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Comment by johnebgd | Hacker News Reader

Switching every individual and organization I can to Brave in the buildup to Manifest V3 launching.

Encouraging 3rd party patching tools to adopt it or the organizations I work with will leave them as a client.

Chocolatey already supports Brave in its packages for Windows.

Feels a lot like the days when Chrome came out and I championed it over Internet explorer and Firefox. Yeah, we all make mistakes, sorry Firefox.

Anyway, Brave seems like a great option to keep extensions alive that can actually block ads/trackers. Chrome is about to can that ability.

More info here for the uninformed: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-ma...

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It seems like Chrome is going to make a massive fortune from webmasters or organizations that rely on ads, since it will unblock the ads for them by blocking the ad-blocker extensions. Quite silly, given the fact that Google used to pay "adBlock Pro" a good sum of money to whitelist their ads. Man, Internet Advertising has turned into a huge pile of clusterfuck. Why? disable your adblocker for 5 minutes and visit some websites and you will instantly notice that ads on the internet have gotten way nastier than ever.

Strangely enough, Firefox has held its ground. It fell behind in marketing which is why Chrome (and Safari/Edge) took over, but Firefox still remains popular for being that unshakable browser. I went back to it recently and wondered why I wasn't using it in the last 5 years or so.

I don't know if any marketing could have helped Firefox not lose to the shitty dark practices from the three other browsers you mentioned:

- Chrome: Spam ads for Chrome on all Google services (incl. YouTube and Google Search which probably are the two most visited websites on this planet?) - Safari: Make it the default and prevent users from using any other browsers (on iOS every browser is Safari under the hood and will reports as such to browser census) - Edge: Make it suck less and also make it really hard to remove it from your system or switch to a different browser

Defaults matter and, especially when they are this toxic, they are hard to beat :/

I honestly solve that issue by just not visiting those sites.

Sites with ads so obtrusive they interfere with my use of the site don't need my traffic. The web is a hugely redundant datastore and I can just find the info elsewhere.

How does this work? Do you have a fixed list of websites you visit and never stray from? Do you avoid clicking on links you don't recognize? How do you use HN, which by its very essence points you at new, unrecognized web sites every day?

I just click away at the first popup that overlays the content.

Content is basically never important enough if it's behind one of those.

I'm not the same person, but I have a similar philosophy. HN tends not to link to sites with really bad ads. If I find that it happens, I just close the tab. I don't intentionally have a whitelist of websites, but in practice maybe I practically do.

This is why I don’t use an automatic adblocker. I block ads by closing pages that have ads. (And if the information really is quality information, then I reward and support the website.)

> you will instantly notice that ads on the internet have gotten way nastier than ever

Anyone that remembers the advent of pop-ups and pop-unders, never ending cascading popped windows, flashy, shaky, and just terrible ads might beg to differ with you.

Any UK tabloid website will carry you right back to those days

For anyone less aware of UK's tabloids, I suggest visiting Dailymail.co.uk for a dose of ads

I remember those. The interesting thing about those is that browsers went out of their way to add features disabling those, only to then implement the infrastructure for them to be re-implemented in-page in ways that are harder to block.

Pop-unders still exist. The only difference is that it's now new tabs instead of windows.

`cascading popped windows`

Ah, these were the MVP stars of the show back then.

Brave is fine enough I guess but something about their business model feels slightly skeevy. I'm also skeptical they can afford to keep Manifest v2 support going in their fork. I know nothing about the chromium code base but such a large divergence is going to have ongoing costs.

Not to shill for Firefox but I haven't had issues with it and don't plan on switching anytime soon. Plus no other browser has tree-style tabs.

Brave's "skeevy" business model at least is trying innovative ways to get revenue. Firefox on the other hand get's 90% of its funding from Google, which to me generates a clear conflict of interests.

Their business model is selling ads to advertisers for real money, and paid services to users for real money.

I don't use it, but Edge has built in vertical tabs fwiw (I know, that's not tree-style).

Firefox haven't actually done anything in particular to help the various TST addon developers though, have they?

My understanding is that when the firefox 57 was released (I believe that was the version that dropped the old XUL add-on model) they did do some work to allow the add-on developer to port it to the new model.

Why exactly they still haven't implemented an easy way to hide the redundant top tab bar I can't explain though!

