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Comment by EMM_386 | Hacker News Reader

I switched to Brave last year after 22 years of Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.

This was purely for Chromium performance reasons (although it seems Firefox has made some major improvements recently). I didn't like leaving behind a unique browser engine, which needs to remain a significant player.

I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave. If you don't like the crypto integration, the ads, etc you can just disable them. I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one. It may not have played out as intended, but it wasn't a scam.

One year in, I've had no issues I can think of. And now they have their own search engine, another net plus to the ecosystem. Outside of things like Tor Browser, the privacy is about as good as you're going to get from a client. In fact, you can open a new window using Tor directly in the browser. I don't use their VPN but that's available also (Mullvad?).

I spend enough daily time in it that I would notice UI/UX/perf. problems ... I really haven't seen any.

YMMV

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>I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave. If you don't like the crypto integration, the ads, etc...

...and the redirection of the URLs of other cryptocurrency exchange websites...and the time it inserted affiliate referral codes when users navigate to Binance. Yes, you can turn off the crypto BS, and they stopped doing the redirects. But I can't trust a browser company that _may_ do such shenanigans again in the future. They "fixed" or removed that stuff, but that doesn't mean they won't do it again. I just don't trust them, at all. That right there is enough to not use the browser. Not to mention Brendan Eich and his views.

If you still don't understand, then I don't know what to tell you.

I don't know much about the first one, but the affiliate codes I'm fine with.

A browser company that tries to monetize in ways that doesn't weaponize my info against me is much preferred.

That said, I can't personally separate his politics from his product, which is why I use Firefox.

It's funny, when Brave the organization's politics are pretty narrow and what you'd want out of a browser: Privacy and user control.

Meanwhile Mozilla the organization boots people for politics, wants "more than deplatforming" and uses as one of their examples organizations deciding what I should see on the Internet - preferring outlets that Mozilla themselves like, naturally. They publish stuff with the gist of "did you encounter other politics on YouTube, how scary".

Meanwhile the organization spends money on getting a sneaker designer to make time-limited color themes for their browser and writes a pile of copy about how cool it is that a sneaker designer painted the browser blue.

https://imgur.com/a/ZmUzr0q

Meanwhile, Brave releases a user-customizable filtering function for their search engine so you, not someone else, can decide from what POV you see the Internet and added native vertical tabs to the browser.

One organization is blatantly political, the other just makes a good browser.

But if you want people you like to decide what I see (at least easily) on the 'net, that's good, I guess.

/rant

I'm not going to defend mozilla, since I think deciding which organization we hate more is counterproductive. But I will say that as a user of a browser, I don't really care that much what anyone publishes or who they boot from their organization (sounds flippant I know but at the end of the day I just want a browser that works). Brave putting garbage in their browser like crypto mining and redirecting links affects _the product_, which is the only thing I care about. Firefox has made blunders, but nothing like this.

Not to mention that they're based on chromium.

>user control

Which is why they were silently filling in affiliate links without user consent right? Or why they were collecting tips for users with no affiliation to the company that runs brave.

Or that using a single wallet built into your web browser for crypto stuff nicely ties all your transactions to that one wallet in a way that completely removes all "privacy" aspects

> the affiliate codes I'm fine with

I would be fine with it if it were opt-in for users who want to support the browser in that way, but silently injecting them across the board is just a scummy thing to do and also likely a violation of any sane affiliate program's terms. A company that's willing to do that loses an unrecoverable amount of credibility and trust in my eyes.

I am with you. Their past actions irreversibly tainted their reputation, and they are no longer worthy of our trust.

I think society has largely adopted a victim mentality with abusive software these days. We are so used to being betrayed and hurt that we now accept it as normal. It started off innocuously enough, but now we are effectively being hurt on the regular. We have learned helplessness, and that will not end well.

> We are so used to being betrayed and hurt that we now accept it as normal. It started off innocuously enough, but now we are effectively being hurt on the regular. We have learned helplessness, and that will not end well.

That's not what a victim mentality (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_mentality) is. What you're describing is closer to learned helplessness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness), which is different.

> Their past actions irreversibly tainted their reputation, and they are no longer worthy of our trust.

This is closer to something you might hear from someone with a victim mentality. I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is evidence of such, but certainly this rigidity of thought around being a victim to another's actions contributes to such.

