Goodbye Brave
arunmozhi.in
arunmozhi.in
Also, if you haven't tried Firefox since the quantum days come back and give it another try.
You are not being attacked by parent. Parent is merely pointing out the difference so other users are aware of it. You could just thank them for the clarification and move on.
And was approved and even pinned.
Firefox is the top choice for me. I recommend it properly and not just for the sake of supporting Firefox. That said, please support Firefox. We should not be allowing Big Tech behemoths from taking away the window into the internet.
If I were to complain to Firefox team - please stop adding shit, I don’t want Pocket, I don’t want anything but just the way it currently is. Just allow us to browse. Fast.
Perhaps Chrome shows more intermittent reflows so you observe more of the page rendering as it's taking place? Can you describe it in more detail? I presume Firefox is doing something right but what might it be?
I am on a pretty powerful Mac and it's exactly the opposite, sadly. Firefox just... stutters. When downloading pages, when interacting with pages, it's there and it's super annoying.
Chrome in the meantime is just absolutely instant no matter what I do.
Doesn't help me wanting to stick with Firefox. :(
The type of ads I strongly dislike for reasons beyond like, breaking pages and tracking, are ones that repeatedly show for something which I already know exists in order to promote a brand.
If someone wants to put up an ad for “we make any bronze parts”, well, I looked to see if any of them were cheap enough to get as a gag (none of them were, but still).
If a company wants to remind me over and over of their company name that everyone is already familiar with, that is irritating.
You see a potential for dissatisfaction, I see a potential for opportunity.
Also, allocating time for “searching for products that I don’t know of but which seems like they might exist, which would improve things” seems, slow an inefficient?
Like, I previously had thought “it is bad that printers basically all have drm-ish ink cartridges.” When I saw an ad for a printer which instead had refillable ink tanks, I regarded that as an improvement. (As it happened the printer had some unfortunate bugs where it semi-frequently needs to be forcibly rebooted by unplugging it, but it is otherwise seems to work nice.)
I don’t see how this is not a benefit? It isn’t like I otherwise wouldn’t be using a printer, or like it increased average rate of printer purchasing non-negligibly . It mostly just changed which printer got purchased.
Like, I suppose if every time I thought “I wish there was a product such the [x]”, I put a description of that into a web form (in terms of keywords I guess?) and then when a product was released, the company releasing the product could send info to the company running the website demonstrating the novel properties, and then the website could notify all the people whose descriptions appeared to match, and that could be an alternative to ads?
I really do not buy many things, if your concern is that ads would compel me to buy too many things, in like, a consumerist way.
(Actually, the example with the printer was when I was living with my parents, so it was actually my dad who bought the printer after I pointed out it existed, and after he evaluated the price taking the ink into account.)
It is a bit confusing to be honest. There seems to be something very upsetting happening but exactly what is causing that response I can't pick out.
And it isn't billions, you need to normalise by audience size. Any company spending billions to influence my behaviour is bankrupt, I don't have enough money for them to make that back.
But one of those things would get a broadly supported "aw, how wholesome!" from the crowd. The other appears to get actual, honest, anger. It is unclear to me why the difference in responses is so large.
Everything a person encounters influences them, and generally people are comfortable with good and bad influences in their lives. The fact that corporations are motivated to sell things doesn't even mean their influence is bad. The fact that I bought a rice cooker because it was being advertised to me doesn't change the fact that I am better off owning the rice cooker. I bought it because it improves my life. So why the hate on ads?
In many ways this is what trade magazines are/were, but the absence of a general market for such generalised interest is so absent its the kind of witness evidence that is deafening in its silence.
The problems are the power Facebook and Google have over the ad market, that increases ad costs for businesses by a lot (I've read, one third, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's more). But online ads are a lifeline for small businesses. Regulate the big players, and keep the ads flowing. Some people here want ads to be abolished, but you'd just strengthen existing brands, i.e. huge multinationals. That's all it would achieve.
That's why real issue with Brave, frankly. I still use Brave as my default browser because it's the only one that allows me to allow all ads by default, and only turn on Brave Shields for specific websites. Even uBlock Origin deprecated their default-allow, and it now breaks many websites completely if you try it. But I don't like "anti-ad" sentiment.