> I don't use it, but Edge has built in vertical tabs fwiw (I know, that's not tree-style).

I've tried Edge's vertical tabs and it's ok but it's a weak implementation of the idea. It only supports a flat list, and I think new tabs also open at the bottom, not even next to the current tab. TST is vastly superior.

Vertical tabs don't really have anything to do with tree-style tabs except a superficial similarity. The entire point is the automatic hierarchical organization.

I think tree-style tabs can be quite useful to those that care to utilize them, but I think the vertical nature is the much better selling point for most people, since its advantages are very easy to grok. I would like to see better integration of addons like it into firefox so it doesn't feel so hacky, though. It would also be nice to be able to toggle between horizontal tabs and vertical ones like in Edge, rather than having to edit css files to get rid of them like you have to in Firefox.

tst > vertical > horizontal for me, YMMV.

Deploying Brave at a company?

That defaults to Crypto ads, Crypto "sponsored backrounds", Crypto wallet, Brave news

instead of Firefox (that many orgs already have in sccm/intune) + ublock origin ? bruh

Literally all of that except their sponsored new tab backgrounds is opt-in. The toaster popup ads, Brave News, using the wallet. All of it.

Wow, interesting. Thank you. May look into this if users are installing Brave, or to use it for deployment.

Running anything other than Chromium as a company is dangerous; Firefox is still less secure than Chromium.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20656680

You do know there are 0day exploits on any browser, right?

I did use Brave exclusively for a while, until I realized that on mobile, Brave blatantly ignores my provided DNS (pihole). And if there is something I really don't like it's software/hardware which ignores network-wide settings (also looking at you chromecast music...)

So, I switched to Firefox on Mobile and by now I moved my desktop as well, so I have all the same addons etc. on all devices.

I've not noticed this with Brave, but wasn't it FF, out of the mainstream browsers, that pioneered DoH (ignoring local DNS). pihole I think makes the requisite setting to tell FF not to use DoH but users can override it IIRC (not the behaviour I want).

Firefox's implementation of Default-on DoH has ALWAYS been able to be disabled network-wide via canary domain.[1]

Other browsers can (and last I checked do) ignore this.

[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/canary-domain-use-appli...

That also enables a hostile network to downgrade from DoH.

Anyway, we're investigating what might have gone wrong. So far we can't find a difference between Chrome and Brave regarding DNS and DoH configuration and configurability. More info welcome, thanks.

Not allowing the user to override it locally would be quite user-hostile! Of all the missteps Mozilla has made with Firefox (in my opinion), giving the user more control isn't one of them.

>Not allowing the user to override it locally //

Otherwise known as "allowing a network _owner_ to determine the DNS used".

The network owner is free to allow or deny connections to IP addresses or ports and drop whatever packets they like by configuring their systems, the routers! They do not get to determine the configuration of _my_ system.

Can you tell me how you have your home network setup as well as how you have your Pihole/browser settings configured?

Brave is Chromium-based and will also suffer from the Manifest v3 change. They're just activating the extended enterprise support to delay the inevitable. So no, Brave will not keep those extensions alive.

With that said, Brave's built-in ad blocker should not be affected by the change.

Please see https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1578933747788836866.

I don't know if this really counters my point, mainly because the tweet this is in reply to was deleted, so there might be more useful context there.

I don't have the link handy since I'm on mobile, but they've stated in a GitHub issue that they're not going to maintain v2 support, just activate the extended enterprise support to give users more runway. This just seems to be a mock-up of a toggle for that extended enterprise support and links to the extensions since they won't be downloadable from the consumer Chrome extension store.

I will admit that they haven't been clear (perhaps intentionally), but I have yet to see an announcement that explicitly states that they will independently maintain v2 support.

Chromium being open source, Brave doesn't need to use the Manifest v3 changes in their codebase.

I assume Brave will continue to rely on Google's app store for extensions. When Manifest v2 stops being supported, aren't v2-based extensions going to fade away?

Yeah, if they are willing to maintain their own fork indefinitely.

Isn't that what they are really doing now? I guess the farther away they get it gets more difficult for them but that is what is happening.

It's more of a branch than an actual fork. It's using an automated build process where they add/tweak/enable/disable stuff on top.

