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Stop Using Brave Browser

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38 pointspallas_athena43 comments

The article strikes me as strongly ad-hominem. The individual attacked exercised his democratic right (small-scale financial support of a political cause) as a private person, and he is proclaimed evil for that because the OP politically disagrees.

I'm a bit shocked that this article even made it to HN's front page.

(However, I do appreciate the technical and business model explanations later in the article about Brave.)

"Ad hominem" would be to attack Eich's person directly instead of criticizing his actions, which are distinctly oppressive and homophobic.

Davenport exercised his democratic right to title a section "The Hateful Browser", to point out Eich "denied the donation made him a bigot", to quote Eich, and to characterize that denial as:

> because he silently donated to causes seeking to strip rights from minority groups instead of directly harassing them, the outrage was unjustified. Okay, Brendan.

Davenport wrote only 4 sentences on the topic (two of which I quoted), plus the section title, and the topic is never mentioned again. The quote from Eich is longer than what Davenport wrote.

How do you get "proclaimed evil for that" from that? I thought it seemed even-handed.

How would you answer the question "Why was appointing Eich as CEO [of Mozilla Corporation] so controversial?"

> How do you get "proclaimed evil for that" from that?

The title of the section, "the hateful browser", tells you the appropriate lense through which to view the entirety of the content. The reader is primed to assume bad faith everywhere.

He reenforces the view with his commentary, the disbelieving and sarcastic "okay Brendan" which further primes the reader into a bad faith view of his accomplishments and life.

It's not a rebuttal that directly addresses any of Mr Eich's points. If we assume good faith on the part of Eich's quote, then an entirely different approach to the points is warranted.

You get Eich 'proclaimed evil' from the section title "The Hateful Browser"? If I hate smoking and contribute to anti-smoking campaigns, am I also evil? FDR hated war - did that make him evil? I know someone who hates her birth father and does not associate with him.

You see where I'm going right? Just because someone feels hatred doesn't mean that the person who hates is evil. Nor that the browser is evil.

The disbelieving "okay Brendan" occurs after giving a direct rebuttal to Eich's second point.

It highlights how the argument "the donation does not in itself constitute evidence of animosity" is incomplete, because the action does not stop at the donation.

Eich knows this, hence using the phrase "in itself" to, as you write, '[tell] you the appropriate lense through which to view the entirety of the content'.

As Davenport (correctly, IMO) characterizes it: "he silently donated to causes seeking to strip rights from minority groups instead of directly harassing them".

Or, as Lehrer characterizes the von Braun defense: "Once the rockets are up / Who cares where they come down? / That's not my department".

Again, how would answer the question "Why was appointing Eich as CEO [of Mozilla Corporation] so controversial?"

Something like half of this piece is guilt by association. Literally the first argument is that 15 years ago Brendan Eich donated to some cause that the author finds repugnant, hance you shouldn't use his browser today. I also oppose Eich's views, but I believe that he has the right for his political belief, and anyway it shouldn't have any bearing on his professional contributions.

The author lists a number of crypto features, some of which failed and some turned out inconsequential. I don't see how this should have any effect on the users who use Brave for other features like adblocking or tabs sidepanel.

Well, it’s a matter of principle.

I wouldn’t support the business of someone who was a former KKK member, or who even merely donated money to strip black people of the right to vote or marry white people or something like that.

It’s just… against my best interest to give them money when in the past they used that money against me.

No possibility of redemption I see

There can be no redemption without an apology and additional actions to prove the truth of your change.

In this case, he has neither apologized nor publicly pledged retracted support from his previous cause.

I don't think it makes any sense to apologize for beliefs that you once had since beliefs are not a matter of choice. You could only admit that your prior beliefs were wrong.

This sounds like Communist or Christian nonsense.

Leaving Mozilla was enough for me.

For some, self flagellation on top of what you ask won't be enough

Brave is the worst of all worlds in the modern browser space. I genuinely believe that it doesn't get much better than LibreWolf and uBlock if you value privacy and don't want to give in to Google - you probably don't need all of the stuff Brave is trying to sell to you.

Does LibreWolf take the "Microsoft approach" like Firefox now does and abruptly force you to close the browser to complete an update, even if you are in the middle of a browsing session? I had other issues like memory leaks/bloat, but that was the last straw that pushed me away from Firefox.

I have zero problems with Brave; I don't use the crypto bit (not for me) and I still use uBlock Origin with it as Brave + uBO seems to do the best job at blocking garbage that I've seen so far.

I've been using it for a couple of years and I'm quite happy with it. What I like:

- In-browser adblocking, which is not dependent on the changes in extension API or extension policies.

- Reader view, which is comparable to that in Safari.

- Sidepanel with tabs.

I also liked the idea of distributing the payment to the websites that I'm visiting, and I'm sad that this didn't pan out.

Tangentially, I also like Brave Search, which is comparable to Google in quality, doesn't have ads and has nice AI summarization.

By the authors own logic, you should also stop using JavaScript, watching sports and accepting venture capital money.