Sad state of affairs. But people who oppose Big Tech domination, and also want ads abolished, don't realize that doing so would prevent millions of small businesses from getting off the ground. Chrome's killing the open web, but might be saving the "open economy" by trying to disincentivize adblocking (by blocking "annoying ads" by default, and implementing ManifestV3). It's a mess.
Let's take Brave for example. Open home page of brave.com and you get:
"The best privacy online
Browse privately. Search privately. And ditch Big Tech."
And a nice screenshot.
The problem is this is not what Brave works/looks like when you open it the first time.
By their own research [1], on your first run Brave will immediately "phone home" 80(!) times. The original post discussed here talks about mundane features like installing an extension not working without contacting their servers about it.
Then, the user is immediately welcomed by ads for several crypto services right there in the browser on the right hand side (curiously hidden on their home page screenshot). I guess that:
"Browser that shares your private information with us and shows you ads you do not really want" would not fly well as a tagline.
Having this behavior turned on by default is where user frustration begins and is later then just amplified by even worse behavior, again incentivized by the fact that the business model is simply dependent on ads, like the other big tech.
once you understand not desiring one, you can understand not wanting the rest, since they're all fundamentally the same thing.
I am entirely with you on not wishing any ads at all, anywhere. I just think that it's not realistic to remove ads entirely on the open web today.
This should not be an excuse for the way ads are being run today. It is fundamentally broken. Incentives and attributions should be changed.
Firstly, I'd urge everyone to deny the initial premise. The right or desire to be free of or avoid advertising has nothing inherently to do with the act of paying money or being able to amass or claim property rights over things. That's not why i hate junk mail. That's not why I don't want to be proselytised to. That's not why i shouldn't have to view propoganda. Of course, the addition of private property rights issues is one more barrier that advertising would have to overcome in order to be deemed acceptable, but on the contrary, i think a better premise is to start with WHY or WHEN advertising should be allowed, given that it is almost universally loathed or objected to. I wouldn't want to live in a world where people are subjected to advertising because they haven't payed for things or own things or content. That's dystopian.
At the very least, I think people should have the ability to say no, and for that desire to be respected and not interferred with. I think there's good grounds for advertising, or at least many types of advertising, to not be allowed in many public areas or via many public resources. I have no problems with companies or organisations not delivering material or allowing access to general consumer goods as a consequence of saying no to advertising, but that's different to users saying "no i don't want ads and I don't want to be tracked" and having the companies go "but I'm gonna do it anyway and you shouldn't be ad blocking".
Finally, I always come back to what the web is, or at least what it was, in that I deny the underlying unspoken premise that the web is there to run business models or pay money for content to be put on it. If businesses can make it on the web, good for them. But if they can't, the web is more important than business.
To be clear, the internet and web and content came first, then the businesses arrived and co-opted it for their purposes. Now the narrative is trying to be rewritten so that you can't possibly let people consume material on the web for free without people paying for it via advertising.
So let me be clear: I pay for my computer. I pay for the bandwidth of my ISP. This allows me access to a public network of computers where I can make requests to other computers on the network to send me information. People can also pay to put content up on that network to be requested by others, but no one forces them to do so, AND, no one forces them to answer my computer's request for content. When i use an ad-blocker, the main activity is for me to determine client-side that there are certain computers I don't want to talk to, and certain content I don't want to see. In an ideal world I wouldn't be tracked also, but that's just an additional abuse or manipulation of the system.
Several years after this whole system had been operating just fine, companies arrived and started trying to make money, and today we have a feigned victim-complex retcon narrative about how people not paying for content should view ads.
On the contrary, if companies do not want me viewing their content: don't put it up on a public open network that's publicly searchable, publicly addressable, and that responds to my requests for that content. Put it behind a paywall, put it behind authorisation, put it on your own intranet or network.
Keep the open web as the web. Keep it open. Keep it in good faith and respect user's explicit preferences. The hosting computer decides what content it wants to make available and who it wants to talk to. And my computer decides who it wants to talk to and what content it wants to see.
And in an ideal world, advertising should be delegated to the bare minimum of places because the starting assumption should be that most users, rationally, justifiably, and understandably, don't want it.
You have just normalized this absurdity because it’s been around for so long. Ads are terrible for people’s mental health, because the best way to sell a product is to create a need for it. In other words, by making you feel incomplete and insufficient.
