorite browser, whatever that browser is.
Speaking of uBlock Origin, even if you can install it on Brave right now, given Google is deprecating the underlying API in manifest v3, I don't think Brave will be able to support uBlock Origin for long, in spite of what they've claimed, simply because I don't think they have the capacity to diverge too much from Chromium's code base.
And if you want Tor and such, might as well go for the real thing.
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> One thing I'd really like to see for Brave's mobile browser in the future is the ability to use Chrome extensions - it seems completely strange to me that this hasn't been implemented yet
Well, it's actually rather obvious:
1. Brave is basically leeching on Google's work, they don't have the capacity for actual software development that goes beyond branding and features that serve their own bottom line — speaking of which, if you care about the health of the web, you're not sticking it to Google when using Brave, precisely because it's still Chromium, still contributing to Google's dominance
2. Extensions can go against their own business model and their interests here are actually aligned with Google's (yes Mozilla's interests are aligned with Google as well, but Firefox on Android does support extensions and given their culture and how things have evolved on the desktop as well, at least in this regard I'm pretty sure they'll support extensions for as long as the underlying OS allows it)
I fail to see how extensions on mobile is more difficult than adblocking, tracking resistance, and TOR support. You can claim that all of those are just baking in well-understood functions from elsewhere, but it's not like extensions are novel, and mobile isn't that weird a platform.
I actually tried their crypto ads, out of curiosity. I had some BATs collected, then I reinstalled my machine, used their backup code to import the wallet again, but it showed zero value. I contacted them about this, never got an answer.
The sync was causing a crash for some people, so they turned it off for everybody. It was off for at least a week, and maybe even now. But even when it was turned on, it didn't sync properly between my iPhone and my laptop.
The browser frame is rendered weirdly both under xfce and kde. I had to resize the window and maximize again, to get the min/max/close buttons properly rendered, and make some random border disappear.
There were sites where I couldn't log in even after turning off the shield.
On my iPhone for some reason when I searched something in DDG, clicked on it, then went back, DDG was rendered, then tried to scroll, and the previous site started bleeding through from the bottom of the screen. The URL bar showed DDG, but nothing was clickable. Refreshing the page didn't work, so I had to force close the browser and open again to see my search query. Interestingly Google seemed to be working, although I only use it for like 1-2% of my search queries, so I cannot be sure.
In the dev tools the audits tab didn't work at all. Couldn't connect an Android device for remote debugging.
In the end all the little annoyances just made me uninstall it, because for me it is just too much to put up with all these. It definitely has some interesting ideas, but I cannot recommend it just yet.
I'm willing to forgive them making such a drastic and strange requirement like mandating that the all bookmarks folder be moved to the bookmarks toolbar, but when a basic feature like bookmarks syncing (a solved problem in every other browser) is so horrendously broken, I simply cannot use it.
A "drop in replacement for Chrome" just isn't my thing as a Firefox user - I just didn't love the browsing experience otherwise.
If the company were to expand their market for postive-ads and crypto coins by releasing a Firefox plugin as a "drop in replacement for uBlock Origin" it might tickle my fancy.
I didn't view sufficient ads to be rewarded with any crypto in the timeframe (monthly?) and none of the webpages I visit regularly seemed to be eligible for BAT donations. The latter seems a chicken and egg problem; it's an opt-in system for the website administrators who might already have alternative monetization (Google ads, patreon).
Brave's business-model experiments to support a tracker-free internet – like the crypto-tokens & user-agent-controlled ad-replacement – are opt-in.
And further: who's better for users?
Boycott Google & Microsoft, sure. But boycott tiny Brave? As Brave pushes the envelope on both privacy technology & privacy-respecting business models? That's a peculiarly self-defeating kind of righteousness.
Shitcoins require public, and trackable, ledgers, so you literally cannot say 'uses shitcoin' and 'tracker-free internet' in the same sentence.
Chances are people just roll their eyes and scroll on to the next comment before they even finish the sentence.
Yes.
> but resorting to such childish naming only ends up hurting your point.
Well, I'm not wrong.
If you just wanted an excuse to shit on crypto then... ok.
Bitcoin, & close relatives, require a public ledger, but some altcoins use other technologies to prevent a publicly-readable ledger.
