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Comment by Steve6 | Hacker News Reader

I migrated from Firefox to Brave years ago, and it's been incredible. It's easy to turn off the crypto stuff and turn on more advanced privacy protection. Then it's just a fast browser with awesome adblocking.

My favorite recent feature has been Brave Scriptlets, which are just little javascript functions you can run on specific sites. I've replaced most of the add ons I used with small scripts. Pretty nice.

I would prefer an engine not built on Chromium... but I've lost faith in Mozilla. I'm glad that Firefox added a built in adblock engine, but it seems too late too late. Brave has been awesome, and being Chromium based gives them time to keep working on stuff that matters.

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The Greasemonkey Firefox addon that allows you to run site specific JS has been around for two decades [1].

[1] https://www.greasespot.net/2005/03/

It certainly is great to have first-party support for such a simple feature. It doesn't have to support the whole GM_ API

And they even have a name: userscripts! [1]

Chrome also used to natively support userscripts back in 2010 [2] but they mostly killed it off

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Userscript

[2] https://lifehacker.com/chrome-4-supports-greasemonkey-usersc...

There's also Violentmonkey [1][2] (which is said to be more lightweight) and Tampermonkey.

Tampermonkey has analytics enabled, and is closed source.

Here's a comprehensive summary on all three. [3]

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/violentmonkey

[2] https://violentmonkey.github.io/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26057106

"The first thing you have to do is to turn off the cryptocurrency stuff."

Fantastic first impression. I'm good, thanks.

Lol. That's actually pretty bad for a web browser.

Can you imagine the absolute boiling rage in these comments if Firefox implemented the same kind of opt-out "crypto stuff".

It is opt-in. The amount of FUD in these threads is unbelievable, both against Mozilla, Brave, or anything else really.

There is a single toggle to turn this off, if it makes people rage so much for something you get for free (I realize not free beer/freedom) then I don't know what else to say.

To be clear, the toggle is to turn off the 'wallet' feature that isn't even enabled until you use it. So you are just disabling seeing the thing at all... with a simple toggle.

You are missing the forest for the trees my friend

I also have to disable the "acceptable ads", with a simple toggle.

And the AI bullshit from their builtin search engine, I'd guess that too is a simple toggle.

Without googling, I'd put good money that there's a thing called "Brave VPN" in the homepage by default, and I have to disable that with a simple toggle.

In two years I may have to disable the crypto-miner, still with a simple toggle, of course, very user convenient.

This is the entire industry in a nutshell. Everyone, from every direction, at all times, is trying to squeeze you for a few cents with antagonistic "features" enabled by default. I have very little patience for this.

"But it's a simple click." Have some self respect, we can do better than this.

Correct. You have to spend a while in settings disabling stuff.

The browser does not re-enable the things you have disabled, but they keep implementing new stuff that you have to disable too.

It’s annoying, although that’s how most software works nowadays (and I include Firefox unfortunately). You have to disable a lot of stuff to make it usable.

I don’t see how supporting Chromium is better than not supporting an alternate rendering engine. Firefox for the end-user is fantastic.

People build on chromium for the same reason they build on Linux. I’d personally prefer if they built on illumos or bsd but at a certain point people would rather spend their innovation budget higher up the stack and benefit from the platform that has the most open source engineers working on it.

Except it turns out that it's a good thing that the alternative implementations exist. Standards are meaningless if there's only one implementer.

Preaching to the choir!

It's too bad that Mozilla does everything they can to alienate its users, with failed attempts to attract a different but non-existent new user-base. Without them, and with Safari being run by a company that likes to tie its software to its hardware, there's pretty much no reasonable non-Chrome-based web browsers, so it's the new Internet Explorer, and many web pages only work on it, because no one tests their web pages on anything else.

I simply have no idea why people hate on Firefox so much. I mean it, it feels like an outlet for frustration toward an org people think might listen.

With current standartization the issue of "page not working on non-Chrome browser" is non-existent. Thanks god nowadays everything (pages) work everywhere in very similar manner, I am using chrome, firefox, safary and opera and have zero problems last 5+ years. Old days are gone.

People online rant about Firefox all the time for adding stuff Google and Microsoft shoved into their Chromium forks a few years ago, but when they do it the response is always "well what did you expect from <x>" while when Mozilla does it, the response is "this is an outrage, I'm switching to <some browser that already has the shitty feature anyway>".