Ad-funded business models make it impossible for the people to "vote with their wallets", so all of the good things about any kind of market dynamics are removed, and we are left only with its disadvantages.
- It treats everyone as "eyeballs", removing any need for a content producer to care about quality. As long as it generates clicks it goes. It has turned even the most reputable of media channels into tabloids.
- By having no regard for quality, it's a tragedy of the commons.
- By removing any chance of nuance, it makes all of the audience to be bucketed into "pass/filter" algorithms, and the only concern is to make sure that the content is so bland and innocuous that no one within their bubble reach can complain about it.
- It has taken mass-consumerism and general public conformity to 11.
- Big Tech turn all of that crap into profit no matter what.
- It is feeding and coddling the coming and current generation of techies into lame drones with no imagination and will to affect actual change. It's creating an army of people who think that the status quo is good.
I don't think it is too much of a stretch to think of how the "ad supported" content economy is correlated with the increased polarization of people, the growing tribal divide and the isolation of individuals. I honestly think that we should be treating the majority of "ad supported" websites as heavy polluters of our minds and our societies.
If you want to do ads online, here are the initial rules of engagement: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html
It might have something to do with the LE intermediate root rotation - Chrome variants and Firefox are happy with the chain, but Safari's CA trust store may not have the new intermediate CA in place.
I'll upgrade the system over the holidays in any case, and the new lighttpd finally has native support for CA chain inclusions. That should make all the clients happy again.
AB+ "acceptable ads" exists to solicit bribes from websites to display their ads.
> AB+ "acceptable ads" exists to solicit bribes from websites to display their ads.
Surely you admit that the "acceptable" criteria are at least directionally correct? So even if you find the model icky, it's also "improving" the overall quality of ads (i.e. making them less intrusive/obnoxious/annoying)?
Given the shortcomings of AB+, what do you think is a better way of (1) defining acceptable ad standards; (2) generating enough revenue as an organization to build/maintain ad whitelists? Genuine questions to provoke discussion :)
Irrelevant. I (and 99% of other users) spend the majority of my time on the internet on websites large enough to meet the threshold.
> technically an independent entity gets to determine what's "acceptable"
Skimming the first page of that "independent" committee's bylaws: they self describe as being "hosted by eeyeo" (the developer of AB+).
> So even if you find the model icky, it's also "improving" the overall quality of ads (i.e. making them less intrusive/obnoxious/annoying)?
I don't care about via what mechanism advertisers improve their ads - that is their job to worry about not mine.
> what do you think is a better way of defining acceptable ad standards
I, the user, choose what is acceptable in my browser, not a for-profit company that benefits from bribes to whitelist ads. Believe it or not I do whitelist some websites with what I consider acceptable ads, but I do not and will never use an ad whitelist.
> generating enough revenue as an organization to build/maintain ad whitelists
Ad whitelists that generate revenue essentially always have a conflict of interest.
Web advertising's abysmal reputation isn't some freak accident. Websites and advertisers should work together to create actually acceptable ads rather than trying to bribe adblockers and hope users don't notice.
Is advertising a valid business model? For some apps and services perhaps, but it's not the only option and in many cases serves the business and users poorly. I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the best products I've used recently have actually put some thought into how to monetize.
I'm not sure the author has checked the same for the alternatives he mentions. The closed source nature of Vivaldi (their tarballs only contain their copy of Chromium) makes it a weird recommendation, in any case.
in fact, I'll go so far as to say that's exactly what most proper ad-blockers are: user implemented acceptable ads. if the user wants to view ads, they have it in their power to whitelist a site or domain.
perhaps a business could be made where you provide a list of acceptable ads and people can pay money to view them. on the one hand, I think that's a more reasonable business model than the one you've suggested, as at least it aligns the user's interest with their own explicit actions.
of course, there is the little problem that such a business model would probably never work, because fundamentally, most people don't want ads. they tolerate them because they don't know they could have a choice otherwise...
Sure it's nothing new that companies try to show you ads. But in the same spirit I always turned down volume or switched channel on TV when ads were on. This was in the past. These days I don't even bother watching channels with ads.
I personally would not be sad if the whole ad industry became less significant and we had more paid services. They also tend to be longer-lasting than many ad-sponsored services. Also I am the customer and can demand certain things, whereas with a free service I can demand nothing and I am not the customer.
