Let me save you a few seconds:
EDIT: It's funny how the votes switch between +5 and -5 every minute. I wanted to add that I did not say Firefox is a bad browser. I was just presenting an alternative.
Supporting Brave is supporting a future monoculture of the web with fancy browser reskins and no matter how good Braves added features are it doesn't change the fundamental problem but becomes a part of it, working for instead of against the good of users.
I'd much rather have some sponsored images than have my data being sold or turned into advertisements.
The article is perhaps poorly titled, and the modern age headline-skimmers will take it at face value. The article isn't calling for more extreme action or censorship... It's saying that deplatforming isn't the solution and what we should do is have transparency of advertisers & algorithms and support / fund research into studies on disinformation. I'm not sure how anyone can disagree with the substance of the article.
Ok, so no political issues... Still waiting on the privacy argument.
Also, Brave doesn't phone home as much as Firefox: https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-deemed-most-private-brow...
Everything I hear is just hollow words- "I just disagree with some of Mozilla's business decisions" / "it's more privacy-focused than Mozilla Firefox" / "it's less politically focused than Mozilla Firefox" / "Brave seems to be a little bit better in some aspects"
Even small things being better in one or another browser are still arguments if both browsers are good.
Also, for me, the company behind the browser matters too, especially since donations to mozilla barely go to the Firefox dev team.
I get that those are not good arguments for everybody, but just dismissing them just because you do not care about them that much seems a little bit harsh.
I'm not being harsh, you just haven't presented anything beyond empty words.
The panopticlick test (now renamed to coveryourtracks) is not a study, but a test you can actually do yourself with different browsers: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
Also, I presented an article from zdnet (backed by a study), about the phoning home of the different browsers: https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-deemed-most-private-brow...
And at this point I don't think it is worth it for me to invest more time arguing anymore, since you seemingly did not read my comments. There are plenty of other comments addressing all the "issues" you were talking about.
I will indeed test both browsers, if Brave is objectively better obviously I want to use it... However, I wish there was just stats on both browsers we could see side by side.
I did find this, https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/compare/brave...
Obviously biased because it's from Mozilla, however- I think this argument is moot. They're both better than what else is out there.
I find the claim that Firefox is less privacy focused than Brave a bit questionable. Brave certainly seems to have good and probably better defaults in that regard, but remember that Firefox is basically developed in collaboration with the Tor project and as a result has various significant (mainly non-default) privacy features architected in such as first party isolation, containers, and Tor-project-approved fingerprint resistance. Easily-disabled telemetry seems like a small hassle compared to such concrete privacy features which do not exist elsewhere.
And for example with something like first party isolation, it is unclear whether Brave would even want or be able to to maintain such a patch set on top of Chromium when it requires quite deep integration with the browser engine.
There’s also the manifest v3 stuff which will presumably end up in Brave at some point.
[1] https://2019.www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#...
Everyone in that thread knows what the article says. You’re just rehashing arguments here that they’ve already responded to there. And you’re not even addressing any of their points.
It's saying deplatforming is not going far enough to be the solution. And it advocates (among other things) "amplifying factual voices", which for a browser platform can mean only one thing - abandoning neutrality and privileging certain type of content - one that the gatekeepers agree with and thus call "factual" - while excluding other types of content, that they disagree with and thus call "misleading". To remove all doubt, they bring Facebook - which exercises clear viewpoint-driven editorial control over the content, even if unconsistently, haphazardly and ineffectually - as an example of what they're looking for. For a browser platform, advocating such approach means they plan to install themselves as the gatekeepers of the Internet, choosing what information you are and aren't allowed to see. While once currently can route easily around Facebook censorship, once browsers join the game, it won't be so easy. And of course, for anybody who values unrestricted access to information as much as privacy, it is the reason to avoid using platforms that advocate such principles.
It seems that this Mozilla article is too vague, open-ended, and short to be processed correctly. I personally interpreted the article differently than you did, which doesn't mean either of us interpreted it incorrectly.
If you equate being factual with abandoning neutrality, you're not being political nor apolitical. That's just anti-intellectualism.
> one that the gatekeepers agree with and thus call "factual"
And the fact you're putting the word factual in scare-quotes only emphasises this further.
Your comment then veers into some vague Facebook comparison which I frankly couldn't parse: I'm not sure if you're making out that Facebook is benign or not?
That's why the quotes are there - because it's literally what the quotes are for, to emphasize it's not my definition and not may decision - it's gatekeeper's, and I have no control and no input on it. If you think eating up pre-filtered and pre-digested information is "intellectualism", you definition of it is very different than mine.
> you're making out that Facebook is benign or not?
