I didn’t understand what this meant until I dug up more information, especially since I thought Brave was already based on Chromium. Turns out that so far only the browser engine was Chromium based. Now its user interface is also transitioning from an in-house open source framework called Muon [1] to Chromium.
This is what an announcement more than six months ago (from March 2018) [2] says:
> Brave for Windows, macOS, and Linux currently use the Chromium rendering engine, but (unlike Brave for Android) it uses a custom HTML and JavaScript user interface. Technical readers will know that we call the runtime for this user interface Muon, which is a more secure fork of Electron, and which therefore combines Chromium and Node.js to enable applications built using JavaScript and HTML user interfaces and Node modules for the application logic.
After getting rid of Chrome recently (not that I was using it much before), I’ve been using Firefox (my favorite browser), Safari and sometimes Brave.
I love the irony in “You are not a product“ from a commercial product (open source, I know) designed to monetize surfing (aka pay-to-surf), as if this is what the internet is about. I think we should resist such an effort and stick with projects (not companies) that want to keep the internet as it was meant to be, ie Mozilla Firefox.
No problem with monetization but I want a browser that puts me first, not a middleman that tries to profit from the trend to subvert the open culture of the internet, pretending they put my privacy first. It’s an excuse, not the main purpose of this browser.
The fundamental question is who decides. Ideally the browser is the product, but not the user. For that, the browser needs to solve the question of the flow of money.
Using Firefox makes you the product, because Mozilla monetizes you with selling you to Google. That is not a browser that "puts you first" or promotes the "open culture of the internet".
Giving people the ability to chose whether they want to participate in the monetization makes Brave more of a browser that puts "you first".
Besides that, Mozilla is basically a company, and their non-profit organization is basically a fig leaf. Even if you don't agree with this assumption, the browser is as commercialiced as any other project, as proven by Pocket, Google search partnership and Amazon affiliate links.
The Brave browser also doesn't claim this is "what the internet is about". On the contrary, the default settings in Brave make the Web essentially non-commercial and ad-free.
Finally and philosophically, there is no collective "we" you talk about, only users who are free to chose from a variety of browsers and products.
Other than that, there is definitely some form of irony in the fact that the people on brave.com wear a cap with a corporate logo, but are implied as being free from corporate influence. The message would be more consistent if there were no logo on the cap, and one could argue this implies that Brave is at best a transition towards a better state.
> Firefox makes you the product, because Mozilla monetizes you with selling you to Google
That's hyperbole.
Firefox was the first browser that made switching search engines or dealing with multiple search engines easy. Firefox was also the first to have usable add-ons for blocking invasive ads and trackers, always promoted as the best add-ons in their addons.mozilla.org. The pro-privacy culture has basically grown on top of Firefox.
I'm using DuckDuckGo on Firefox and I installed it on iOS too, because it makes it easier than Safari to deal with multiple search engines.
As for Google Search, people forget that Google Search is first and foremost the best search engine and most people expect nothing less. And when they tried switching that default to others, people bitched and moaned about it. Google is so far ahead of everybody that for the general population it has no competition. The same reason for why Apple cannot replace Google's Search and cannot build their own search engine, so might as well make some money off of Google.
This is not selling the users to Google, this is simply providing a good user experience by default. If anybody wants to help and fight this, then the first step would be to provide a better search engine. Don't get me wrong, I like DuckDuckGo and will keep using it due to privacy concerns, but for many searches, especially local ones, the difference is night and day. Not to mention that DDG is also dependent on Microsoft's Bing and it will be a sad day when Microsoft closes access to its APIs. Because apparently it's pretty expensive to have your own web crawler ;-)
What would Google do if Mozilla blocks all ads browser wide by default? (Which they can't do adhoc because it is probably explitically forbidden in their contract with Google)
The answer will give you a clue about the question who is the product.
Irregardless of semantics, Mozilla is entirely dependent on the privacy invading ad system.