As a student I made a few small Android games with ads. They brought in a few hundred bucks. Then I was blocked by Admob for whatever reason. At this point I learned what a crooked business this is and I swore that I will never make an ad-sponsored app again. If I have an idea for a product/service that will only work in that setting it will not even go on my list.
Also, this very site has no ads. Neither does wikipedia. Nor librivox, or Project Gutemberg...
For example when I share this link to my favorite ad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q49fDwqwK5E
and you decide to check it out, it satisfies the above criteria.
And by "ads that I accept" I mean "ads that I can turn off".
While I suppose Brave with its integrated ad blocking is going to keep it working, I believe it will be wildly unsustainable for Chromium based browsers to keep the V2 APIs for extensions amidst the torrent of upstream changes coming from Chromium. So the only functioning blockers these browsers are probably going to have are built in ones - and only if they care enough.
1. I haven't followed Ghostery, AdBlock+ devs since I started using Brave. Sad to learn of their status. I will look at uBlock Origin. 2. Firefox was a memory and CPU hog and I always usef it as a test browser or a secondary browser, until Brave. Then I started using Chrome as secondary and dropped Firefox. I will give Firefox another try. Thanks again.
I have two problems with that. Firstly on Windows Firefox uses the Control key, so now I have to remember a different shortcut for my work PC vs my gaming PC. Secondly I run i3wm and alt is my mod key.
Out of curiosity, why do you use alt instead of super?
Ghostery is not selling user data.
Let me point out a few facts:
All browser-side code is open source https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-extension and https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-dnr-extension.
Yes, Ghostery has a subscription based business model and that another reason to great care in protecting users privacy. Take a look on how we use blind tokens to authenticate subscribed users while searching on glowstery.com https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-search-extension (notice that even when you are a subscribed user there is no session cookie so queries cannot be linked).
Hope this sheds some light on the accusation. If that’s not enough, I do sincerely recommend uBlock Origin or AdGuard on Apple’s platform.
Ohhhh, let me too!
"Ghostery makes money by tracking the trackers while blocking them and selling data about third party trackers, which it calls Ghostrank."
"Ghostery calls it Consumer Messaging Platform, which allows the company to message users directly in the web browser. According to Ghostery, it will be used for product announcements and promotions. What makes this problematic is that it is enabled by default."
You aren't fooling anyone.
Indirectly relevant - It is not the client source code that is ever the issue. It is the server side code and the business model that matters.
Client can be even closed source, if it is zero-telemetry. There is no danger for user privacy there.
But if the client is not zero-telemetry, and is phoning home, at the very least private information like IP address will be transferred and we have no way of knowing what is done with it.
The original post talks exactly about the problem with dependency on the server side which for a browser (and an ad blocker for that matter ) should ideally be zero with the option to opt-in for things like updates.
I have a PiHole with a fairly huge block list (~1.2M entries) and uBlock Origin and I keep wondering if I stay only with them, will it be enough?
> To benefit from uBlock Origin's higher efficiency, it's advised that you don't use other content blockers at the same time (such as Adblock Plus, AdBlock). uBlock Origin will do as well or better than most popular ad blockers. Other blockers can also prevent uBlock Origin's privacy or anti-blocker-defusing features from working properly.
Personally, I use Firefox out of principle.
Google has something to do why the Android Firefox is crippled: before Firefox 68 was released, the Google reviewers actually rejected it owing to the addons system. (Yes, I know Kiwi browser exists. I don't understand the reviewers' logic but here we are.) Fortunately, FF 68 is an ESR release and was able to stop-gap the issue by releasing security updates (which aren't blocked by Google). Unfortunately, this is the reason Mozilla is only shipping "recommended addons": Mozilla has individually reviewed it because Google will penalise Mozilla if there's a malicious addon on their store. (Note that I won't shield Mozilla on the "Daylight" updates: I hope that they just continue Fennec rather than they rewrite it but personally it's fine.)
Without it we loose the standard part of the whole web, and it will be “whatever chrome does is the standard”.
* Firefox main income is the competitor, Google
* Firefox sent telemetry to Google servers after first start
So am I, it doesn't feet in my degoogled life.
Seeing the market share of Desktop Linux I'd hazard a guess that those users are in the majority.
