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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?

Yeah, the consumer side Teams app is already different in UX than the corporate one. Wouldn't have been terribly difficult to brand that as Skype and market it as such.

Yes, on desktop. Mobile Firefox still has none, though that should change within this year or the next.

Brave lets you add custom filter lists and write your own filters. The blocker can also do eg. CNAME uncloaking, which even full-fat uBO can't do on Chromium.

The BAT was Brave's to begin with as far as I know, part of a pool to promote the launch of their tipping system. It makes perfect sense to return the BAT users could assign from the pool to creators back to the pool if the creators didn't sign up.

Which is not to say that the tipping UI wasn't a hot mess, which it was. Hard to tell who was onboard, who wasn't and eg. Tom Scott got a bunch of tips when he had no interest in the platform whatsoever.

> BAT is also different from adblocking, because it monetizes other people's content.

It doesn't. The browser literally shows you toaster popups all by itself, and gives you some pocket change amounts of BAT for viewing them.

That's what a lot of us have. Brave's own ad systems are opt-in, and a majority of users don't opt-in. It's a minority that are interested in the crypto features. I just left the crypto stuff off, hid the icons and have a degoogled Chromium with strong adblock and some nice quality of life extras.

Site isolation is one: Firefox doesn't sandbox websites from each other on non-Windows platforms, and even on Windows its sandboxing solution is just worse than Chromium's. They're doing work on implementing sandboxing more widely, mind, but still have a long road ahead of them to get to parity.

In addition, since their adblocker isn't an extension and doesn't care about extension APIs, they can do things even Manifest v2 Chrome extensions can't. For example, full-fat uBO can't do CNAME uncloaking on Chromium due to API limitations, but can do it on Firefox which has the APIs. Brave is Chromium-based, but since Shields isn't an extension they've built CNAME uncloaking into it.

Purchase referral code swap thing? As far as I know, nothing like that has existed. There's a ton of FUD "reporting" about Brave out there intended to drive users away.

There was a function that'd suggest a campaign partner while typing things in the address bar (eg. "binan" for binance.com, it'd show an ad for binance as one of the dropdown suggestions). For one day, it had a bug that if you wrote a complete url (eg. binance.com) in it and that matched a campaign partner, it'd give the ad as a suggestion. The bug was fixed within one day of being reported and the whole ad suggestion thing turned off by default.

As far as I know, they've never done anything to referral codes within websites. The current browser does have a function where if you right-click a link, it gives you an option to copy a clean link by stripping tracking nonsense out of it. Eg. X links just become plain links to tweets and so on.

It does, but Teams is mostly a thing within businesses. Skype is a consumer side brand, which MS is scuttling in favour of Teams (which is a really weird brand to try to use for consumer-side customers). They could've used Teams architecture/app and branded it as Skype, it would've made way more sense than Teams (free) which is what they're doing now. Consumer side Microsoft Accounts and business are different worlds, it'd help MS a lot to speak about them clearly.

But MS and good product naming, well...

Yeah, I just checked to reply to another commenter, and Slack's just expensive:

Slack Pro's 8€/mo/user

Teams Essentials is 4€/user/mo

M365 Business Basic is 6€/user/mo

It's not just the enterprise stranglehold, though that's surely part of it. But Teams, at least today and on Windows, is GOOD. It works well for internal meetings and chat, calls are good, and on the unregistered outsider webinar attendee experience, Teams has just been better than Zoom in my experience.

Also, even if you just want to buy Teams, from what I've checked the barebones Teams only packages MS sells for smaller orgs are still cheaper than Slack. Actually, let's see... yeap, Slack Pro's 8€/mo/user, Teams Essentials is 4€/user/mo, M365 Business Basic is 6€/user/mo.

It definitely supports both audio and video calls.

Proton Docs has seemed fine to me.

That's true in good part. But when it comes to leftist activists specifically, it's war for Musk. His son transitioning didn't exactly endear him to the ideology.

> Deplatforming completely failed in preventing the rise of the right wing over the past two administrations; if anything, it reinforced their delusions of persecution

Is it delusion anymore if you're systematically barred from everywhere? The Twitter Files also exist, showing active government-driven censorship efforts.

The dev just drank all the FUD Kool-Aid, not much else there to it.

Brave did start on Gecko, but migrated to Chromium.

Vivaldi's inhouse UI code isn't open source, but is visible for users to verify AFAIK.

I just use Brave with a shitton of profiles. That does cause problems for mobile use since no Android browser dev has bothered with proper profiles or ability to install multiple copies of the browser, except for Google I guess.

With Brave you don't need to, even for sync.

Brave. Vertical tabs, privacy, everything sync is e2ee (unlike eg. Edge).

Vivaldi may also be worth a look. Similar setup: User-oriented team, vertical tabs, e2ee sync. If you like a thorough browser history, I think Vivaldi keeps a more detailed browsing history than most other Chromium browsers.

> Some parts you ignored: "the SPLC's classification and listings of hate groups (organizations that "attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics") and anti-government extremists are widely relied upon by academic and media sources" > > Why would academia rely on them, given that the prime currency in academia is intellectual honesty?

This is outright wrong. That is the ideal of academia, yes. The practice of academia is rather different: They're very politically partisan, and especially in the humanities (where the SPLC's input is most relevant) academia is very prone to doing things like citing shoddier studies that cater to the academics' own (liberal-left) biases and ignoring ideologically inconvenient ones:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201906...

Academics are not selected for bravery, they're selected for conformity.

Hell, the whole peer review and working off of grant money things mean you have to please your (left-lib or Marxian) colleagues to get the money to do research at all, and then to get your results incorporated into the wider body of work.

Looks like a decent set. They support simple tables, which is great. https://proton.me/support/drive-create-edit-docs

Will be interesting to see what it can and can't do, but this is certainly welcome and came about much faster than I thought it would.

Don't know about oversized, it felt partly more that eg. Baker was mostly interested in Mozilla as a platform for activism, not in making a good tool for users. The new interim CEO seems to have breathed life into actual browser development.

EU law does force them to advertise alternative search engines. I just updated Chrome on my work laptop and they gave me a slate of search engines. My Chrome defaults to Brave Search now.

Definitely not especially recent:

https://gosling.psy.utexas.edu/scales-weve-developed/short-t...

They can give multiple different kinds of answers if instructed to approach an issue differently. Yet, all modern AI services run into very clear, artificial guardrails if you ask them to do certain things (you have to work harder to get them to describe white people positively, while they happily write eg. poems praising nonwhite people, and claim saying positive things about whites is potentially insensitive and promotes stereotypes). Often even if you point out to them that they are being unfair and applying disparate standards to people based on skin color and that this is prima facie racist, they have a really hard time overriding their Californian coercions. They'll acknowledge their mistake one sentence and revert to a moralistic screed the next.

Yet eg. Chinese cultural output is largely insipid and lacking that je ne sais quoi that's appreciated in many other countries' outputs.