I don't think there is or ever will be a "new internet explorer". If your page works in Chrome, there's a 99% chance it'll work in Firefox and Safari. Web standards have been unified to the point painting and layout algorithms are now part of the spec. It's why Ladybird managed to get a decently compatible engine in an extremely short time frame.

And people treat Mozilla like the devil when while they make mistakes, they routinely fix them too. E.g: when people had concerns about the AI stuff, they added a general opt out with a feature-by-feature opt-in.

To make an obviously unproven and not universal observation: I feel like it's people who just like the google integration in Chrome and want an excuse to run it, even though they feel like they should use Firefox because it's more compatible with their world view, so they latch onto any issues Firefox has to go "see, they are all the same anyway", and then just repeat vague "Mozilla sucks" stuff.

> I feel like it's people who just like the google integration in Chrome and want an excuse to run it, even though they feel like they should use Firefox because it's more compatible with their world view

What world view is this? Considering that Mozilla is a puppet Google basically owns if you look at where the funding comes from.

So like... Google Chrome with adblocker and Tampermonkey bundled? Just need to disable the cryptocurrency stuff? You don't really make it sound good.

What's the alternative if you want full ad-blocking in a Chromium browser? I use Firefox normally and wouldn't trust Brave, but there are some sites FF doesn't work with, so it's understandable why some people wouldn't use it.

What doesn't work with Firefox?

I don't remember, it's usually a random poorly-made site like the DMV or a budget airline. Reddit used to have issues but not anymore.

Helium(comes with UBO) or Ungoogled Chromium with UBO sideloaded.

There's a minimal version called Brave Origin https://brave.com/sv/ublock-origin-alternative/

Even better now that they have a paid offering with all that crap stripped out (Brave Origin) which is free on Linux.

Everyone has made these Brave debloat tools that basically do the same thing as their ridiculous Origin offering.

To sell for $60 a web browser that technically has all the features removed is a pretty goofy move.

Eh that’s a common business model. Pay to get the ads removed is basically the same thing.

Well, I'll link to this video review by Techlore.

Brave Just Released a Paid Browser: Here's What You Need to Know https://youtube.com/watch?v=3i5KH0l895o

Just watched it. Brave Origin seems like a superior product in every single way.

I don't trust Brave though and don't want to use chromium.

> a pretty goofy move

I'm doing a goofy thing and buying it, despite knowing I can debloat Brave, because I already do that. I didn't know this existed till I read this thread. I've been benefitting from Brave for many years now; it's great that they've provided a way to pay for this without dealing with the crypto stuff, and I'm extremely happy to do so, because they deserve some of my money.

I'll also pay and support their work to provide a really good browser (which needed a bit debloating).

That's such a weird reaction. There's constantly, for years, people here asking for Firefox to just start offering a paid version to get away from needing support from Google. And yet when someone actually does that apparently it's goofy and we should just be manually stripping that out without paying.

If you can't afford it or don't want to pay, fine. But why are you trying to influence other people to do that by labelling it "goofy"?

How would you strip those things out mobile, by the way?

Free or "libre?" Brave Origin seems like a good idea, but I wouldn't use it until it becomes part of mainstream Linux repos and can be built independently.

Both. Brave is FOSS.

uBlock Origin was and is the BEST adblock. And it was one of the fist suggested add-ons when you get in the add-ons page. It should have been integrated.

> It's easy to turn off the crypto stuff

I'm living under a rock, but my first thought was that you turned off TLS.

If your mind goes to TLS when you read crypto, you surely do live under a rock ... in bliss.

As a developer, personally I would be worried if that wasn't my first thought when someone uses browser and crypto together :D

Instead of turning it off, you can just make it useless: https://youtu.be/M1si1y5lvkk

Why not Cromite (or Ultimatum, Helium)? Hard to understand why someone reading HN use browser without extensions support.

Brave has extensions support. You can get them from the regular chrome store for them.

not on phone

even less reason to use it on desktop

Do any of them support sync ootb, selfhosted?

I don't think the parent poster is talking about Android.

i've never known what to think about brave because it was being pitched by cryptocurrency bros so i've always ignored its existence. who are these guys and is it genuinely good software?

Brave has probably the most comprehensive and transparent page of any browser available about what features it supports, how it makes money, and who is behind it.

https://brave.com/about/

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