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Comment by AstralSerenity | Hacker News Reader

Firefox and its derivatives remain the only true alternative at this point.

You can still install uBlock Origin in Brave, assuming you don't mind the crypto stuff and how they pay it out (or, rather don't) to site owners. Even Firefox feels a little weird now with the advent of Mozilla Advertising.

Very much a lesser of all evils situation.

You can, but ultimately Brave is downstream of Chrome and their stated intention of supporting Manifest V2 "for as long as [they're] able" doesn't inspire as much confidence.

Firefox is also the only open alternative to Chromium at the moment, so I prefer to endorse it instead.

Brave has its own Rust based Adblocker BUILD IN. That is at the very core of the Browser, uses the exact same filter lists uBlock Origin and all the other use. There is no point in using uBlock origin in Brave at all. I have been using Brave for years now and the adblocker pretty much like uBlock. Never looked back. I think it even inspired by uBlock but the fact they can even integrate it tighter with Chromium makes more then than an extension written in JS.

uBlock Origin does a bit more than applying community maintained filter lists though. I regularly use its capability to add custom filters for instance. Is that also possible in Brave?

Yes

For now. We’ll see how long it takes for them to integrate their Brave Bucks for either enabling the blocker or whitelisting ads.

We would not do that on principle, but imagine we're the mustache twirlers you fantasize we are: we'd light our brand on fire doing any such thing, lose all our lead users, stop growing and start shrinking. Think / Type / Post is the Ready / Aim / Fire analogue you seek.

I know that you probably went with Chromium based on the way your relationship with Mozilla ended, but man... I'll never have a Chromium based browser as my daily driver, I simply never trusted the ad company to not do what they ended up doing in the end (killing ad blockers). Brave will always be a no go for me for this reason. And now more than ever, we really need some company with real fire power to take the reins of the Firefox source code and create a real trustable fork.

Separate reply that ritual impurity or blind black-box rejection of open source Chromium/Blink seems also to suffer from emotionalism over reason. See

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...

This is a choice we made. As I wrote in my last reply, I think we would have died trying to get Gecko/Graphene with a Web front end up to competitive scratch vs. Chrome (nm Firefox).

A Firefox fork would have gone over badly with some potentially large number of Mozilla/Firefox fans, and we'd still lack key elements not part of the Mozilla open source (at the time, e.g., Adobe's CDM for HTML5 DRM). On the upside we'd have more UX customizability.

But our choice of Chromium/Blink (via Electron, so we had Web front end upside without Firefox extensions) was not a slam dunk choice. It involved trade-offs, as all engineering does. One downside is we have to audit and network-test for leaks and blunders, which often come from Chromium upstream:

https://x.com/BrendanEich/status/1898529583546421322

Huh, I was under the impression that you were forking Chromium itself instead of building over Electron. Or are you talking about a past, post-Gecko decision that had to be dropped as well?

Yes, please read https://brianbondy.com/blog/174/the-road-to-brave-10.

No, we started with Gecko (on Graphene, a sandboxing multiprocessor framework from b2g/FirefoxOS). We switched for hard-nosed wins of Chromium (as part of Electron) because out of the box vs. Gecko, most rows in the spreadsheet favored Chromium decisively. This is covered in

https://brianbondy.com/blog/174/the-road-to-brave-10

Why do you write "probably... based on... relationship ended"? Brave as a startup does not have time for feels not realz, pathos-over-logos nonsense. I recommend you avoid it in your work efforts too.

Thanks for the replies. I did not knew that you started with Gecko. Anyway, Brave is my go to advice when a regular user asks for a mobile browser, it just works out of the box. Not for me, and I still hope to see a Firefox fork becoming the main Chrome competitor in the future.

Firefox reborn will be a tough turnaround job —- Ladybird could be the better path.

I get it. I run FF as my primary browser (mostly because I don't want to see the internet devolve into a Blink mono-culture).

But, I always recommend Brave for less-technical folks. It just works! My FF setup includes a number of extensions, some of which need a bit of tuning to be useful. Then you have to deal with issues in websites that just don't properly support FF, etc. My grandmother can install Brave and simply start browsing. Things just work without extra config or tinkering.

> install uBlock Origin in Brave

There's no need to do it, their built-in adblocker supports the same rule lists.

https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

But does it support blocking JavaScript, large media elements, social widgets, and fonts?

Yes, you can block elements directly from the context menu. I use it all the time on Reddit.

There's also built in blocking under brave://settings/shields for Javascript and social features.

It doesn't have a specific feature to block fonts AFAIK but it does have fingerprint protection if that's your concern.

Brave's adblocker supports the standard `$font` resource type modifier on adblock rules as well.

Thanks, TIL!

What I specifically mean by 'large media elements' is that I currently have the uBlock option active to 'Block media elements larger than [50] KB'. (Where the 50 is a spinner so I can increase or decrease the size if I want.)

I would like to know this, too. It does not seem to be on the list of features unless they are referring to it via "cosmetic filtering". I often block particular elements on websites.

You can block elements, there's an option on the right click context menu to do it visually.

I switched to Brave last week after the whole Firefox fiasco. I installed uBlock Origin after there were some ads that got through.

e.g. on DuckDuckGo.