Everyone knows that default settings matter, as around 80% of users never change much in their browsers, and it is this majority user base which forms the foundation for the contracts between browser makers and search engines.
If Mozilla blocks ads by default, the question isn't what Google would do, the far better question is what will the publishers do.
If big publishers start to block Firefox's User-Agent, it's game over for Firefox. And yes, publishers are increasingly more aggressive in blocking users with ad-blockers installed.
Or did you think that the content producers will simply stand by while their revenue vanishes?
Nope, not going to happen and it will be getting worse, before it gets better. Ad-block users have been ignored only because they were a minority.
Want to bet that they'll try extending the DRM support to the HTML content itself and thus make it illegal to block ads? It's going to be fun.
> What would Google do if Mozilla blocks all ads browser wide by default? (Which they can't do adhoc because it is probably explitically forbidden in their contract with Google)
Just a few things:
1. Mozilla did explore this a number of years ago, concluded that
a. if you block all ads, you break the revenue of pretty much the entire web, so that's probably not something you want;
b. if you block all ads, you break loading of many websites, and that's not something an established browser can afford to do;
c. if you do either, websites are just going to block your browser;
2. Mozilla actually came up with ideas for blocking all ads without breaking the web, decided that there were too many variables, too many ways to break everything by accident, and did not pursue this plan – however, as far as I can tell, Brave either reinvented the same ideas or picked up that plan.
Also, to answer your specific question, Google pre-emptively reacted against any attempt of Mozilla by launching Chrome. If you recall, they launched Chrome pretty much because they could not buy Mozilla.
> Irregardless of semantics, Mozilla is entirely dependent on the privacy invading ad system.
While we live in a world where ads = privacy invasion, this doesn't have to be the case. If you look at recent versions of Firefox and ongoing projects, Mozilla has stepped up on privacy protection and keeps doing so.
Again, it's hard to do without breaking the web. But some can be done, one step at a time, and Mozilla is working on it.
> Everyone knows that default settings matter, as around 80% of users never change much in their browsers, and it is this majority user base which forms the foundation for the contracts between browser makers and search engines.
> Besides that, solving technical problems is possible if there is the will to do it.
Right now, the problem is that it breaks either the web or the browser.
The alternative currently being pursued by Mozilla (and the W3C) is WebPayments, which should pave the way for websites paid for by micropayments, rather than ads.
I disagree. I don't have anything against paid software but it's not the only possibility, a lot of the software I use are open source projects maintained by volunteers, not products. I ideologically refuse to consider that every piece of software is a product.
Now regarding Firefox things are not really clear cut, Mozilla is effectively non-profit but clearly their well being (and the salaries of the people working for it) clearly revolves around their browser having a decent market share. The whole "selling you to Google" stems from that.
> I ideologically refuse to consider that every piece of software is a product.
1. Who pays for the hosting? How do they pay for it?
2. Who pays for the site development? How do they pay for it?
3. Who pays for the site content? How do they pay for it?
The vast majority of sites out there are commercial products, in some forms or another. Even Wikipedia is, they're periodically begging for money.
Since we have this problem that running websites costs money, how are they going to pay for it? The ad model is quite reviled by techies. What's the alternative? How do websites make money to keep running?
I don't understand, are you talking about code hosting or simply just considering web services?
Regardless, hosting is a separate issue. You have open source projects who provide a piece of software that you're free to host yourself or pay somebody else to host for you. See for instance the Roundcube webmail.
It's similar to how I need to buy a computer to be able to run Emacs, that doesn't mean that Emacs itself is a product. Of course many web services are actual products and you pay for both the development and the hosting.
Here we're talking about a web browser though so the point is moot anyway.
Software is not only web sites/applications.
In that very same application domain there are pieces of software like the Apache http server. AFAIK the Apache Foundation is founded by donations.
Is httpd a product? They're not selling it and apparently they don't sell data about its users.
Ok, but my questions haven't been answered: how do we pay for websites?
