Mozilla promised us Tor integration, IPFS integration and more private browsing by default. Brave delivered it all.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Is that similar to First Party Isolation in Firefox?
I've tried this in Multi-Account Containers for Firefox and SessionBox in Chrome, and they're both pretty buggy, e.g. the console's username menu indicates I'm in account "A", but I'm seeing resources listed from account "B", or EC2 will work fine but clicking over to ECS prompt me to sign in again.
Does this effectively do the same as the 'Canvasblocker' extension does for Firefox?
Nonetheless I'm happy to hear about the improvements in Brave. I've actually shifted from Firefox to Brave since I'm expecting Webkit/Blink to become a 'Linux kernel' for web technologies and thus the web.
Keep up the great work! The only true remaining nitpicks I still have with Brave (after the introduction of Sync V2) are
1. iOS Brave being based on Firefox instead of Chrome iOS (I am aware of the technical cost of switching codebase)
2. Prevent browser close on last tab close
If those two existed Brave would be perfect for me.
[1] https://2019.www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#...
It was the only reason why I left chrome for firefox
Debatable how significant that is as a difference.
> For advanced users: You can also enable Containers without the Multi-Account Containers extension, by changing some preferences in the Configuration Editor (about:config page). Note that you will get a better user experience by installing the extension but, if you choose not to, you can set privacy.userContext.enabled to true, privacy.userContext.ui.enabled to true and privacy.userContext.longPressBehavior to 2 in about:config.
In my view it's nowhere near as nice as it is on Firefox, with site isolation (Facebook, Google, Twitter, reddit), temporary containers, and a myriad of other add-ons that improve managing them (keyboard shortcuts and transition rules are the two I use the most).
its more like Vivaldi's tab stacks or FF's Tree Tabs. With groups there are no inherent additional security mechanisms in place to prevent cross-group contamination/access. i.e., two different tab groups can access the same site data.
containers however are completely isolated from each other. i.e., two different containers have completely different sets of site data.
Are you saying the biggest advertiser on the planet likely doesn't want to add functionality that could potentially hinder tracking for advertising purposes...?
I am shocked, shocked and appalled. /s
I've wondered how send could be so slow but maybe something in my setup is just killing it. More than anything though, I would love an easy way to access my phone's sharing options from my laptop (perhaps an addon button that shows a list of app intents that can receive a url/page).
This is one thing I'm hoping to hack at when I get my Librem.
Never rode my bicycle quicker (public transport sucked). Fortunately my computer was on mute but still had to confess to watching certain content on a work machine to my boss. Nothing came of it but all the same.
Be careful. I even posted on r/TIFU at the time.
You can share links and files with any connected device. Use it as a remote control for music players and presentations. Ring your phone from your computer to find it and more.
(edit: add second paragraph and link)
PS: Just noticed there is a VPN feature https://userbase.kde.org/KDEConnect#Running_KDE_Connect_over... -- KDEconnect is really amazing.
I also remember a popular extension that could do this, PushBullets
Even if it’s off, you can see all your other device’s tabs at the bottom of the mobile safari tab switcher.
They have both recently put existing tabs in the omnibox suggestions, which is a huge quality of life improvement.
Works great, though I needed to whitelist some domains on PiHole for it to function.
Except that the mozilla 's site does not care about your privacy. Whether you use containers or not, they automatically get your identity from the browser, and then you cannot just be logged out.
"We need more than deplatforming"
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d...
noun: deplatforming; noun: de-platforming
the action or practice of preventing someone holding views regarded as unacceptable or offensive from contributing to a forum or debate, especially by blocking them on a particular website.
Blocking, silencing and removal does suppress speech.
You also suppress freedom of speech indirectly when you put someone in prison, so any crime punished by imprisonment seems to be considered reason enough to justify that as well.
Saying that freedom of speech can't ever be limited is a very ideological point of view, so far away from reality that I wouldn't consider it worth debating at all.
Now there is a valid argument to be made, how decisions to deplatform a person should be made and/or how such decisions can be appealed.
You’re confusing suppressing an individual’s ability to speak with the general notion of the free exchange of ideas. Arrest one person and free speech activists aren’t concerned, arrest everyone that says something, now they are concerned. The notion of trying to suppress topics is the problem, not the limitation of a particular individual.