There is an Aggressive setting for Brave Shields, which you can set either per-site in the Shields menu from the URL bar, or globally in brave://settings/shields - that should take care of SERP ads and other first-party placements.

Luckily, Firefox has several forks that strip that telemetry.

Brave has a native adblocker that lets basically nothing through, though it can be configured as desired. Crypto stuff is opt-in, though there is a little monochrome button for it on the browser that one can disable with a right click.

Another day, another subtle insinuation that Brave is the only Chrome fork anyone uses. Are you people being paid to do this?

As I see it, Brave is the only Chromium-based browser with a competitive Mv2-deprecation-resistant adblocker. If adblocking is important to you - and it is, to many people - then Brave literally is the only one worth considering. Not to mention it is open source, unlike most of the others.

(I work on Brave's adblocker, and FWIW the folks who work for Brave are very open about their affiliation when commenting about it online)

Or maybe it's just popular? Recommend something else if you don't like it rather than just insinuating crap about people who do.

It is not a subtle insinuation, Brave is the defacto only browser apart from Chrome right now. All the rest are niche and irrelevant if you measure adblock, compatibility and widely subpar privacy protection.

There is some bitching about the ads crypto token, but that is entirely optional, so complaints are mostly fear and dogma. And to be honest, is a fascinating new approach to ads that suvberts the current state of affairs in the advertising market.

Do you have thoughts about Kagi/Orion browser? I've been using it for a bit now and I've been pleased with the ad blocking capabilities and the ability to have ublock origin on my iPhone and iPad. The browser definitely has scales but it's usable for me at this point.

Not open source.

Your comment was downvoted into oblivion, but it's a very valid point. There is a significant number of GNU/Linux users who value the freedoms granted by FLOSS licensing, so I believe Orion not being a FLOSS project is a valid argument against it - specifically in context of GNU/Linux (as a part of Free Software movement).

At least it certainly leaves me (personally) having second thoughts, even though I'm no purist and use proprietary software (but try prefer free software if I can).

macOS only

Linux is coming, but that still leaves Windows and Android (and iOS?) out.

There is an iOS version https://apps.apple.com/app/id1484498200

How long will Mozilla be around for, though?

If the Google, Pocket and other ad money dries up, Mozilla the company may go away but the Firefox browser itself will continue on because it's open source. As an exclusively Firefox user for over 20 years, I suspect if Mozilla the company dies, it will won't negatively impact Firefox much, at least in any meaningful way. In fact, the browser may be somewhat better off managed like the Blender or MAME projects.

In the last five years or so Firefox has increasingly introduced controversial changes that make it (IMHO) less good, primarily around interface design. And, from what I understand, Mozilla employs full-time UX designers who've been driving much of that. Of course, with Firefox it's still possible to modify, fix and restore all these recent interface "improvements" with user CSS but it's a constant annoyance to need to keep fixing it. Fortunately, there's an active community effort around restoring the Firefox interface and usability, exemplified by the brilliant Lepton project https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/releases.

My perception just watching the evolution of Firefox from the outside, is that it used to be a browser that celebrated the ethos of "Have it Your Way." However, Mozilla the company gets money to pay its executives and employees (millions in the case of more than one recent CEO) by actively driving users and eyeballs for Google, Pocket and other advertisers. So the company is highly incentivized to try myriad changes and redesigns to increase appeal to "the masses" of browser users. Thus, the UX keeps getting 'simplified' and 'de-cluttered' with advanced functionality 'de-prioritized' and add-on support demoted to second-class afterthought - instead of the shining key feature advanced users value most. Basically, in recent years the Firefox UX and end-user features have been pushed by the substantial payroll needs of the Mozilla company to become more like Chrome and Safari instead of embracing its unique position as a tool for power users who value advanced features, customization and extension. And it was all for naught because Firefox has continued to lose market share while ignoring (and even actively alienating) its niche community of fanatically devoted power users.

Do you think the open source community is capable of maintaining Firefox without Mozilla? I find that doubtful. Even if they did, without Mozilla, Cloudflare and friends would start trying to kill Firefox like they do to other independent browsers.

Do elaborate...

As long as Google pays them to remain alive to reinforce the narrative that Chrome isn't a monopoly.

That deal is on the chopping block as part of the DOJ's lawsuit.

Yep, very likely.

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/03/doj-google-must-sell-...

Now, why do I have this feeling that it will be bought by some entity very close to the current US administration?

It's easy to block ads on an entire system DNS level, instead of using browser plugins.

This way you're missing out on specific js patches for sites with hard to block ads (like YouTube)

That's a special case, which can be solved by buying YouTube premium. For general ad-blocking, the DNS filters work great.

What incentives does this enforce in the market? Strangling smaller players and reinforcing the dominant ones.

"We understand some users don't want ads so to monetize our product we allow those users to pay and not see ads"

Your response: "I want to keep my cake and eat it too."

I have a solution for you, stop using YouTube if you feel so strongly that a video platform should be free to use.

I'm paraphrasing in the quotes, they aren't real quotes...

How does that work on a smartphone?

You install NextDNS from the App Store.

...so long as you're not in a market where they automatically opt you in to sending all your DNS requests to a for-profit company without asking, and if you are, you remember to set up a canary domain or go and update your settings for every new install and new profile.

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