There's the ad model, which people don't like, the subscription model, which almost no one uses (it's used successfully for webapps, but not by websites, there's maybe 10 or 20 successful subscription based sites in the billions of sites out there).
What else is there that doesn't involve somehow turning the browser into a product?
Putting ads in your websites doesn't turn your browser into a product any more than putting ad into a PDF turns your PDF reader into a product or getting robocall turn your phone into (more of) a product. That's completely orthogonal.
Well in the case of Brave that might not be completely true because they have this whole agenda regarding ads but that's specific to this particular browser, not a fundamental aspect of web browsing technology. ELinks is not a product because you can use it to view ads for instance.
Putting ads in my websites turns me into a product.
We need to turn this whole ecosystem on its head. How do we do that? I'd rather have the browser manage payments to the sites I use based on some usage statistics, but in this case, we still need some sort of payment system, probably centralized. It might not be turning the actual browser into a product, but it does make it put it awfully close to one.
Firefox seems like they respect the user to me. Putting Google, the most popular search engine, as the clearly visible and easily changeable default makes the most sense, in my head.
> Using Firefox makes you the product, because Mozilla monetizes you with selling you to Google. That is not a browser that "puts you first" or promotes the "open culture of the internet".
Why not? The idea of being targeted with more effective ads based on what I look at is microscopic when compared to the things that got me excited about the internet originally, and it doesn't even seem to contradict them.
Without rejecting ads outright (which is IMO a valid position), it's hard to argue against ads based on site content, anonymous user statistics, or terms of the current search.
The most objectionable thing is tracking specific users, which results in a lot of data that can be abused, and further power imbalance of companies and states vs. citizens. The latter clearly does contradict early internet ideals.
I think it’s worse than that, I mean, it’s anecdotal but I think their premise is flawed. Because I don’t think enough people are going to enable adds for it to ever be viable option for advertisers.
I mean, their business case evolves around advertisers paying users to watch adds instead of paying Facebook or google. But Facebook only earns a few dollars per user per year, who in their right mind would turn off their adblocker for a few dollars? Probably not people that have an income which is attractive to advertisers...
Then there is the part where they want users to pay for content, but that already exists with superior tech, lower middleman fees and better consumer safety. I know, I know, crypto will get there or whatever, but when is the last time an inferior option ever disrupted anything?
One the other hand, if they didn’t put their premise/vision of a revolutionised web ahead of their users, then they might as well be working on Firefox.
> But Facebook only earns a few dollars per user per year, who in their right mind would turn off their adblocker for a few dollars?
This is a good point and it is interesting to think about the economic logic of advertising. It seems to me the burden it places on it's viewers is far greater than the (often questionable) value it brings to the advertiser. A huge unaccounted-for externality.
In fact, when you consider the huge psychological weight that a consumerist society places on it's citizens, and the attendant healthcare costs, you could easily make the case that even strictly in economic terms, advertising is a huge net negative, before even considering the social costs.
How much does my city make from all the billboards everywhere? It can't be more than a few dollars per person. I'd happily pay that much more in tax to have them all removed.
I'm willing to make a speculative bet on Brave/BAT. The existing user growth is good, and the incentives for their ad system are basically correct for everyone.
The product Brave is actually peddling is akin to anti-cheat software: It takes steps to prevent fraud throughout digital advertising and improve the cost effectiveness of digital ad campaigns. That pitch means that they have the ear of advertisers already, and it's only a question of executing on the rest. Given prodding, advertisers will cooperate in order to fix up the market because what they really want is a "commoditize your complements" scenario. They are not there to become adtech wizards. They want to find qualified customers for their primary business. If Brave succeeds in forming a coalition, you'll start to see businesses from other sectors talk it up and give users and content creators hard incentives to sign on. They can even use such marketing efforts as part of their own speculative plays on the currency.