But, Brave uses an off-blockchain technology ('ANONIZE': https://tech.cornell.edu/built/anonize/) to tally attention without per-browser/per-user tracking. So, the use of their BAT tokens to net-out rewards, even though on the public Ethereum ledger, has no contradiction with the "tracker-free internet" goal.
Brave's cryptocurrency scheme gives the Brave owners a 30% cut of all profits.
I am not 100% in favor of Brave's monetization strategy, though I'm very glad they are trying something less common. If their overall execution was more to my liking, I would gladly pay them for the service. You have no business presuming to decide for other people what they find worthy of compensation.
Well not just any browser company, but a browser company that improves the status quo and convinces me that they deserve it. In this hypothetical, the answer to your question is "because they deserve it".
The revenue usually isn't moving from me as the consumer directly to the producer, rather it is provided by advertisers who are engaged in ever escalating tactics to increase their efficiency, with little regard for me and my privacy as a consumer. With adblocking, we have two sets of people: a smaller group who browse without benefiting the advertisers who compensate the producers, and a larger group who browse while being enablers to the user-hostile privacy violating tactics used by most advertisers.
Neither of these situations is truly desirable in the long term. I don't seen any ideal solutions, and I believe that any entity which can move us towards a new and better model might be deserving of compensation, regardless of where they sit in the stream of data.
It's my choice which browser I use, and if I decide to use one that pushes money in a certain direction to fund better browser software, then I don't see that anyone can really complain.
Some of us aren't yet comfortable with blocking the easiest way for users to compensate creators, while still consuming said content.
HNers should be rooting for crypto to succeed - decentralized networks have the most promise for protecting privacy. Federated networks like email result in centralized entities - decentralized protocols like BitTorrent remain much harder to shutdown.
Edit: not exactly decentralized in practice.
As a hypothetical example, imagine that Brave is sold, and new owners changed the code so that 50% of the tokens go to the PRESIDENT RE-ELECTION FUND, instead of the website user looks at.
Brave could make a new BAT token and point their browser to use it, but they don't get to do anything with the original code controlling the tokens everyone is already using. It cannot be disabled, modified, or deleted, by Brave Inc or by any person.
[1]: https://etherscan.io/address/0x0d8775f648430679a709e98d2b0cb...
This by itself is strong proof of centralization. Brave can unilaterally make this change and give themselves total control over BAT 2.0 while leaving the original BAT worthless.
1. More than 12 employees at the time of ICO. 2. Check the UGP status. Tis well distributed. 3. Check the payout to freecodecamp, over $2k.
No one is being compensated there at all and the site itself often can't even gather 1st party analytics.
I am always open to changing my mind, yet when I see the same untruths mustered to poison-the-well ('swapping ads with their own' - not true) I wonder why the same dishonest and distorted talking points come up instead of any valid criticisms.
What you call 'cryptocurrency nonsense' is a model that potentially threatens to overturn Google's ad model, and with it the current ad-tech ecosystem.
That obviously means there's a huge number of high-stakes players who are very keen for this particular model not to 'take' in the online world, and so we see the same untruths constantly amplified.
Brave must be doing something right, and even if there's a purist's position which says their model is not the holy grail, I'd prefer innovation and disrupted business models over a continuation of the current ad-tech status quo.
Only by the strictest definition of swap. They block ads and show ads from their own ad network, which they collect revenue on. That the Brave ads don't appear in the same place as the blocked ads doesn't impact the ethics of it.
And in what way is it unethical for that same company to provide the service, which I desire, of blocking ads that I've already decided I don't want to see, because the people serving me those ads are violating my privacy?
Many people seem fixated on trying to frame this in the most disparaging way possible, which distracts from the reality of what is actually happening here.
This line about 'swapping ads with their own' has been an attempt to imply in the reader's mind that Brave was / is nefariously replacing actual ads with their own, which is not true.
The truth is Brave blocks all ads by default, and nothing more.
Do you believe it's ethical for a user agent to block ads, or that it's unethical and a form of theft?
I'm with gorhill of uBlock on this [1]:
That said, it's important to note that using a blocker is NOT theft.
