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Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

They should have a BAT extension for Firefox.

The extension route isn't feasible. If you don't control the underlying APIs, you can't guarantee service moving forward. We saw this with the Manifest v3 alarms and how they threatened the existence of uBlock Origin and other fine extensions. There's a lot more that can be said about this topic, but I'll leave it at that for now :)

"Firefox BAT extension might not work in the future" is still better than no Firefox BAT extension. I like the idea of Brave but my preference for Firefox is greater.

It's not a matter of "might not work in the future," it would be broken on arrival due to the limited abilities offered by the current extension APIs.

As for Firefox vs Brave, I would encourage you to check out the independent study by Leith, of Trinity College in Dublin. Leith found Brave to be in its own class as the "most private" browser tested (including Firefox): https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf.

You could perform a similar test yourself. Setup Fiddler on your machine (installing the root cert to inspect HTTPS traffic), set aside %localappdata%/Mozilla and %appdata%/Mozilla, then launch Firefox. The traffic (without any user interaction) is a surprise to many. Compare with Brave (be sure to set aside %localappdata%/BraveSoftware beforehand).

I've never quite understood why I would want to use Brave as its just another chromium browser with some ideas about advertising. I found your post interesting.

The paper you linked to is limited in scope to the browser itself calling home with unique identifiers. The paper says nothing about what happens when the browser visits say Facebook.

In terms of the browser calling home and uniquely tracking you all by itself, the paper says Brave does a good job. But Brave still calls home for things and Brave can still collect IP addresses and browser fingerprints the same as any other site.

A hypothetical Brave Rewards extension would pretty much just check which domains you visit and proportionally send them BAT tokens. As long as there are APIs to check the current domain and send HTTP requests to Brave's servers I think it would be fine.

I don't think BAT is a very serious idea if it's only applicable to one browser.

If people want to donate money to content creators or actually earn money off the web, there are better alternatives than watching ads.

I would really appreciate a few examples. Ads, love them or not, have funded the Web thus far. Blockchain is making it even easier to integrate support into the Web. Brave sees the potential in both, and leverages the two together. Users are able to privately and anonymously be rewarded for viewing an occasional ad notification, and turn that into meaningful support for content creators. All other methods of supporting those who make the Web great tend to involve digging into your own pocket (not everybody has disposable income), and/or handing over personal details to a third party. Brave's approach requires neither of those.

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