On the user end of things, that means that Brave engages in the click fraud arms race, but with higher-powered weaponry than can be accessed from within Javascript. They get a deal that is a definite improvement on the status quo: they choose exactly when and where they want to see ads. For the other parts of the system, the cryptocurrency marketplace replaces most of the middlemen and associated incentives for fraud. If you're in the business of total control either way(whether it be "never-again-an-ad" or "I want to access as many users as possible"), it's a devil's bargain, but if you're interested in getting the Web on a more sustainable path where quality is encouraged, this is something that could do it.
Maybe it's just me but why do we have to make the web about other people making money? In the 90s there were plenty of websites ran by hobbyists and amateurs and even professionals who did it for the joy of their craft and even today there are loads.
Maybe I am being overly harsh but are we saying that a browser like Brave is required these days?
I don't think the web would be worse-off if all commercial sites disappeared: There will still be enough hobbyists, amateurs and pro's with $10-a-month blogs to provide whatever information I need.
For those that have more in depth content, videos, films and so on we already have subscription models for those and I can pick and choose what I want (I don't subscribe to anything other than Pluralsight tbh).
Why do we have to assume that every site on the web is a commercial entity with staff and overheads and that the web will collapse if we don't allow adverts?
The web worked perfectly well without all this tracking and abuse and by using browsers like Brave we are saying that we are ok with it.
There's a pretty hard limit to the volume and style of content that can be produced by amateurs and hobbyists.
For a start, it's limited to people who are already rich enough to have the time to spare.
But certain types of content - deep investigative journalism for example - should always cost significant amounts of money. You want the best people in the world at that craft to be able to spend as long as takes, and travel to wherever they need to go, to uncover the truth in a story. This kind of work plays a crucial role in society, by keeping a watch on the political, legal and corporate worlds and helping to expose corruption and abuses of power.
It's likely already the case that too little good investigative journalism is being done these days. We should be looking for ways to have more of it, not less.
Brave doesn't profit directly from advertising revenue. BAT is completely separate. The point is, specifically, to remove the incentive for the current trend of stealing your privacy by offering an incentive to directly pay content creators.
I find the irony in more prosaic details like a 2.1MB image [1] to show the new UI of "Secure, Fast & Private Web Browser" (for comparison optimized PNG8 is 351KB [2] and JPEG is 398KB [3]).
I agree Mozilla is a corporation, despite its marketing and brand efforts, everything else is very corporate. It started out as a foundation with corporation-as-necessity, but no longer the case. They are able to distance themselves from ad money through Google, but it's the same. If they could make more profit and growth, they would choose to do so.
A small example has twice been ads in the browser (now using local targeting), and if it was 100% a non-profit foundation goodie-goodie, would probably go with a default search engine like Duck Duck Go, but survival as a corporation prohibits otherwise. And I think that's totally okay, but I don't think we can pretend they aren't a corporation.
No. I mentioned "I think that's totally okay" and natural. My main point was only that Mozilla Corporation behaves as a corporation, internally and externally, not a non-profit foundation. They do have an external-facing mission / angle, but so does every other company.
Firefox isn’t doing much to stem the online dependency on ads. We really need an alternative monetization system. The internet is only half functioning if we still require massive corporations to intermediate between us and content providers.
It is doing a lot to stem the online dependency on tracking, however, which I think is far more important. DuckDuckGo monetises through as, and I have absolutely no problem with that.
Your specific tracking, perhaps not. Once it gets to a point where it influences election results in your country, or prevents you from getting insurance, etc., it does.
But no, DDG doesn't offer a paid option, as far as I know. (I also doubt there would be a sufficient market for that.)
It seems like giving you the ability to decide people to support when you want to (if you ever do) is fair game. I don't think I see any inconsistency here.
Brave is supposed to protect the privacy but in reality, their business model is about ads.
It's like pedophiles giving advices on how to protect your kids from danger.
Of course they know about it, and I wouldn't give my kids to them.
Brave is essentially trying to become a mix between a pay-to-surf and an rogue ad replacement software.
They have dozens of millions of dollars raised (= in debt), this is very big money to pay back at least 5 times.
