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Comment by mateus1 | Hacker News Reader

Just get Firefox.

Brave has ads, including annoying desktop pop ups!

You have to active choose in the settings to get ads. And if you do, you get "paid" in crypto for getting them. But I also like Firefox.

Brave doesn't have popups unless you explicitly go out of your way to ask for them. Out of the Box, the web is quite a nice experience with Brave, which is not the case with any other browser I know of.

Brave does have ads in the browser's empty tab. I'm fine with that, if that's how they monetize it. I've even clicked on a few because they were interesting to me, which I haven't done in years on any other platform.

"Brave has ads" is a good thing. Please, allow me to explain :)

When you launch Firefox for the first time, you're already being setup and prepared to be served to Google. Your data and more are being primed. The address bar serves as a key-logger, and your inputs (before ever explicitly navigating anywhere) are being sent to Google.

Brave's ad notifications are opt-in; you have to turn them on. You decide their frequency. They're built on privacy. Users in a common region (e.g. United States) share a regional catalog. Your browser downloads a copy of this catalog, studies it locally, and decides when/if it should show any of the ads listed therein.

When a Brave Ad is displayed, 70% of the revenue goes into a digital wallet. When you see an ad in Firefox, there's a good chance you just lost a little bit of your data, and received nothing in return. In Brave, these rewards stack up, and can be passively or actively distributed to the sites and properties you appreciate most online.

While your arguments make sense, I find the continuous calling of other browsers as having keyloggers disingenuous. The only difference for Brave you've mentioned elsewhere in the thread is that it's opt-in by default instead of opt-out, which is fair.

Also, by this logic any text field that does something with your input before explicitly pressing a submit button is also a keylogger. That just doesn't make sense.

When an application sends your keystrokes (or an accidental/unintended paste) off to a third-party without your consent, I think it is fair to call that a keylogger.

> …by this logic any text field that does something with your input before explicitly pressing a submit button is also a keylogger.

I respectfully disagree, since there are many things a text field can do with input which doesn't violate the user privacy (e.g. local spell-checking, input sanitization).

My objection is with the automatic transmission of keystrokes to third-parties without the explicit consent of the user. Whether we agree to call this "key-logging" or not isn't as important.

We can both agree that this could result in the unintended sharing of very sensitive data—that's the point I'm trying to make. Cheers!

I have one remaining worry about Brave: If I choose to auto-contribute to sites, would it be possible to deanonymize me and derive what I look at from the BAT blockchain? E.g. if someone knows some of the sites I look at can they find out the rest?

These contributions aren't made on the public blockchain, so there is no way (not even for Brave) to know which site(s) you're supporting. Note also that (by default) the Brave Rewards wallet has no requirement for KYC. As such, there is no information about [you] connected to these transactions.

Thank you for your answers in this thread. There's a lot of misinformation about Brave on HN.

But does FF have an adblocker on iOS?

if Brave blockers are not enough you can get uBlock origin.

Brave and uBlock Origin use common lists. One area where uBO goes a step further than Brave is in cosmetic filtering. That said, we're going to be pushing some updates this year which bring Brave up to speed in this category.

@Jonathansampson will Brave adopt Manifest V3 (which will in principle remove some functionality from adblockers) from Chrome/Chromium ? Or do you plan to use your own solution ?

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