Don't fall for this creepy idea.
The ultimate logical consequence of blocking = theft is the criminalisation of the inalienable right to privacy.
The ethics around this are clear:
* if a user wishes to opt-out of an insecure, fraudulent and privacy-harming ad-tech ecosystem for content on the open web that is their right
* if that same user wants to opt-in to a privacy-respecting alternative ad model which operates in a very different way, that's also their right
Attempting to claim the combination of these optional user choices is 'ad swapping' in a nefarious, unethical sense is simply dishonest.
A more accurate phrase considering the individual user choices involved might be 'model swapping'.
As a user I deliberately choose to swap the current ad-tech model with a new, innovative model. That model may have to evolve, but from a technical and human perspective appears to be much better than the current status quo.
> Attempting to claim the combination of these optional user choices is 'ad swapping' in a nefarious, unethical sense is simply dishonest.
...
(For the benefit of anyone else on mobile who finds HN's quotation style unpleasant, here is the gorhill quote:
"That said, it's important to note that using a blocker is NOT theft.
Don't fall for this creepy idea.
The ultimate logical consequence of blocking = theft is the criminalisation of the inalienable right to privacy. ")
Code blocks are definitely not HN's quotation style and not recommended for quotes. They are often used for that purpose by mistake. It is an understandable mistake considering the lack of formatting options here.
A common quotation style that works on all devices is what I used above, a leading '>' followed by the quoted text enclosed in asterisks, like this (with code formatting here to show the special characters):
> *For the benefit...*
> *Blank line between paragraphs*Can somebody expand a bit on how the ads are shown in privacy-respecting way? Are they not personalized? That seems unlikely.
If the matching is done locally, is Brave downloading hundreds of ads on the device, and then showing only the one that were picked by local ML algorithm?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20831014
For convenience, I'll also quote it here:
> The user opts-in to Brave Rewards/Ads. This kicks off a machine-learning model that begins to study the user's habits and interests.
> On a daily basis, the user downloads a regional ad catalog (as to other Brave users in their region). This catalog contains numerous ad options, which your device studies for relevance.
> If/when your device identifies an ad within the catalog that might be of interest to you, it displays the ad as an OS notification. At this time, 70% of the ad revenue is deposited into your in-situ wallet.
> At this point, the user has made absolutely no contact with an advertiser. If the user chooses to click on the ad, it is opened in its own tab in the Brave Browser. This tab, like all others, is subject to Brave's default security/privacy settings. No third party trackers, etc.
> The advertiser will know that you are interested in their product/service, because you clicked the ad. But no other information about you is given to them; only what can be inferred from standard first-party browsing online.
It's ethical if the user chooses to do so due to privacy concerns or other related reasons.
It is NOT ethical if the maker of the user-agent is profiting from it, being essentially copyright infringement.
Projects like uBlock Origin are very different from Brave, because the company behind Brave directly profits from blocking ads. Without ads and ads blocking, Brave doesn't have a business.
Thus it is ethically justifiable to block ads on the grounds that we should come up with a monetisation model for content that is not ads. Blocking ads and then offering your own ads is not ethically justifiable in the above context (and in fact is a bit tacky). Personally opting to replace ads with different ads is also not ethically justifiable in the above context (and is a bit defeatist). It's nice that the replacement ads pay you money, but this is unrelated to the ethical argument (and obviously the advertiser comes out ahead even in this scenario, because otherwise they wouldn't run the ads).
If you agree, how would you disrupt the existing ad models in an effective way?
Something doesn't feel right.
PS the only place I hear about Brave now that their clickbait articles on tech sites all but disappeared is here. Yes. The verY sites their revenue we are suppose to want to protect so they can sell us infomercials pretending to be content.
It’s obvious we can’t leave the web in the hands of corporations, neither Microsoft, or google and definitely not brave? which is ran by a morally questionable and compromised Brenden Eich to begin with.
I disagree. Existing browsers are "good actors" in an online wasteland devoid of privacy [1], and Brave is a "bad actor" in this context because they're trying to disrupt this awful status quo. Per Krishnamurti, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." So it is with the browser landscape.
No doubt they will make some missteps, that's typical of any novel approach to finding a balance of privacy vs. viability of free content. The ad model is perfectly sensible in this context.