Edit: tried to download debian package to check their patches, but failed: https://packages.debian.org/sid/firefox
So proofs are welcoming.
Honestly, i havnt missed it all. Firefox on mobile is awesome - plugins work! Plus, no longer does google know where i am anymore. Its ability to track and suggest ads to me is pathetic.
i doubt it - they probably know just as much from extrapolation off other data points, even if the browser data point is gone.
Is this some kind of patented behavior that Mozilla is afraid to implement?
"pull down to refresh" is patented by Twitter:
https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/21/4350826/twitter-pull-to-r...
And Firefox implements the feature in Nightly (this is an old thread, so perhaps it has already landed in mainline) :
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/nzfcak/why_do_we_n...
(I find it a little obnoxious actually, as I frequently accidentally hit it trying to scroll back up)
Only certain ones from their recommended program. Add-on support on mobile is still very limited from what it could be.
> "Arunmozhi is a freelance programmer and an open-source enthusiast."
I'm surprised, shocked and dumfounded that Firefox is not even mentioned while Vivaldi and Chromium are being considered. For someone who put up with Brave for years and its other issues, it really seems strange that Firefox is not in consideration.
This is "self eating snake" type situation. Many webdevs ignore Firefox because of its market share and this yields worse support. People don't like "worse support" and use it as argument (excuse) for using Chrome.
However I've only noticed problems in Firefox with various "chrome experiments" and WebGL performance. Oh and sometimes it's hanging and taking too long to load some source maps on large projects.
There's no reason for him not to consider Firefox, since installing extensions reliably led him to become exasperated with Brave relying on backend servers, which then led himto the decision to stop using Brave. So since most if not all of the extensions he's looking for are very likely either ported to Firefox, or have (often better) equivalents, why not switch?
I'm not trying to be pedantic, just using the opportunity to promote switching to Firefox, because it's great :) and there are less bumps on the road than people make out.
When I switched back to Firefox after quantum hit, I actually discovered I didn't even need a few of the extensions I needed in Chrome.
> I am thinking of going back to [Chromium] with the usual extensions like Ghostery, AdBlock+
> [Brave's] amazing ad-blocking and tracker protection
If you just need an adblocker, sure. At this point everone should have heard of uBlock Origin.
- Doesn't come with a built-in ad blocker, so have to install a 3rd party plugin (I don't want to install any extension into my browsers) - Mozilla upper management have been making terrible decisions for the last 5+ years. By not using Firefox I'm sending a message (I used to give $$ to Mozilla) - Firefox keeps having features removed (RSS, FTP, etc), and gimping the UI.
It's not much to ask to have these 3 things improved, at which point I'd move back to Firefox from Brave.
Sampson (Brave Team)
Brave proxies Google endpoints to prevent users from making unintended contact with Google.
Unsatisfied, I checked the Reddit sub the next day, and saw tons of complaints. Apparently if the Brave backend is down, it won't even launch.
This is a huge problem that makes me entirely skeptical of not only the browser, but that anyone in charge has any idea of what they are doing. Currently testing alternatives...
Sampson (Brave Team)
Is there a link or can you share more? Why would a DST bug prevent an app from opening at all?
In our case, we had a bit of code that aimed to measure the time until midnight/tomorrow. But when clocks change at midnight (jumping forward or backward), you can wind up with days that appear to be longer than 24 hours in length. And when a day is more than ~24hr in length, you wind up with unexpected answers to seemingly simple math equations.
A bit of logic, responsible for setting up a timer, wound up scheduling numerous timers when our 'How long until tomorrow' code began returning negative numbers. That set of unintended timers locked-up the application itself. You can see our issue for the behavior here: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/11030.
For 10 minutes of anxiety, check out 'The Problem of Time & Timezones' from Tom Scott of Computerphile: https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY. It's a fantastic summary of the issues programmers face when dealing with time :)
Sampson (Brave Team)
I apologize for my hasty comments. Based on the Reddit thread I had seen, it seemed most people were blaming a down server - and to a user, that's what it -felt- like too, seeing as there wasn't an app update or anything recent. I'm thrilled to hear that wasn't the case, and appreciate the explanation. Sounds like we're staying with Brave then!
