Hacker News Reader

Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

After all the Brave controversies [0] I'm not sure why anyone uses Brave anymore. They took creators' money while ostensibly "collecting" it for them, and they inserted their own affiliate links when you visited certain sites. It's just shady behavior all around. I mean, when you have your own "Controversies" section on Wikipedia, you know there's something wrong.

Especially with Manifest v3 looming which would kill modern ad blockers, I see no reason not to use Firefox. Sure, Brave and other Chromium browsers might say they'll fork Chromium, but how long will that last, really? It's no joke to maintain a fork.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...

View on HN

> After all the Brave controversies

"Brave's controversies" are not really about Brave.

Brave as a company is not above criticism and should be harshly gone after for their mistakes when they do anything less than perfect with regards to privacy or anything else. I think they've done over 90% of things right, but have screwed up a small portion of the complicated stuff (new browser, new online advertising models, and search ecosystem) they're trying to pull off. And yes, they've made a few errors along the way.

That said, the "Brave controversies" are not actually about Brave's real merits as a company, but are mostly about a long-standing grudge regarding Brendan Eich's political beliefs. A certain crowd will not give Eich an inch to ever succeed and will continuously rip even the most minor and inane issue solely to destroy what he represents.

I'm really sick of people pretending that the "Brave controversies" are actually about Brave as a company and not overwhelmingly about the larger ongoing culture war that's been waged.

> "Brave's controversies" are not really about Brave.

Which of Brave's controversies listed on Wikipedia aren't about Brave because they are about Brendan Eich's political beliefs? I have no idea what his political beliefs are, but while I can accept the possibility that they may put Brave under additional scrutiny the problems people have had with Brave are real.

I think it'd be wrong to dismiss their controversies as being purely the product of a "culture war" even if some people's hate for Brendan might help promote awareness of those same controversies.

I don't care about Eich himself, I view creators as separate from their creations, so I'm surely not who you're talking about. I would rather that people use a non Chromium browser over a Chromium one, and honestly, Chromium itself is less shady than Brave due to the shady behavior I mentioned. I mean, man in the middle attacking your own browser, really?

Every one of those "few errors" involved other people's money, hijacking advertisements, etc. I don't even know what Brendan Eich's political beliefs are, except inasmuch as he decided to build a cryptocurrency scheme into his product, but I won't touch Brave with a ten-foot pole.

Not everything is a conspiracy. Sometimes it's just people deciding the thing you like isn't good enough for them.

>A certain crowd will not give Eich an inch to ever succeed and will continuously rip even the most minor and inane issue solely to destroy what he represents.

Oh fuck off. To add on to the comments of others, Many of us _do_ care about his "political beliefs". If you're in the tech industry, you're in one of the most queer industries of all time, and some (and sometimes, many depending on where you are) of your colleagues are likely to be some form of queer.

Just being a supporter of Prop 8 would have been a political belief. Actively donating money to fight for it is hate. Additionally, donating to Ron Paul is just proof of bad taste, but donating to Pat Buchanan, a known homophobic, antisemitic, white supremacist candidate doesn't just make it "oh his political beliefs is that gay people aren't cool, teehee" but veers straight into actual fucking hatred.

So, yes, fuck Brendan Eich as a person, _and_ Brave as a company has done a lot of things that make it truly untrustable.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/02/controver...

A demonstration of my exact point couldn't be made clearer than your comment. Thank you.

You're welcome. A clear demonstration that you are perfectly happy with people being discriminated against just because of their sexual orientation.

- Brave blocks you more against Fingerprinting than Firefox with uBlock. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

- Brave uses Chromium and uses better isolation and sandbox than Firefox. Especially on Android.

- Brave has Adblock built-in natively. It's written in Rust, so Manifest v3 will not affect it. https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

- Brave is profitable on itself and not dependent on search engines money like Firefox.

Not saying it's the best but I decided against Firefox because the technical and financial foundation looks better on Brave for me.

To each their own, bit this is what it boils down to for me: I trust Mozilla's intentions more than I trust Brave's.

There's no telling when Brave are going to decide it's time to monetize and start compromising themselves and their users.