It's more that we are so absurdly petty, pathetic, and entitled that we refuse a tiny, minuscule amount of pain for the greater good. Maybe back in 2010 the difference in speed between the browsers mattered but I've used Firefox since version two and as long as you had an ad blocker the speed was NEVER an issue.

So now we've given a hostile ad agency control of the internet to save 100ms on certain web site loads. Good job everyone.

What's his politics? I don't really follow his politics.

Eich backed Prop 8 (the gay marriage ban) in California.

I mean those standards are fine, but google does far far worse. So you're not using chrome right?

Nope. I don't use any Chrome/Chromium based browsers at all. I stick with Firefox and on rare occasions, Safari.

>but google does far far worse

They absolutely do, and using the chromium code base, regardless of what you supposedly patch into or out of it, pushes forwards GOOGLE'S goals, not the open web's goals.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36899179

What are the tradeoffs you're putting up with given the alternatives? Chrome-- data collection galore...

I don't use any Chrome/Chromium browsers at all. Period.

> I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one. It may not have played out as intended, but it wasn't a scam.

The original intent was absolutely a scam. They wanted to hide the ads that were already on websites, replace them with their own, then give a fraction of the revenue they just effectively stole from those websites back to them (but only if they knew to ask for it).

Also they were going to take over all the third-party tracking data for their own, while branding it as “privacy” — so much hand waving about "we don't run a MiTM proxy" (while hoping we didn’t notice it’s because they don’t need to be in the middle when they control the browser itself).

Absolutely brazen, and they kept changing their story in real time whenever people started to notice hey wtf is this. Happened to be able to find this in my posting history for example; in hindsight I wish I hadn't been so cowed by the fact that I was arguing with Brendan Eich Himself, because man what a load of horsepuckey he and his guy were delivering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14464518#14465271

None of that is a scam?

The user and their browser decides what ads they see. Websites are not entitled to showing ads.

The parts that could most safely be described as "scam", to my point of view, are

* lying to users about protecting their privacy, while gathering and reselling more information than was possible with existing 3rd party trackers

* lying about "giving back to publishers", while actually coopting those publishers' revenue streams

Your "Websites are not entitled to showing ads" statement gave me a moment of thought, I have to admit: I don't see anything wrong with ad blockers, but I do think the ethics of ad replacers is pretty problematic. At best it makes Brave a parasitic entity feeding off revenue that would have otherwise gone to the content creators.

I'll reluctantly agree that that part on its own doesn't rise to the level of "scam" but I certainly don't think it's admirable.

I think letting an advertising company have any control over content distribution or display is inherently a problem, so Brave signalling that they want to do advertising is pretty clear to me that they cannot be trusted.

Like, do Brave think google is just evil and that if someone else becomes the advertising behemoth things will be just rosy?

For sure. And their overall shiftiness whenever anyone calls attention to their plans ("oh, that FAQ's out of date," "oh that's a future feature," "oh that's not what we planned, even though it's exactly what we said," etc) doesn't exactly help make them seem like a trustworthy partner.

> I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave. If you don't like the crypto integration, the ads, etc you can just disable them. I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one. It may not have played out as intended, but it wasn't a scam.

The presence of ads and/or crypto is a strong signal that you're working with an untrustworthy entity, whose objectives will not be aligned with your own.

Maybe Brave the browser isn't outright a "scam," but the willingness of the company to dip into scam-enabling technologies like crypto makes the brand toxic, and anything by the company is immediately suspect.

The same is true for Signal, for what it's worth, as it still supports Moxie's pet shitcoin.

It's easy enough to opt out of Brave because Firefox exists, but there's still sadly no better alternative to Signal.

> The presence of ads and/or crypto is a strong signal that you're working with an untrustworthy entity, whose objectives will not be aligned with your own.

Decentralized wealth is crypto. Sure, there are scams, but the point is to pay people for viewing ads (wealth re-distribution in a decentralized fashion). No one else is paying you to view ads; they are just taking your engagement data, your face and eye gaze data, your mouse trajectory data, etc. Brave is the first to try to pay you a portion of its ads revenue in a way that you the end user can flip into whatever currency you want, including USD. I've never been cut a check from Google, Amazon, Facebook, or the like. But I've received BAT, which I can flip into ETH/BTC, and earn more money.

> Maybe Brave the browser isn't outright a "scam," but the willingness of the company to dip into scam-enabling technologies like crypto makes the brand toxic, and anything by the company is immediately suspect.