The analogy I like to use is they (Chromium-based browsers) are in another lane on the same road whereas a complete fork diverges to their own road. The former is still beholden to whatever direction the Chrome road goes.

Yeah, at some point Google may just straight up remove the Manifest v2 code from Chromium rather than just disable it. At that point it can get harder for Brave. Happened to them with eg. mobile slideshow tabs. Google disabled it, Brave kept the feature alive until Google removed it from the codebase.

I'm not familiar with Brave development, but I assumed they are mostly using the off-the-shelf upstream engine and putting their own browser (chrome, UX, etc.) around it.

> Feels a lot like the days when Chrome came out and I championed it over Internet explorer and Firefox. Yeah, we all make mistakes, sorry Firefox.

I stayed with Firefox then. Seems like I can stay with Firefox now.

Until Google removes the Manifest V2 code from Chromium. Then we'll see how long Brave can hold with such a large divergence of codebases. Will they stop updating their engine and stay stuck ? Cherry-pick each and every patch ?

This has always been the failure of the "It's open source; just fork it" attitude.

Yeah, we should just do nothing instead.

Or we should use actually open source products like Firefox.

Less secure than Chromium and receives 90% of its funding from Google. No exactly the perfect browser people make it out to be.

A fair amount of what people want wouldn't be all of Manifest V2, but just the part of onBeforeWebRequest() that's being removed.

Feels like it wouldn't be impossible to shoehorn some of the old functionality that extensions rely on into V3 without supporting V2 entirely I imagine?

Then again I'm sure Google went out of their way to make it as hard to do as they possibly can.

Manifest v3 only affects extensions. Brave has a native adblocker, that doesn't need access to the Manifest API.

Does Brave support GPO/Admin templates to turn off all the crypto shit?

No way companies are mass-deploying this to users over Chrome or Firefox with ublock origin.

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33269074.

Stumbling from one terrible solution to another. A few years later Brave will be the black sheep and shinynewvendor the benevolent knight...

There are other, much cleaner ways to ignore ads... that would satisfy both sides. Client doesn't have to see it, advertiser has the illusion that it was watched. Everyone profits, just like in the old days with TV ads. Yet people fight over this lame manifest fiasco :DDD.

Ridiculous (that eff link).

I already switched back to Safari, which is an odd choice for a dev. Firefox seems to be in a malaise and is getting clunky. I simply do not like Chrome. And then there's Safari, okay-ish, but with growing/good integrations (passkey, private relay), and bookmarks synced with phone, and it's backed up by a super-profitable smartphone platform. Done.

> Chocolatey already supports Brave in its packages for Windows.

also winget (it is preinstalled on W10/W11 now)

I don't think Chrome will actually go through with it. It would drastically push away the nerds (who are the ones what setup stuff for the rest of the family). Nobody cares if the browser is technically better, if it is infested with ads.

Why Brave and not DDG browser? Brave left a sour taste for me with their crypto + linkjacking for referrals nonsense.

>Anyway, Brave seems like a great option to keep extensions alive that can actually block ads/trackers. Chrome is about to can that ability.

You are the one who is uniformed because Chrome extensions still have that ability with manifest v3. The move to manifest v3 is about improving performance, privacy, and security which means that extension authors need to migrate to more thought out APIs. It's canning old APIs, not ad blocking / trackers.

The APIs usable for adblocking in v3 are extremely limited in scope relative to the equivalents in v2. You can make a v3 adblocker, but it can't have all of the features that e.g. uBlock Origin users have come to rely on such as "cosmetic filtering" (blocking page elements, not just URLs).

uBlock Origin Lite (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin-lite...) shows what will still be possible under v3.

>uBlock Origin users have come to rely on such as "cosmetic filtering" (blocking page elements, not just URLs).

Manifest v3 doesn't prevent that. uBlock Origin Lite choose to not require broad permission for every single site, but instead it choose to have the user grant it permission on a site by site basis.

I don't quite get this mania to get rid of personal pronouns when talking online.

How hard would it be to add an "I'm" in front of "switching every"?

It sounds pretentious as hell when they are missing.

It's a stylistic choice, I do it to avoid putting myself as the focus of a sentence. In the OP comment they probably want to emphasise the switching to brave, over the fact that it is them personally doing that switching.

If you'd stated "Don't quite get ...", IMO it would have been no less understandable. Usage progresses.

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