If you'll excuse the tangent, judging [anything] by intentions is generally impossible. There was a time when Google was an absolutely inspiring company and there whole 'Don't Be Evil' slogan wasn't just an ironic joke. And they kept doing the right thing year after year. Yet within a matter of years from their peak they managed to devolve into a sort of satire, in their extremism, of 'evil corporation.'

There was never any reason to expect this to happen, but it did - and exceptionally rapidly. I absolutely agree with you that there's no telling when Brave will start going the other way and compromise all that they currently stand for. And that's okay. Because if, or probably more accurately when, that day comes - I'll be moving onto whoever the next "Brave" might be.

And the cycle will continue.

> Brave uses Chromium

> Brave is profitable on itself and not dependent on search engines money like Firefox.

Brave is still dependent on Google even more than Firefox, I agree that Mozilla must seeks multiple sources of revenue but if it was easy maintaining your own engine Brave would do it.

Let's take 2 hypothetical scenarios.

1. Chromium stops being FOSS.

Brave, Vivaldi, Edge continue to exist. The only difference being, Brave is now a fork that exists independently and has to do security patches on its own.

2. Google stops funding Mozilla.

With 90% of the revenue gone, Mozilla as we know it would cease to exist as a corporation.

So no, Brave's dependence on Google is not a life and death situation for the whole company.

Firefox + uBlock + NextDNS makes the web pretty damn nice and is also pretty damn easy to setup if you do not want to get too fancy with it.

Will manifest 3 really kill modern ad blockers? Like adguard and ublock won’t work as they do now in some upcoming Blink/Chromium version?

That is correct. The creator of uBlock Origin, gorhill, made a post about it [0], and uBlock Origin actually works better in Firefox than in other browsers apparently [1].

[0] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

Your information is outdated. gorhill also released a version of uBlock Origin that runs just fine on Manifest v3.

Just fine based on the limitations that were given, ie Manifest V3, but it is still better on Firefox.

It'll work as it does now on large websites, but smaller ones will probably not make the cut (due to filter list size limit).

Anyway, there's already a manifest 3 version, swap uBlock Origin for uBlock Origin Lite and experience the changes yourself.

Firefox promised multiple times that they're gonna deviate from manifest v3 on that front, so only uBlock Origin (proper) will only work there.

They will work but not as well.

Correct: they will work about as well as DNS-based adblockers. The "cosmetic blocks" you depend on in uBlock Origin to block same-origin and in-page elements, the things that make Fandom wikis usable, will not work.

I had to check what you meant and turned of uBlock on a Fandom wiki. Ye, well, those popup ads are really distracting. Even pop-up video ads. Following your scrolling around.

It's good to remind oneself about how the internet looks like to most people ...

I'm honestly tired of so much misinformation regarding Brave floating around.

> They took creators' money while ostensibly "collecting" it for them

They did not. In the initial days, they did not have the feature to block unregistered creators from getting donations. When Brave was informed about it, they made sure that creators who registered can claim their tipped tokens and for the rest, they refunded the tokens to users.

The fact that you think they'd want their tokens back, when they themselves give them away to Brave Rewards users every month is kinda weird. Not only did they refund the tokens but also got them to the registered creators.

> and they inserted their own affiliate links when you visited certain sites

They had a URL auto-complete bug in the system and it was an opt-in feature but the bug replaced the whole URL instead of suggesting links. They fixed it in a day, before the news even got out. The PR is there on GitHub but people love to bash them because of a bug that happened when Brave wasn't even 6 months old at that point (iirc).

> I mean, when you have your own "Controversies" section on Wikipedia, you know there's something wrong.

So does Mozilla, your point?

> Sure, Brave and other Chromium browsers might say they'll fork Chromium, but how long will that last, really? It's no joke to maintain a fork.

Brave does not depend of manifest v3 for adblocking. Their Ad blocker written in rust is much low level than Ublock. They'll just be fine.

> I see no reason not to use Firefox.

but I do see reasons to not use Firefox. How about performance? Memory management? Loading speed? Dev tools? Webkit?

I have not had any performance issues with Firefox and while I have not used Brave much Chrome has always been a memory hog. Maybe Brave solved that but......

Not just maybe, they actually did.

Here you can find the research: https://brave.com/brave-saves-batteries/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com