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Comment by sgt | Hacker News Reader

> Firefox is the only major browser not built by a company that makes money from advertising and/or selling your personal data

This is true for Google, etc, but definitely not for Apple. Not saying Apple is perfect in every way, but they actually have a track record for privacy protection.

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Brave runs on Chrome and has some of the highest privacy protections.

I love Firefox, but just questioning if there aren’t good solutions available on Chrome.

And while Apple may not have a business model as focused on selling data, they still have a growing ad business + weaker protections against fingerprinting and ad blocking

Brave’s internal ads and crypto weirdness are enough for me to be uncomfortable with it.

What internal ads? I see 0 ads while using brave because of its internal ad blocker.

Crypto features are an easy toggle to disable. The toggle isn't hidden, doesn't re-enable itself, and isn't weird in any way.

They’re talking about the ability to turn on ads within brave and get BAT as a reward.

In addition to getting nagged on the regular (every update?) to turn on the ads.

> weaker protections against fingerprinting and ad blocking

Citation?

https://privacytests.org/

It's worth noting that PrivacyTests tests default configurations. If a browser has a good suite of privacy features but doesn't have them on by default, they'll score low on the benchmark.

Firefox, for example, can be hardened very well with options and extensions, but has many bad defaults (like Google default search with search suggestions on).

The site is all baseline, not potential. Not peak potential, not press a couple buttons potential.

Apple definitely makes a lot of money from advertising...probably more than they make from selling Macs (based on 2022 results).

Also I think this quote might be technically right, but Mozilla's revenue is almost entirely paid from advertising companies who pay royalties to have their search engines by default in Firefox. So they are very much coupled to the dynamics of the ads industry.

Not doubting you, but do you have a source for that? Best I could find was their last quarterly earnings report which does have “Services” ahead of everything but iPhone, but I would imagine includes some big money makers like AppleCare.

Apple gets 36% of Google's advertising revenue from Safari's default search. So Apple is earning from Google's advertisements.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/google-witness-a...

Apple makes money from ads in their App Store. Do they make ad money from Safari? I couldn’t find that info.

Apple gets 36% of Google's advertising revenue from Safari's default search. So Apple is earning from Google's advertisements. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/google-witness-a...

Well FF is too, so not sure that’s relevant to TFAs claim that we are discussing in this thread.

Just a small correction. Large parts of revenue are obtained though sharing ad revenue between Mozilla and a search engine, not for being the default search engine.

Firefox has ads doesn't it ? for the homepage links.

(I am not complaining. long time firefox user)

Firefox’s default search engine is also Google Search, full of ads and spam.

This is what pays their bills. Major source of income for Mozilla is Google paying to be default search engine

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