Do you use any resource owned/operated by Google? Amazon? JPMorgan Chase? Facebook? Bank of America? Wells Fargo? (to name a few) All of these companies "dip into scam-enabling technologies like crypto."

Do more research.

> ...there's still sadly no better alternative to Signal.

Isn't the Matrix protocol the better alternative to Signal?

Unlike browsers, which can (for now) still be swapped out solely on individual preference, the network effects are real for messaging platforms. This means that currently Signal is more broadly useful than Matrix clients.

Hopefully this can change some day, and Matrix (or something like it) will become ubiquitous. But it was a slog for Signal to gain even its small market share, despite its better usability and lower barriers to entry.

For lack of a better alternative, we "standardized" on Signal as the de-facto secure messaging system that is outside of the control of ad companies, and it will take time to rectify that.

on the Matrix side we are slogging away at https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-e... to provide good (excellent?) UX as well as interoperability via Matrix.

>the willingness of the company to dip into scam-enabling technologies like crypto

This is a ridiculous take. Every technology you use that facilitates payments or communication is, objectively speaking, "scam-enabling".

> I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave.

I certainly don't hate Brave. I use it. I also don't like Brave, I put up with it. It's just that there aren't any great browsers out there, and Brave sucks less than most.

I agree with you, but it sometimes feels like a 'great browser' is supposed to be free, bleeding-edge while also backwards compatible, tracking-free, ad-free, and somehow altruistic and for the good of the open web.

Where are we getting these absolutely unattainable ideals from? Who can possibly support and fund such a project besides an enterprise?

Can I get a decent bookmark manager and more than X months of history? What's so unattainable about that?

You should check out History Trends Unlimited! I also wanted an unlimited history and since no browser supports it, someone made an extension. It even automatically backs up your history for you in a neat litte zip file!

I like Pinboard as a bookmark manager. Browser and platform independent!

Raindrop.io seems to be better these days, plus Pinboard posts stuff like this... https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1628462667559239680

> Who can possibly support and fund such a project besides an enterprise?

KHTML was doing fine before Microsoft, Google and Apple forked their codebase.

The definition of “what is a browser” was much simpler then.

What don't you like about it?

The text input spelling checker is really terrible; late 80s spell checks were better.

Forgot which, but had a 12 letter word that I misspelled one letter of, Brave underlined it in red with no replacements in right-click menu, I fixed it by googling the spelling and underline went away.

In often happens that it has no or even very wrong suggestions.

Personally, I don’t like the inability to turn off the update mechanism, which is annoying on my macos 10.13 computer that has a warning bar every time I run the brave browser application. I suppose this means there is telemetry built in that can’t be removed

Yeah, that's actually been irritating me a lot lately. Brave has taken to constantly nagging me about not being able to update itself. I know! That's on purpose! Stop bugging me.

The UI, mostly. But the point isn't that I'm not in love with Brave. The point is that I use it because it's the least bad option, and I wish there were an option that I would actively like.

> I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one

The intent is to circumvent how authors have themselves chosen to monetize their own content, insert themselves as the man in the middle, display their own ads and "pay" people in a currency they print. They're actually replacing the direct compensation the author would receive with an indirect one. Traditionally this kind of scheme is known as a protection racket. Also of course this means that Brave is simply an advertisement company, like the ones they are supposed to protect you from.

When someone visits your page through Brave the ads you would have been compensated for are being blocked, Brave earns actual money for the ads they put in their place, and then users get the chance to tip you in 'attention tokens', which they wisely pre-mined. That's not noble, it's like the mafia combined with a Nigerian prince currency scam.

>I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave.

Let me help you understand why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...

That's the one and only real reason why they hate brave, all the other reasons are just excuses they like to tell to themselves and to others.

If I had a dollar for every product I use with a piece of shit CEOs I'd be a millionare

That's not the only reason. He's also a covid conspiracy guy.

> That's the one and only real reason why they hate brave

Cause Mozilla did him dirty? When Obama ran in 2008 he opposed gay marriage. Hell proposition 8 passed. California's constitution still has text banning gay marriage in it.

Obama publicly changed his mind over 10 years ago. Has Eich?

I agree, it's a great browser and the BAT was at least an attempt to change some of the bad incentives of the modern web. Doesn't seem like it worked, but kudos for trying something new!

> I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave. If you don't like the crypto integration, the ads, etc you can just disable them.

If you buy fruits from a shop that also sells scummy lottery tickets, you at least should accept that other people will bring criticism and skepticism to that shop.