That's what using pre-digested information does for you - you become unable to parse things that aren't pre-digested. I will help you to make it clear - Facebook is evil, but the major point is not whether it's evil or not, but the role of information gatekeeper that it performs. Applied to a browser platform, this approach is dangerous and unacceptable to anybody who values their own intellect and is not scared of actually using it once in a while instead of outsourcing this function to a gatekeeper body.
Do you have a link to this definition that doesn't match your own? I'd be curious to see varying definitions of "factual"; it might make this issue easier to discuss.
> it's no longer my choice, the gatekeeper chooses for me what is "fact" and what is not, and I have no option of applying my own intellect and make my own choice - the choice is made for me, the conclusions are prepared in advance for me and the information is pre-filtered and pre-arranged to push me into accepting whatever vision of the world the gatekeeper privileges
You use two words here: "pre-filtered" and "pre-arranged"
Pre-filtering is not what's been proposed in the article. We've already covered that above, so lets not reiterate... any implied pre-filtering here is imagined.
Pre-arrangement is the world we live in and the very definition of the modern internet. What's been proposed is to introduce an improvement to how things are pre-arranged. I'd love to live in your utopia where we have the time to read everything in Google's index one-by-one and select which ones we value individually, but here in the real world, things are pre-arranged. This is about trying to find the best way to ensure that that pre-arrangement is not horribly skewed and corrupt.
Go to any "fact checking" site, they regularly "fact check" opinions and predictions about the future, which can't be "factual". Ask any of the current gatekeepers, which regularly block people expressing controversial opinions (about things like how to handle the beer bug or riots or any other current issue) for "misinformation" - completely ignoring the idea that opinions and facts are different things. The definition of "fact" in "fact checking" is basically "fact is something you don't get deplatformed for saying", more or less. Of course there's no better definition - why would they commit to any definition if "fact is what we say it is" works so well?
> Pre-filtering is not what's been proposed in the article
It is. That's what "amplifying factual voices" is - that is the only thing it could be - a filter. It doesn't have to be 100% block - but to be of any efficiency, it has to privilege one viewpoint and suppress another, and the choice will be made by the gatekeeper. It's not imagination - it's a basic requirement without which any mechanism like that would be useless. It has to make privileged opinion easy to reach, and excluded opinion hard to reach, otherwise there's no amplification.
> What's been proposed is to introduce an improvement to how things are pre-arranged
"Improvement" is a tricky word. When you define what is better for me, and "improve" things according to your definition, what happens if I disagree about what is better for me? Then your "improvements" are actually obstacles for me. But what if you're so sure you know what is better for me that you are determined to force it on me regardless of my opinion? That makes any such "improver" my enemy - they may think they are helping, but they are not, they are hurting.
> This is about trying to find the best way
When the "best way" is determined unilaterally by the oligarchy of the gatekeepers, it's usually the way that is best for them, not for me. I didn't ask for their help, and yet they are determined to force their "best way" onto me, whether I want it or not, whether I consider it best or not. This is a very common pattern that is repeated in human history again and again. Being on the receiving end of it is never fun, and rarely improves anything for the people being "helped" against their will.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-deemed-most-private-brow...
It isn't.
It's a zombie org that only exists because google needs to have a patsy to point to if there is ever an anti-trust case against it.
So much freedom.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3600206/mozilla-report...
[0] Yes, there's Lynx and some hobby browsers and yes, there are people who use them as dailys. But you can not reasonably expect anyone to work with them or get a non-technical person to live with those.
Google has more control over Mozilla than they do over organizations that have forked Chromium because about 90% of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google.
But this just isn’t true - just like Linux (which dominates the web server space) there are multiple parties working on and forking chromium - if google introduced something someone didn’t like they can maintain their own fork and plenty of people are.
Additionally there are other alternatives that enjoy 5x+ the market share of Firefox, most notably, safari/WebKit.
That's funny, because they did that literally six days ago: https://blog.chromium.org/2021/01/limiting-private-api-avail...
(I'm not sure whether Brave actually used Google account syncing, but Chromium surely did and this move clearly shows the dependence)
I've never personally used Brave -- my only interaction with it was when one of my profs in university invited a guy for a talk who then basically proceeded to shill Brave for half the talk. It left an awful taste in my mouth and continues to do so.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d...
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.
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.
---
Nothing here sounds unreasonable?
Considering that, in the Firefox article, this links to an article [1] by The New York Times lamenting with no self-awareness whatsoever that Facebook reversed its temporary signal-boosting of The New York Times... I'm really not comfortable with how "factual" is being defined.
Like, I'm all for researching new ways to share and promote information and fact-checking.
I just don't want them to stop at "We should all listen to what the mainstream center-left media says".
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/technology/facebook-rever...
I've seen a few people on HN objecting to it too but they didn't seem to have read the actual post.
There's nothing in the post that condones (or condemns) deplatforming. TL;DR of the article is: "Deplatforming happened, but here are 4 additional/different things that are needed that would be more impactful than deplatforming"