> Saying that freedom of speech can't ever be limited is a very ideological point of view, so far away from reality that I wouldn't consider it worth debating at all.
You built a shitty strawman and then attacked it. Bravo. If you actually want to debate people who advocate free speech, the concern is when speech is suppressed because of the contents of the speech. Not because the person is dead, in prison, in a coma, or some other contrived crap.
I may just be my misunderstanding. I get the feeling in these discussions, that people think things like deplatforming, etc. are generally and always wrong and people/institutions speaking about it (such as Mozilla) are bad. If that is considered a strawman, then I am glad.
> Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.
> Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.
> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation. [link to post on changing Facebook's timeline algorithm]
> Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
The first two are no-brainers. The third is alright, but I doubt re-weighting Facebook's timeline algorithm is going to put the genie back in the bottle. The fourth is useful but pretty generic at "do research on things".
"Changing these dangerous dynamics requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms. Additional precise and specific actions must also be taken"
Note: More than. Additional. Also.
> But as reprehensible as the actions of Donald Trump are, the rampant use of the internet to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy is about more than any one personality. Donald Trump is certainly not the first politician to exploit the architecture of the internet in this way, and he won’t be the last. We need solutions that don’t start after untold damage has been done.
And then lists several possible solutions that seem quite reasonable, and we should for sure push for the first two.
PS to anyone reading this exchange, at this point our comments are longer than the original blog post, you might as well just read the original instead of our out-of-order commentary. :)
> Changing these dangerous dynamics...
The "these dynamics" Mitchell speaks about are, the rampant use of the internet to:
1. Foment violence and hate.
2. Reinforce white supremacy.
3. Politicians (or anyone playing politics, really) exploiting the architecture of the internet to spread lies / hate / what-have-you.
> temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors
These, presumably, include:
1. Terrorists organizations like the Proud Boys.
2. Divisive, regressive, repressive figures like Donald Trump.
3. Institutions hell-bent on inciting hate, spreading disinformation, facilitating abuse, inculcating disharmony, encouraging violence, sowing mistrust, aiding conspiracies...
> Additional precise and specific actions must also be taken
Absolutely.
I see this policy stance as being no different to wanting the education system to not purport Racism; this isn't curtailing freedom of speech or any other freedom. It is purely an exercise in needing to do more than just deplatforming Racists: Not actively seek to create new ones!
It’s horrifying that they think this is even possible. Some of the worst political divides are over which set of facts to emphasize (children in cages vs children separated from traffickers) or are speculation on ongoing events (Russian pee tape, Trump is a Russian asset, Russia stole the election, etc).
“Amplify factual voices” just sounds like more echo chamber bullshit where you follow your politically aligned fact sources like Twitter.
No, it doesn't. Facts, which are a subset of universal truths, need to clearly outweigh falsehood. For example, you'd not find schools teach conspiracy theories like "Earth is flat", or "Global Warming is a hoax" for a reason. Fringe theories that rely on absurd reasoning and have no basis in actual facts must be curtailed, and under no circumstances do those theories deserve any amplication platform, definitely not one which operates at the scale like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter.
I realise that what's a universal fact today needn't be a fact tomorrow, but we have got substantially better scientific and socio-political tools to verify and come to conclusions one way or other for many topics. It is only prudent to let fringe theories be fringe and not amplify them for more eyeballs and revenue.
Consuming nonsense does affect real people and has real world consequences.
Yes, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that both sides of the political spectrum base a bunch of bullshit based on sets of facts they deem important.
There is no set of facts that indicates wealth should be taxed or corporate rates should be cut. Each side trots out “facts” supporting their view but the conclusions are completely different.
This is great, silencing disinformation... or maybe not.
On one march friday, facebook would silence the "conspiracy theorists" claiming you should wear a mask, because our 'experts' (and american too, and WHO and many others) said, that wearing a mask for covid is useless.
Then, on the next day, our government mandated masks and gloves in every indoor location (stores,...), and facebook would silence the people claiming masks are useless.
“We work to ensure the internet remains a public resource that is open and accessible to all.”
I guess by “all” they mean only people with political opinions they support.
Unfortunately part of making things "open and accessible to all" means revoking access to people who would weaponize the internet to contradict those goals.