Sampson (Brave Team)
I also don't sign up for sync, or password manager, or any of that stuff as I don't trust it enough on any browser.
Several months into Brave and I have no urge to turn back yet.
Sampson (Brave Team)
You're installing an extension from a web store. Of course it doesn't work if there is a problem with the backend servers. Where do you expect to get the extension from?
So installing the extension worked in Chrome, but not in Brave, because they had some backend problems, while the installing of an extension should not need the Brave servers at all.
Sampson (Brave Team)
Is the point that there should be a separate source of extension packages or something?
Surely, privacy minded people will find a way around those, but out of the box ipv6 is a privacy regression for the reasons listed above
Use random addresses, no further words needed. If you are actually that paranoid, feel free to use stateless translation to change the host part of the IP.
>Also, the geo-location accuracy using ipv4 is at the level of a city. With ipv6 you can get to a geolocation accuracy of a building block and confidently target individual devices within ones home network since they will use
Unless your ISP is announcing unique /48s of individual building block, no. If your home router gets a static IPv4 address, the same problem prevails, not relevant.
>Surely, privacy minded people will find a way around those, but out of the box ipv6 is a privacy regression for the reasons listed above
Out of the box IPv6 offers the same privacy regressions as the original IPv4 before we fucked it to high hell. NAPT is a royal pain for any P2P protocol.
There are people who already use ipv6 on their routers/pcs/mobiles and they don't even know it.
Updating one machine manually is okay, multiple machine - no.
Many thanks to the author for diligently assisting with this investigation.
Sampson (Brave Team)
If I could just install unblock origin or find system wide adblocker then I would use that instead
But it seems ad blocking is always mentioned as a feature.
Might I recommend trying piHole at the intake into your homes.
Instead of relying on the application doing filtering, simply do it for the whole network (yes, caveats apply).
Then constant bugs when paying out BAT rewards, causing you to lose them, but never refunds you.
I'm sorry to hear that you experienced an issue with the distribution of BAT rewards; I'd be happy to assist and see to it that you receive all rewards for which you are rightly owed. If you have a Twitter account, send a DM to @BraveSampson to proceed.
Sampson (Brave Team)
Lost funds weren't much to bother with. It was just, I had disabled "automatically pay to creators" option on all my devices, but I saw a transaction go out. Then I checked on reddit, and some other people had similar issues.
I will still keep using Brave, no worries. I think it is a good project nevertheless. My complaints are more just small pet-peeves, no biggie. Keep up the good work. Thanks
Regarding lost funds, the only way Brave should ever make an automatic contribution when auto-contribute is disabled is if the contribution were queued up prior to disabling auto-contribute. You can check brave://rewards-internals/ (specifically the Contributions and Event Logs tabs) to compare timestamps to see if a contribution was processed after you disabled auto-contribute. Happy to help claw-back any rewards lost to a bug (if that be the case).
Whatever I can do to improve your experience with Brave; just let me know :)
Auto contribution; Ah, I see. Thanks for explanation.
KYC links on those sites lead to: https://launchpad.truepnl.com/kyc https://ksmstarter.synaps.io/
Theyre a bit buried in their UI and only faced when trying to trade/stake etc.
If anyone has read HN for any length of time, then you’ll know all the shady stuff Mozilla/Firefox has done. And not just hand waving “crypto” stuff that Brave gets accused of doing, but truly slimeball stuff. Firefox and Normandy, when the certificate expired, it also disabled NoScript in the Tor browser which disabled some security. Might not be a coincidence in the attempt to expose some targets. Using Tor. Their horrible start page that pushes political agendas, and gets reimplemented even when you have specified your tab and start page. Pushing their VPN when you launch Firefox. The list goes on and on that is pretty embarrassing, that none of the other browsers even come close to that level of behavior.
I haven't noticed their start page because I always disable it, but if they have some sort of news feeds on it then anyone nowadays would call it something or other.
A company that claims to support privacy launching a VPN service to support their development? Yeah so shady, they should have started a marketing company instead like Chrome! /s
Switched to Edge maybe last year after years with Firefox, but I was fed up with its hostile developers, who care more about their nerdy features than actually what users want, which is why Firefox declined into irrelevance.
edit: also get Kiwi Browser if you are using Android, the best Android browser, one of very few Chromium browsers with proper extensions support
Hope the backend issue mentioned gets fixed. Tweet to Brenden, he's always quick to respond.