[1] https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf
If I use the Brave in its intended mode, then EFFECTIVELY it does swap ads. By intended mode, I mean the way Brave is supposed to be used. From [1], here are the main selling points of Brave:
1. "Block data-grabbing ads and trackers"
2. "Tip and contribute to websites directly through Brave Rewards"
Turning both those options EFFECTIVELY swaps developer ads with your own ads. The web developer who spent tons of resources in creating the content is effectively at the mercy of the Brave who makes tons of money.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wayback-machi...
"""
We study six browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Brave Browser, Microsoft Edge and Yandex Browser.
For Brave with its default settings we did not find any use of identifiers allowing tracking of IP address over time, and no sharing of the details of web pages visited with backend servers.
Chrome, Firefox and Safari all share details of web pages visited with backend servers. For all three this happens via the search autocomplete feature, which sends web addresses to backend servers in realtime as they are typed. In addition, Firefox includes identifiers in its telemetry transmissions that can potentially be used to link these over time. Telemetry can be disabled, but again is silently enabled by default. Firefox also maintains an open websocket for push notifications that is linked to a unique identifier and so potentially can also be used for tracking and which cannot be easily disabled.
Safari defaults to a poor choice of start page that leaks information to multiple third parties and allows them to set cookies without any user consent. Safari otherwise made no extraneous network connections and transmitted no persistent identifiers, but allied iCloud processes did make connections containing identifiers.
From a privacy perspective Microsoft Edge and Yandex are qualitatively different from the other browsers studied. Both send persistent identifiers than can be used to link requests (and associated IP address/location) to back end servers. Edge also sends the hardware UUID of the device to Microsoft and Yandex similarly transmits a hashed hardware identifier to back end servers. As far as we can tell this behaviour cannot be disabled by users. In addition to the search autocomplete functionality that shares details of web pages visited, both transmit web page information to servers that appear unrelated to search autocomplete.
"""
From:
https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf
(Paragraph breaks added for readability)
Edit: I am a passionate advocate for freedom, privacy, and free software and I like Brave.
(In 10 days, which probably explains a lot of the warts.)
There have been zero accusations or complaints that Brendan Eich harmed inclusivity as part of his job. It's a shame he was forced to step down, but we don't need to be bringing this up like it's a mark of shame on his part.
I also find the self-acclaimed "Brave" browser company an odd partner to work with for an organisation dedicated to the open web like IA. This browser has exactly one purpose: to make money. In terms of the people working on it, it's arguably more commercial than Chrome, Safari, or Edge.
The proposition "Brave" is making is: "Don't you also feel what this world needs is an intermediary between you and the people creating what you like, skimming from both sides whenever money is involved?"
1. Go to https://archive.org/donate/ in any browser, on any device.
2. Click "$100", click "Donate", enter credit card info.
Now you write out the process for doing it via Brave. Assume the user just installed Brave and has 0 BAT.
The payments are anonymous and private.
You had to spend a certain number of years on Earth to become old enough to have a credit rating and legal standing to get a credit card.
You had to obtain a credit card by filling out paperwork and being accepted by the company issuing the credit card.
You had to wait for the card to arrive in the mail.
You had to activate it the card.
I don't think it's fair to just skip over all those steps just because they're already done. Sure, for you, today, the card is probably easier. But by that token a guy with a horse in 1900 who already had a stable and a bunch of hay could say, "Why would anyone buy a car?"
And he'd be right, on that particular day, for him. But not for everyone, and not forever.
The browser company (Brave) only makes money if the user opts in to ads, which is exactly that; opt-in. That choice is on the user.
Brave have been very open about their focus on privacy and an open web.
That sounds insidious but this is what most media platforms do.
Chrome is the only one of these browsers that is produced by a company where at least 80% of its billions of dollars of revenue is generated by monetizing the personal identifying information of web users using ad tech.
It’s also the only major browser without built-in support for mitigating tracking cookies and scripts.
What Brave is trying to do is bootstrap an ecosystem where users can use a utility cryptocurrency to reward content creators they like while optionally getting paid to view ads that related to sites on the web they visit without leaking personal information due to zero knowledge proofs.
