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Comment by killingtime74 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think the customer cares as long as you can use it

The type of people who are into decentralizing the internet are also usually against a single company (google) controlling the rendering engine of most users.

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.

> against a single company (google) controlling the rendering engine of most users

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.

There is a difference, and all the html rendering code being written by google is centralization not 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)

Linux isn't controlled by an advertising company.

Neither can an open source project be controlled by a single entity

Chromium is.

I am that person. I moved away from Brave because its still chrome/chromium based. I am also not confident in their "blockchain" advertising model and don't trust they are actually any less private with my data than chrome/chromium.

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.

You don't have to participate in the advertising bits of Brave; those are optional. But, they're a privacy-centric way to generate rewards which can be passively contributed to your favorite sites, sustaining their content creation.

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.

Thanks for this clarification. I use Brave less because I am actually afraid to install extensions, because addition phoning to Google. Or how does Brave handle that?

Customers caring about IPFS support are also the ones caring about browser engine monoculture.

The evidence is in, and I'm sure you're right about the typical users. But the discriminating ones know better. The difference is how much it's using you.

Some of us care.

Those that care enough about privacy to use TOR and IPFS likely care very much about using a browser made by Google. De-googling Chrome is like removing telemetry from Windows 10 over installing and running Linux: For some it's great while others wont touch it no matter how much work is put into making it "safe" (and IMHO Chrome variants are at most "safe").

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