I use Firefox and ublock origin. Also, "Nervenschoner" addin for the consent Dialog. With that, almost all ads are covered

firefox developer edition, to be more exact.

also faster than chrome on my M1 nowadays and ... no google. one more user against blink-monopoly in rendering the internet here.

If you were to stop using things because of the political views of the people who are involved in their creation, you would end up having to give up most everything.

Firefox fan here and did not intend to use Brave anyway. This article still managed to not convince me.

So the argument is: 1. The guy who started Brave has political opinions and has financially backed them. 2. He built a browser that blocked ads and then tried to monetize that. 3. His monetization scheme doesn't make much money for anybody but the company and makes it difficult for others to monetize. 4. The browser tried to increase revenue by steering users to affiliates (but did a poor job of it).

So to sum up, Brave is doing the same thing as Google except that they never figured out how to effectively serve ads to users, so they actually protect users from ads.

Stop using Brave browser. Seriously.

I disagree with your characterization of #2 and #4.

The author describes Brave's "marketing as a privacy-preserving web browser."

This is not the same as "blocked ads". The author even wrote "From the start, Brave Software had a different idea than just blocking ads outright."

If it is supposed to be a privacy-preserving web browser, then #4 should not have happened. If the developers can't tell that a new feature like that will destroy privacy, then how do you trust Brave to recognize privacy-breaking capabilities elsewhere?

If it is not developing a privacy-preserving web browser then what is the goal of the company? It comes acrosss like a Google wannabe with an odd fascination with cryptocurrency.

To sum up: "If you want a privacy-focused web browser, use Firefox or Vivaldi. If you want to support your favorite content creators and publishers, turn on advertisements or support them through the methods they already support (Patreon, Ko-Fi, and so on)."

OTOH, if you like cryptocurrency, or want to send your ad dollars to company other than Google, then it sounds like Brave is appropriate.

For iOS I couldn't find anything better than it. Firefox addons on iOS don't work because of apple's webkit requirements.

May be someone can recommend something with uBlock working?

Orion browser

I'm actually enjoying brave as a very simple and no fuss ad blocker

Since I explored Arc browser, I am not using any browser in the market.

Indeed. After a few hours with Arc, I abandoned Chrome and Safari and never looked back :-).

I keep other browsers for frontend developments testing only.

I'm concerned about Firefox's RAM usage. See this set of benchmarks:

https://www.androidauthority.com/brave-vs-firefox-3314241/

I thought that perhaps with uBlock Origin Firefox could use less RAM, but searching on that only found results were uBlock Origin sometimes used huge amounts of memory (hopefully fixed by now).

Firefox is using about 3.5Gb RAM on my computer right now. I have 271 tabs open.

Are all those tabs loaded into memory? They shouldn't be. The benchmark uses as fresh a start as they could manage.

They are not but that's good memory management, isn't it? :) Most are cached on disk and freed from RAM.

I'm not dismissing the tests in the article but it's just not relevant to my real world usage.

https://privacytests.org/

Brave in "high" shield settings blocks ads and nasty practices on phones. Firefoxmobile does now too via extensions, but it's also sadly noticeably slower for most sites I care about.

it's crypto aspect is a scam too.

People are not the same as the things that they make.

People didn't like Germans during WW1, so they threw away Beethoven's music. How dumb is that?

The Nazis invented missiles during WW2, so we should perhaps throw away all of our Space technology? How dumb is that?

Some guy that's not very nice writes a good browser, so perhaps we should throw that browser away? How dumb is that?

This article is way over the top to me. Eich shouldn't be discredited simply because he donated to some conservative cause once. A lot of companies do that to hedge their bets in DC. And let's say Eich is what you would call anti LGBT or what have you? I don't agree with it but I don't think someone should be attacked for it. Maybe he has some religious beliefs or something. Or maybe, since that was years ago, he changed his mind or became a different person. It seems illiberal to me. It seems the best way to get people to agree with a point of view is make solid arguments and see if they come to a new decision. Going after him or anybody and trying to destroy his career seems less ethical than what you are accusing him of frankly, considering companies pull this kind of stuff every day. There is a much better way to criticize Brave than stoop to this thin emotionally low article.

Agreed. Stay away from Brave. Just use Chrome with uBlock Origin.

The company behind is is scummy with its cryptocurrency.

The company behind Chrome isn't great either.

Yeah but they have a vested interest in a low drama browser and high performance internet; Firefox and now Brave have had drama.

Chrome's criticisms mainly take place in development spaces; its push for technologies that are only supported by itself, and now its attempts at curtailing adblockers (because Google's primary revenue model is ads).

Technologies only supported by itself is one thing, "technologies" that are literally impossible to support unless Google gives the OK are something else entirely.

> Just use Chrome with uBlock Origin.

Until they ban adblockers for good…

And ban the ability for anyone else to use a non-Google browser thanks to attestation. Chrome is bad, and using it is helping Google kill the web.

Considering how dramatic a difference to UX just 3 chrome addons [1] make, it motivates me to find any addons I'm missing. Are there others that dramatically enhance day to day web use?

[1] uBlock Origin, Video Speed Controller, YouTube SponsorBlock.

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