My suspicion is that this sort of comment is motivated by a 1990's view of Microsoft. They much different company now, for sure.
I'd say Apple did something worse than ads with the image scanning privacy invasion. Even retroactive in time. This is no go for me. But many are OK with this sort of disrespect by Apple while pointing fingers on others like MS? I don't think it's a good line of thought...
If you are blocking an ad, could a website react to that by slowing, or disrupting your connection?
Sampson (Brave Team)
Sampson (Brave Team)
Sampson (Brave Team)
Curious why? Do you think that ads in Google search are good for the user and not privacy-invading? Those ads account for most of Google's revenue.
Do you not have a problem with claiming this on the homepage:
"Brave blocks all creepy ads from every website by default." when this is clearly not the case?
Or Brave does not consider Google a part of the "big tech" it is "helping to ditch"?
If you're on a Google-owned site, an in-situ first-party ad isn't necessary to harvest information about you—the page itself can do this far more effectively than any ad element. Blocking first-party advertisements is largely an aesthetic decision; Brave enables this via the Aggressive Mode in Shields.
By "creepy ads," we're referring to the invasive, data-collecting remote ad scripts which siphon your data from one host to another via JavaScript, Cookies, and cross-domain requests. First party ads (e.g. a Fortnite advertisement on the Epic Games website, or Google Ads in the Google Search Results) are not examples of cross-domain data-harvesting elements.
We absolutely do think that Google itself is creepy, and that it should be avoided entirely. Consider search.brave.com instead ;)
Yet you chose to allow ads that feed majority of Google's revenue?
> Blocking first-party advertisements is largely an aesthetic decision
Blocking all ads is an aesthetic decision. Users would still use ad-blockers even if all the ads in the world were not mining user data.
Brave supports the option to block all ads. By default we block the harmful ones. We offer options for blocking the non-harmful (but perhaps distracting/annoying ones) as well (via Shields and custom lists; see brave://adblock/).
If you wish not to see the first-party SERP ads on Google, I would suggest you not use Google. If you would like to use Google, know that doing so enables them to collect and harvest all sorts of data about you. But, you can hide their SERP ads (which doesn't secure any of your data) by switching Brave's shields from Strict to Aggressive.
Better to use https://search.brave.com instead ;)
How are you sure? I would assume that a more likely scenario is one where clicking a first party ad on Google.com helps build a profile about the user.
> If you wish not to see the first-party SERP ads on Google, I would suggest you not use Google.
Recommending to avoid a site that has ads is not how ad-blockers are supposed to work.
You absolutely could create a similar browsing experience (with excellent extensions like uBlock Origin), but you're still ultimately at the mercy of the browser vendor. For example, uBlock Origin is facing pressure from forthcoming Manifest V3 changes which threaten the existence of the extension (and many others like it). Brave, as a Browser, has committed itself to continuing support for these types of extensions.
One of the other large elements of Brave is Brave Ads & Rewards, and the ability for users to anonymously translate their attention into substantive support for content creators in a privacy-preserving fashion.
Sampson (Brave Team)
In Brave's case, we proxy the requests to prevent direct contact. As such, when a user attempts to install an extension in Brave, the browser sends the request through a *.brave.com endpoint, which relays it to Google, and returns the CRX (or other response).
In the author's case, they may have sent an invalid request to Brave's proxy endpoint (e.g. missing or invalid service key). This can happen when you're using an out-of-date build of the browser. It's not clear to us at this time what caused the "Access Denied" error, but we know that a missing/invalid key could yield these results.
Sampson (Brave Team)
It would be different if he was trying to visit www.archive.org and got an error from www.brave.com
I went back to Firefox and haven’t looked back.
PS: I don't get why that tweet about making tea is relevant at all.
Tongue in cheek aside, I don't know much about Brave - is there some specific reason that it needs an always-on server to call home to?
We're looking into this from our end, to see if there were any recent proxy-interruptions which might explain the user's experience.
Sampson (Brave Team)
Sampson (Brave Team)
I really like the odd de-mozilla'd Firefox versions though.
"Privacy" is defective when your exploit mitigation is deficient. You've got a lot worse privacy when your whole computer is owned, than when a few websites track which other websites you've been to.