A tolerant society means no tolerance for terrorists.
If we deplatformed every “violent thug” that did something people didn’t like, you would have a fraction of the rights you have today.
This is not about shutting down all controversial discourse. It is about "defend[ing] a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant". Surpression shall only happen if there is no other way to defend a tolerant society cause the intolerant are working with (massiv, wide spread) violence.
I don't know who is in the position to decide when that point has come. But one could argue that people invading the capitol is that point.(I don't think so)
What I am really worried about, is that it seems like tech companies will have to make those decisions. In the end there will be individual persons, who make that decisons and that is very dangerous.
Look, an "Anti soviet warrior", "on the road to peace" - https://www.businessinsider.com/1993-independent-article-abo...
Google and Facebook should host whichever legal content they'd like, and we should build alternative systems that give us control over how we spend our attention and share our influence.
But: There is noone else, who is able to control the growing beast of social networks that they created. And in parts they can not control it either. There are too many languages used, that no employee or AI understands.
In the end we are darned to watch and hope they make the correct decisions.
Basically it's about whether you can get them to agree with both of the following statements:
1) X-ism should not exist. 2) X-ists have a fundamental right to exist.
Point number one is perfectly reasonable as should be point two. The really scary authoritarians flat out deny point number two, but most people will start equivocating or scream at you because you don't want to punch X-ists.
This is a growing problem that society needs to find a solution to quickly. Denial of point 2 leads to mass murder of people for thought crime. Still some people seem okay with this.
And I just want to point out before I get tons of hate that it's perfectly acceptable to give X-ists consequences for their _actions_. Not their private thoughts.
You're exaggerating. We don't have a real problem with people who want to mass murder people for being X-ists. It's easy to observe the inverse, though.
Ex CEO of Mozilla and current CEO of Brave has been removed from Mozilla for donating his private money to some conservative same-sex marriage organisation.
You can't be taken seriously as an advocate for a tolerant and accessible non-profit when you spend your salary denying people the right to get married.
"But we should claim the right to suppress them (intolerant philosophies) if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
How relevant to our age... and this appears in a treatise by philosopher Karl Popper from 1945, who attributed the paradox to Plato's defense of "benevolent despotism"... i.e. the discussion is as old as civilisation itself!
The question is: When do we reach the point where the defence starts to break?
You could argue that that point is reached when terrorists storm the capitol.
I don't know if we reached that point already. What I do know: If we wait for too long, we reach a state of no return.
But how do you know who is a 'freedom fighter' and who is a 'terrorist' then? Do you let google and facebook decide?
Look, an "Anti soviet warrior", "on the road to peace" - https://www.businessinsider.com/1993-independent-article-abo...
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
And it could as well be written yesterday:
"The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness."
"The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice."
"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means."
"1940 it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any technical crime. We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible quisling to go free. To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage. The general failure to see this was a bad symptom, though it is true that the agitation against Mosley’s release was partly factitious and partly a rationalisation of other discontents. But how much of the present slide towards Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the ‘anti-Fascism’ of the past ten years and the unscrupulousness it has entailed?"
(Note that the guy writing all this was a socialist who volunteered to go and literally shoot at - and be shot by - actual Fascists in the Spanish Civil War less than 10 years earlier.)
You are just misinterpreting what that quote says. They think that the internet should remain a public resource that is open and accessible to all. They don't think that everything on the internet should be a public resource that is open and accessible to all as you are implying.
Do you really think that everything on the internet should be a public resource and accessible to all, even your email, bank accounts, etc?
I guess we should simply ignore these political endorsements and only take the functional utility into account when choosing browsers.
Mozilla has something like a $200M pa income (from Google alone). I wonder how that compares with Brave's income.
If you're talking about typical user of the average web browser, they care about IPFS as much as they care about the rendering engine - i.e. not at all.
It would be cool to see IPFS integrated and enabled by default on all browsers. I doubt Google would ever take the leap, but maybe Mozilla would. I also have doubt that Microsoft would but they would be more willing than Google. Anyways, I hope this can happen before Mozilla's market share shrinks more.