By definition, since they are an ad company, they are ok to block the trackers, just not the ones that affects them.
For example, Brave doesn't block Yahoo & Bing ads and trackers, why ?
Advertiser pays Microsoft Bing, who pays Yahoo, who pays DuckDuckGo, who pays Brave.
To verify it, you can make a search on DuckDuckGo using Brave and check where the ads link point to by copy-pasting it ;)
Of course technically they could block these trackers but they are never going to do it.
The is the main revenue source of Brave, and this is one of the big reasons why DuckDuckGo is growing fast.
Monetize your search history like the old school toolbars.
Looks like they forgot to disclose this little conflict of interest.
If you check the commit history, there are really funny discoveries (woops adobe.com is whitelisted)
I have been using brave on android and really enjoy the experience. It is very similar to chrome and thus gives most of the advantages of chrome (opening browser after a long time feels very snappy, swipe to switch tabs). It also has convenient options to block ads and js placed very prominently at the url bar. It also has features like HTTPS everywhere and fingerprinting protection(haven't tried this one yet). Firefox on Android supports desktop extensions like uBlock origin, and I tried making it my default for some time, but brave is simply much more usable. The two shortcomings for Android firefox for me have been (a) No swipe to switch tabs, (b) Loading new pages is noticeable slower than Chrome/Brave.
Power consumed is high. Brave consistently shows up as the highest cpu using app. Is firefox better on battery? If so, I will give it another try, as that is a very worthwhile trade-off.
Yes! And now the dev tools can be docked to the edge of the webpage (they were floating in their own window before this update).
For anyone (like me) wishing to have a default browser per use case (surf, work, dev, hangout, etc.), have a look at this project (dynamic default browser switch, based on URL): https://github.com/netgusto/bowser
I've used the mobile version for a while, but switched back to Opera after Google Ads showed up on a web page in a popover, despite having been blocked. It was already Chromium-based. Opera doesn't have the flip-switch menu Brave has to switch off certain features, including Javascript (very helpful for disabling most those annoying cookie and GDPR consent popovers) but their ad blocker is quite effective.
Can someone outline the justification for the switch to Chromium and the difference between Chromium and Muon, which seems to be based on Chromium anyway?
Muon was a fork of electron, which included many patches for features required for a variety of desktop apps. The amount of packages ensures that it takes time to upgrade to new chromium releases (regression testing with the patches).
Since brave is just a browser, it does not need all of those extra patches and features. So it is simpler and easier to just roll with chromium directly.
Nah. Electron does not prioritize chromium version updates over everything else. They generally do so at their own pace, instead focusing more on other features and bug fixing.
It works fine for their intended userbase. For a browser that might be an issue due to exploits and vulnerabilities.
I can't find the Github-issue atm, but I'm guessing it was motivated by security (there's been a bunch of RCE-exploits in Electron), technical debt, and performance (Muon was an Electron-fork, and Electron is more than just Chromium).
We don't, but getting there on the web at scale is a long battle.
The W3C has been working on WebPayments [1] for several years. Once it lands on most browsers, it should enable websites to offer a choice between ads and micropayments.
But there are lots of problems to solve first, ranging from finding the right APIs and UXs to make sure that users won't end up paying by accident, or that children won't pay with their parent's browser without their agreement, to the fact that people don't use the same mechanisms for paying al over the world, to security issues, etc.
Ideally it would be a completely interoperable system/protocol - so nothing like say Paypal or Google Contributor that competitors would resist adopting anyways. Plus, the adoption from a single provider for payment services wouldn't be nearly as high as a protocol + hundreds of providers.
I'm nervous about switching browsers because if I have to switch back then I have to deal with importing all my bookmarks back. Does anyone have a good way of syncing bookmarks between all my browsers? The only thing I've seen is a quasi bookmark service that uses bookmarklets.
I will probably start using or at least trying it again when they publish version 1. For now, it's just not remotely comparable to Firefox et al. when it comes to customization, control and stability.