None of this is new. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27219402
Brave has a top-notch team, uses Blink, and has some of the best fingerprinting protection I've seen in any browser, much better than Safari, and better than Firefox. They have good people working on it. The fact that an attempt to improve privacy [0] is being used to bring Brave bad PR is ironic.
[0]: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
The link you're referencing talks about NT kernel syscalls - if the computer is already infected it doesn't matter what browser is being used.
If one is a high-value target for a nation state or something of that caliber I would agree with you - but that doesn't apply to regular users. Atleast to my knowledge.
Another counter-argument here is that people looking for vulnerabilities would much rather spend their time looking for chrome exploits than firefox exploits (because of market share), no?
Coinbase was, and that wasn't long ago. If I were a sysadmin I'd blacklist Firefox from all my machines, no matter how I feel about the open web, about Mozilla or their mission statement, it's not a reasonable risk to take.
> Another counter-argument here is that people looking for vulnerabilities would much rather spend their time looking for chrome exploits than firefox exploits (because of market share), no?
People look for both. Firefox is a much higher value target to governments than Chrome, because that's what Tor Browser is.
Tor is Firefox ESR, which only has big security fixes backported; other security flaws remain in Firefox ESR for much longer. But beyond that, the security fundamentals were never a part of the original Firefox project like they were for Chrome, and it still isn't. 13 years later, Chrome's still making faster progress with exploit mitigation than Firefox, and Firefox is the one that needed catching up. There's a reason why GrapheneOS, which people here trust, don't use Firefox. Check their website for a great readup[0].
On Zerodium, Chrome RCE+LPE goes for $500k, Firefox and Safari. People will argue that's marketshare, but get any exploit mitigation researcher in here and they'll tell you Firefox (and Safari) are fundamentally less secure than Chrome. Price isn't just determined by demand (by governments), it's supply too.
I understand the "cyberpunk" love for Firefox, they're the good guys fighting big G. But that doesn't change what their codebase is.
One of the reasons why I also quit this was because some problems with their rewards crypto programs. Basically, this content creator Tom Scott, makes great videos, tweeted some stuff about Brave explaining the issue. He says that Brave users who watched him or visited his website were encouraged to donate to him through the Brave rewards program, when in fact, Tom Scott had not signed up or agreed upon it. Several people donated misunderstandignly and Brave didn’t even say that Tom Scott was not on their crypto platform, refused to either refund the people who donated and thanks to this issue now any content creator who isn’t on their crypto platform has a small text below the crypto payment.
The issues mentioned by Tom Scott (from December of 2018) were wholly unrelated to security or privacy, and instead serve as a case-study in UI/UX and messaging. Allow me to explain a bit in greater detail.
Brave held a token sale in 2017 which resulted in 300 million BAT being added to a User Growth Pool. In 2018 we invited Brave users to direct BAT grants (that is, BAT belonging to Brave) to their favorite content creators. Some users expressed a desire to support Tom Scott (as they should; his content is phenomenal).
Brave's UI explicitly marked verified creators as such, but made no explicit indication when a creator was unverified (we followed a similar model to Twitter, which gives checkmarks only to verified accounts). This resulted in some confusion among our users about whether or not Tom was a verified creator.
Some users chose to direct BAT (again, from Brave's own User Growth Pool) to Tom's YouTube account. At the time, this BAT would migrate from the UGP through to a Settlement Wallet, waiting to be collected by the creator. Again, we're talking about BAT from Brave's own wallet--no user funds involved.
After listening to Tom's feedback over Twitter, Brave took action and made a series of prompt changes. For starters, we began to explicitly identify unverified creators as such (not doing so was a naïve design decision on our part). Secondly, we modified the contribution model such that Brave (the browser) would not send tips to any unverified creator (that is, no BAT would go into a settlement wallet). Instead, issued tips now remain in the user's control for up to 90 days while the browser routinely checks to see if the intended recipient has verified.
We blogged about these changes at the time: https://brave.com/rewards-update/. We made these changes in fewer than 48 hours, IIRC. Tom's feedback was excellent, and resulted in a substantially better tipping model in Brave. Of these changes, Tom shared on Twitter "These are good changes, and they fix the complaints I had!".
I hope this helps!
Sampson (Brave Team)
Sampson (Brave Team).