I would love to hear more about your privacy concerns; we have excised quite a bit from Chromium. You can read about those changes [on GitHub](https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...). We also audit our network activity to make sure nothing ever slips out. You can read about our [desktop](https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff...) and [iOS](https://brave.com/ios-browser-first-run/) audits on our blog.
Perhaps more of interest would be an independent, third-party review and comparison. Trinity College's School of Computer Science and Statistics did a comparative review of Chrome, Brave, Edge, Firefox, Yandex, and Safari. They found that Brave was the "most private" in terms of phoning home. You can [read their review online](https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf).
Always happy to discuss any specific concerns you may have.
That isn’t really applicable here though. That’s kinda like claiming we should be against Linux because it runs all the web servers. There is a difference between centralization and standardization.
I don't think the linux comparison makes any sense for this situation. Linux has very little to do with the web experience, where the rendering engine is the core of it. Linus's ability to change world wide web standards on a whim is close to non existent. Google is literally replacing the WWW network stack (a good change mind you, but nonetheless demonstrates the level of power)
Brave takes an existing browser (Chromium) and adds some extra features to the UI and networking stack.
Modern web browsers are incredibly complex pieces of software. The overwhelming majority of code in Brave's repository is shared with Chromium. What Brave's developers do and what Mozilla's developers do are not comparable.
None of the reasons really sheds a good like on Mozilla.
Hopefully uptake by non-mainstream browsers like Brave will increase the exposure, attract developers, increase the network and get us closer to having IPFS, Hypercore or some other protocol available to the mainstream, whether that be in Firefox or by some other means.
Besides, you could argue that browsers have added plenty of fad technologies over the past few years, DRM comes to mind.
TIL about hypercore! Looks like an interesting concept based on append-only logs. It reminds me of this work being done at VMware: https://github.com/vmware/node-replication
I don't think that is ever going to happen.
I think this is closer to being true, as someone who forks ff and has had to remove/add stuff and compile it myself for almost 5 years now.
I'm tempted to start working on adding native ipfs support for myself in netwerk/protocol/ipfs…
Do you think Mozilla will ever switch to chromium? It is the linux of the web - would be nice if they could finally focus and stop dressing up their dead horse.
I don't think so. If they did, there wouldn't be much incentive for using Firefox.
> It is the linux of the web - would be nice if they could finally focus and stop dressing up their dead horse.
And what would they be focusing on exactly?
Ipfs for one
Such hyperbole.
It was easy for Apple to deliver Safari, when biggest work was done by Konqueror team...
It took years of shipping Chrome before Google actually forked Blink.
https://blog.bitergia.com/2013/02/06/report-on-the-activity-...
Thank you for the support!
Half my extensions are still broken on Firefox Android. I've been using Firefox desktop on my PinePhone off-and-on and not only do all of my extensions work, but it's snappy and has a superior UX. I can actually access and manage my bookmarks with a sane interface.
And yet even desktop is sullied. Each major version tries to hide my bookmarks, or something equally egregious, and Mozilla frequently abuses my trust by promoting products and services through privileged channels.
It's getting hard to justify using Firefox.
Interesting. When Mozilla promise this, and what sort of time frame were they talking about?
Presumably "more private browsing" has been delivered somewhat already in Firefox?
They even started a bunch of Tor nodes to collect some metrics. It looks like they are removing their blog posts about it
https://blog.mozilla.org/it/2015/01/28/deploying-tor-relays/
https://web.archive.org/web/20150722100146/https://blog.mozi...
> Our primary goal is to un-fork the Tor Browser
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1173199#c31
They were very vocal about how web is broken, needs more Tor and IPFS for everything to allow more free speech for disadvantage. Today they promote unregulated censorship, banning and shadow-banning public channels. You will find many posts about it between 2014 and 2018.
Focus on Brave. You have nothing to do with Mozilla.
Boycott Firefox, Switch to Brave, my browser had Bittorrent support 16 years ago
In 2005, Elinks browser had built-in Torrent support. In 2021, Firefox still does not have built-in Torrent support. In 2021, Brave has built-in Torrent support.
Why Firefox has not focussed on decentralisation and uncensorability for the last 16 years?
Maybe because they work for their grand masters (Google and other GAFAMs) who want power, and don't want decentralization?
I would've embraced brave had it written its own browser engine or simply picked something non-google.