Do you think the shop should not sell something that some people want because other people don't like it? AFAIK the BAT token hasn't done any material harm to anyone besides maybe some speculators that bought at the peak

I think that the people who don't like it might not shop at that store, and the business should take that into account.

That "should" shit, however, is inviting other people to make a value judgement just so you can attack them for not being libertarian or something, nobody cares. They should do what is best for their business if they want to be successful. They thought that was crypto, and who am I to second guess? As long as they're doing it, or strange advertising shell games, I'm not even their customer, so I don't get a say. I don't think they did anything remotely fraudulent...

How dare someone expect more from their fellow citizens than "shamelessly and with zero morals make as much money as I can through any means". What's with HNs wants so bad to be free from judgement for doing business that can hurt people.

I mean tons of grocery stores sell lotto tickets.....

So do most gas station and random convenience stores. No one complains since you don't have to buy em.

No one complains anymore because in general states regulated that the tickets need to be behind a counter (or behind glass) and entirely unavailable to minors and a portion of sales need to go to remediation tools (addiction PSAs, addiction counseling services) and/or education funds and other taxes.

Agreed, but it's more like the store is aggressively slipping you gambling chips for their questionable casino every time you buy.

They have a new api where they’re happy to sell copyrighted website data (like mine) to third parties to train ai with (without copyright holders permission). This sort of soured me on the company. I was a fan until then

The hate for Brave is well earned. They launched with a totally scummy scheme of hiding ads on people's sites and collecting money "on their behalf" but they needed to then know to reach out to Brave to get it. They have done some not great stuff since then as well.

PSA: They held the tips for a while to see if the creator signed up, and if not sent the crypto back to the user. If it even was the user's, they put up a pool of the stuff out of their own pocket to jumpstart the tipping service and the whole thing might just be over the allocation of that pool, I don't remember the specifics.

In any case no one lost their stuff, bad UX was critiqued and bad UX was fixed.

> If you don't like the crypto integration, the ads, etc you can just disable them.

You're still using Brave which can be seen as endorsement of those things by others, including by website operators looking at user agent traffic.

By using a software you don't automatically endorse every feature it has.

Sometimes that's true, but in the case of a fork especially when the original is still around, I think that's not always true.

Some people use very specialized versions of Linux as a political choice, for example.

> Some people use very specialized versions of Linux as a political choice, for example

My point is that if other people use other variants (non-specialized) it doesn't necessarily mean that they support opposite "political views".

Using base chrome is worse then though right? Google causes infinitely more damage..

Using any chromium based browser is explicitly giving google more power over the free and open web.

Right, which is why I'm using Vivaldi as my Chromium-based browser.

A lot of people are leery about crypto and have read a FUD article or two about the browser and put it in the hate bucket. Next to none of the common complaints are modern missteps. One of the most common complaints was a bug that got fixed within a day of being reported, in a feature that Firefox is doing TODAY yet people aren't demanding Firefox devs' heads on a plate.

>read a FUD article

Really? It's FUD that the Brave browser and team worked with and on a crypto project to integrate crypto into the browser?

No, not FUD in terms of Brave implementing crypto things within the browser. That much is obvious and they take pride in it.

What I mean is that year in, year out you'll see the same things about a bug in their Firefox Suggest-esque feature that got fixed within one day of being reported, the bad Rewards UI which got fixed without anyone losing their cryptocurrency in response to eg. Tom Scott's feedback being treated as a scam where Brave stole it from people and so on.

They're basically criticisms of first iterations of new things and assume maximum malice on part of the Brave team. The integrating crypto into the browser side is mostly unrelated, nobody denies it and few think it's unequivocally good.

As the guy who released all those Phoenix and Firebird and Firefox versions, I can tell you with some certainty that it hasn't been 22 years yet.

First builds were spring of 2002 and you probably didn't have those because they were still called "browser" or "m/b" back then and not made terribly discoverable. You probably mean you got with it in 2003, summer or fall, which would be 20 years ago, not 22.

> As the guy who released all those Phoenix and Firebird and Firefox versions, I can tell you with some certainty that it hasn't been 22 years yet.

Yes, I was off by a year or so, I'm not making anything up. Two decades is a long time to remember details.

All I know is I'd FTP to grab the latest and unzip it into a folder.

By this point I was running a couple major websites and had a "5-star CNET Award" for an internet-centered software product so I was on top of anything in that sphere.

Glory days.

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