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Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried Brave?

Brave is adware.

Technically, both Chrome and Firefox are adware too, since Google's main business is ads, and Firefox/Mozilla get a lot of money from Google to display Google as a search engine in Firefox (an ad :) )

Firefox doesn't sell BATs, in-browser notification ads, or new tab takeovers. The closest you can get is a pinned site in the new tab page (new installs only) and ads in Pocket, or whatever they're calling that new tab thing these days.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/solutions/

https://brave.com/brave-ads/browser/

Calling Firefox adware is a stretch at best, and disingenuous at worst. Adware doesn't mean that the software survives because of one advertisement that that user can turn off.

Only if you opt-in to that misfeature, last I checked. It's opt-in, not opt-out.

I don't know, Brave says it's every third new tab. https://brave.com/brave-ads/browser/

Looks like I'm getting a ProtonMail ad every few new tabs. I never noticed because I've never looked at the new tab page. Doesn't noticeably slow it down to have the ad there, luckily.

So, to reiterate: Brave is adware.

The new tab ads can be disabled with 2 clicks.

I love how quickly the goalpost moves from "No ads" to "Only opt in ads" to "Ads can be disabled with two clicks."

Quit coping and just admit it, Brave is adware. If you like it, that's cool, totally your choice. It's fast, performant adware. But it's adware all the same.

Firefox has ads in the same places.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy

whataboutism gets you nowhere. Brave is still adware.

As is Firefox, and Chrome.

So really, there's no point in singling it out.

It's strange you're so adamant to label Brave adware while dismissing concerns that Firefox engages in very similar "adware" practices.

It might be adware but I’ve actually never noticed the ads!

Also it’s the only browser on my phone that I can use to browse the web without ads…

When we're talking about reasons to switch browsers, then saying they both have the same behavior is not whataboutism. It's extremely important context to the complaint.

Been running it since 2021. The adblocker is simply great. A d keeps getting better.

and*

It's good enough when some terrible lazy web designer only tested on Chrome. It does nothing to protect against the future when Google decides they are sick of people trying to get around their Ad Block ban and change the license because no one has any real alternatives anymore.

Also blocking is not as good as intentionally poisoning with something like Ad Nauseum

What’s the current licensing mode? Can they fork their own version at that point in time and develop it open source ?

No Chromium fork developer not called Microsoft have the resources to maintain a web browser engine.

But focus on the license overlooks a more important threat. Google made Web Environment Integrity so services could require approved devices, operating systems, and browsers. Resistance led Google to remove it from desktop for now. But they kept something like it in Android. And they will try again.

Chromium uses the BSD license. Google could take Chromium closed source tomorrow without needing to change the license.

A few years ago. Crashed constantly and didn’t support tagging bookmarks.

Never crashed once for me.

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