Brave really wants to increase the value of the Basic Attention Token by flipping the current business model of the web on its head.
That’s not a bad idea.
It's not a bad idea, but IMO it's a bad execution.
They're effectively running a business based on extorting everyone building anything for the web (everyone from big businesses to small hobbyists trying to make something new) by flat-out replacing the most common form of monetization (ads) with their own monetization and saying, "Hey developers, I know you worked hard on that website, so if you want that money (or, at least, a cut of it we feel is fair), sign up for our platform instead".
The dividing line is privacy invading third-party ads.
At a whole 12M users, they're hardly extorting anyone at this point. Let's back the hyperbole train up a bit.
They're only free to do so in Brave's eyes if they roll their own ad solution, which is an option but not _always_ the best option. The "easy" (and, arguably, more featureful/secure/"better") route to monetize across the Internet (especially on hobby projects and small businesses) is third-party ads. There's lots of reasons someone might weigh the options and make the decision to go with a third party ad provider; Brave takes that decision away. Whether that's better or worse for the Internet as a whole is debatable.
wrt third-party ads being more secure... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising
You also point the arrow of causality in the wrong direction. It's not as though Brave magically shows up on devices. The current ecosystem and its host of problems (including privacy and security) are precisely why users are choosing adblockers of all stripes.
In Brave's case, at least they're conscientious enough to provide an alternative path to monetization for creators.
Or they can choose block 3rd party ads and tracking scripts and opt-in to seeing ads they are more likely to be interested in and get paid a percentage to do so.
Chrome—and by extension Google—does not give you that choice and certainly doesn't share any of the ad revenue with web users.
It's true, but I also think that people who pile on Mozilla when they do such things wouldn't touch Brave with a 10 foot pole to begin with so they don't really care much about it. From the start Brave's core proposition is to be more intrusive by default by shipping an ad-blocker, their ad system and a few other things. You're buying into that when you install the browser. This particular change doesn't seem out of line for them.
After all most of Brave's features (including this very one) are one extension away in Firefox, which is one of the main reasons I don't understand why anybody would bother with Brave especially if the goal is to avoid browser monoculture.
Now this is interesting.
To be clear... we are super happy that Brave values helping to make the Web more useful and reliable.
We welcome other browser companies joining them and working with us as well.
The extra load on our servers is not that significant. At this point we support thousands of request per second, we can take on a few more.
Having said that... we always appreciate the support and love from the community to people (and companies) who use and appreciate our services.
We are adding more a billion URLs/day to the Wayback Machine these days... that is a LOT of hard drives :-)
I was using Firefox and then I switched to Brave. None of their featyres/business model is shoved down my throat. I just use it to browse the Web, I do not see ads, I do not participate in their crypto currency program. Heck I don't even see their icon for crypto currency on my browser UI.
I found Brave to be faster and more user friendly than Firefox which is why I switched. What I meant by user friendly is not just the UI components but also requires a minimal setup effort. I would like to hear more about technical and privacy related merits/demerits of Brave as I feel that's more pertinent at the moment when it comes to browser. However, the hate I hear about their business model/crypto currency somehow is baffling and ironically it seems to come from Firefox users. Can anyone point out some interesting technical and privacy related drawbacks of Brave? That'd be useful for a lot of us.
They have been at times.
Particularly in the period during which they solicited funds to "help support" blogs and pages by people who had not signed up (and did not want to sign up when they found out about Brave and BAT).
I'm not saying they're all bad, but they've overstepped the bounds of good behaviour at times.
IANAL but this sounds like straight up fraud, not just "overstepping the line a little bit".
There's a screenshot here - https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br...
Tom Scott was alerted to this when someone sent him a tweet asking if he'd got thte tip, and was annoyed because he had no intention of monetising anything.
It does indeed look fraudulent to me. They have changed the behaviour now IIRC.
A lot of the negative feedback comes from the fact that the company needed to have high community backslashes or potential for legal issues before they would act. They also did false advertisement.
I personally opt out if something appears sketchy. I still question the privacy or user focus and so should everyone with software that claims privacy first.
Also, since it uses chromium, performance on android is way better than firefox. Android firefox is too slow.