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Comment by GoofballJones | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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