It's basically a chrome copy plus future abilities (for now). So Chrome is a better choice until now for me.
I was a huge Firefox fan, but having 50+ tabs open made the browser unusable - even the latest versions. I then switched reluctantly to Chrome, but always hated the UI.
Having downloaded Brave, it was love on first sight, looks good, works good, blocks ads. I very much miss all the Firefox extensions, I hope a lot will get ported eventually.
Oh, and Mozilla? You need to reboot your company/non-profit. I don't know what goes wrong there, but all the projects I found interesting got stopped (Persona), and the browser is no longer really great. It just /feels/ clunky.
> I was a huge Firefox fan, but having 50+ tabs open made the browser unusable - even the latest versions. I then switched reluctantly to Chrome, but always hated the UI.
Really? I haven't had any such problem with Firefox in years, and I tend to browser with a few hundred tabs open. What platform are you using?
> Oh, and Mozilla? You need to reboot your company/non-profit. I don't know what goes wrong there, but all the projects I found interesting got stopped (Persona), and the browser is no longer really great.
The process is actually very simple: if nobody uses it, it gets stopped :)
> It just /feels/ clunky.
Are you talking about versions more recent than 57? Because the performance boost during the last year has been huge.
>Really? I haven't had any such problem with Firefox in years, and I tend to browser with a few hundred tabs open. What platform are you using?
Windows at work and Macos/Linux at home. The situation has gotten better since browser extensions that save and restore all tabs reliably don't work with FF anymore. Now the browser usually forgets about 50% of my open tabs when I restart it...
It's my default Android browser because you can set it to block scripts and adverts by default and yet the option to trivially allow scripts in a site is a single click away.
It's so good at this I've uninstalled multiple apps (especially news and weather ones) and have started saving links to web pages instead and the whole experience is better (because blocking adverts and tracking in apps is a real pain).
I do not believe that you can do that, but I've largely stopped using apps that contain adverts so to me this is not an angle I worry about so much (plus I use NetGuard so in app tracking I was already limiting).
It's been my default browser on MacOS for about a month. I signed up for BAT payments about a week ago.
For the most part, it's just another browser.
Pros:
+ I can disable Javascript per-site and reload the page in two clicks. I think that's possible with FFox or Chrome extensions, but it's built in to Brave.
+ UI looks cleaner.
Cons:
- A few videos have refused to play. (Can't characterize that yet.)
- Reopening a closed tab only opens the last page on that tab, not the page history. I.e., the back button doesn't work.
- I don't know when, which or how publishers will get paid in BAT.
- I don't know how hard or expensive it will be to buy more BAT when my free ones are gone. Apparently I will have to open an account at a cryptocurrency exchange? Yuck!
I’ve used it somewhat occasionally, and to me it seemed like Chrome as far as memory usage and sluggishness with multiple tabs and windows are concerned. But I like the fact that it comes with a built-in ad blocker, and avoids contacting Google (unlike Chrome). This announcement says it should perform better, and that’s something I’d like to try out and see.
If you were frustrated by the recent “signing in” changes and the backtracking of that in Chrome, you should try Firefox and Brave.
Love it for casual browsing (I use the anonimity by default) and am happy to be greeted by the "Hey you are a first time visitor of our site, please accept the cookies" every single time I visit a site (yes, I close the browser after browsing).
This is what an announcement more than six months ago (from March 2018) [2] says:
> Brave for Windows, macOS, and Linux currently use the Chromium rendering engine, but (unlike Brave for Android) it uses a custom HTML and JavaScript user interface. Technical readers will know that we call the runtime for this user interface Muon, which is a more secure fork of Electron, and which therefore combines Chromium and Node.js to enable applications built using JavaScript and HTML user interfaces and Node modules for the application logic.
After getting rid of Chrome recently (not that I was using it much before), I’ve been using Firefox (my favorite browser), Safari and sometimes Brave.
[1]: https://github.com/brave/muon
[2]: https://brave.com/development-plans-for-upcoming-release/