Cliqz was a hypocritical product right from the start, and it never attracted a large userbase. The only reason it survived that long because the company behind Cliqz didn't care about throwing lots of money into the idea of creating a competition to google.
Second, the product doesn't provide any practical benefit to google users, so there is no point to switch.
Cliqz didn't realize that you can't sell privacy as a primary product. Privacy is always a secondary attribute to a real product.
That's why DuckDuckGo is succesful. It profits from the increasing privacy-awareness, but people use it because it both works and respects privacy.
Brave is far from perfect, and to a certain extent it is indeed hypocritical. Brave sells us the idea of decentralization, even though in practice there is no decentralization at all.
Other than that, you can't compare Cliqz with Brave, and here's the reason why Brave will not fail:
- First and firemost, they have a consistent monthly growth in their userbase for years
- In contrast to Cliqz who pushes their own products via Ghostery, Brave acts as a neutral middleman, thus creating a direct competition with Google et al., who are also middlemen. In other words, Brave offers every customer the same opportunity to serve ads
- An innovative and unique product: The monthly growth proves this point, as innovation leads to demand.
- user first ideology: Even though Brave wants to be a middleman for a privacy-preserving money-flow between creators and users, they allow the user to chose whether to activate it or not. By default, Brave is just a browser that blocks annoying and privacy-infringing stuff. With Cliqz it is basically impossible to get the Cliqz out of the browser, with Brave I can change my browser in a way as to never see anything related to ads, crypto tokens, etc. and Brave actively respects that decision.
As long as Brave respects users like me who deactivate everything in the browser related to ads and crypto schemes, they will continue to have a loyal userbase behind them.
Just for archive reasons. There are some interesting points worth addressing (IMHO). Of course I worked at Cliqz :-)
"The company only survived because of the investor throw a lot of money". 100% correct, and that speaks greatly about the investor. They believe that Google is a monopoly that needs to fought, as many others. But, instead of (or on top of) bitching and moaning, lobbying, etc. they put good money where their mouth was. Kudos for that.
Privacy was never Cliqz primary product. Privacy was a strict design requirement of Cliqz, which can be marketed more or less. Data collection and browsers alike, we wanted them to be private, because that's the right thing to do, even if it was more difficult to implement. The whole data vs. privacy argument is fallacious. One of the reasons why privacy was so important to us is precisely now, whoever ends up owning the data cannot learn anything about any of the users. Imagine the government getting Google's data if they go belly up or upon "legal" request (change Google by any other company). The data of Cliqz poses no risk to any user, including myself.
The primary product of Cliqz was search, either as the typical result page or instant search integrated on the browser. That's very difficult to build, and expensive, something that DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Qwant, etc. do not have to pay because they rely on the backend of others (not 100%, but mostly). If we were repackaging Bing/Google/Yandex with a different ranking twists, our quality would have been better from the beginning, of course. But that's not building an alternative to Google, which is what we wanted. Still, that's not a pun to DDG and others, what they provide has value to the users, of course. But they are not real alternative, kind of an electric car that gets its electricity from burning coal.
Brave is a great browser, respects to Brendan and team. We both "fight" against Google. For Brave it's Chrome, for Cliqz was both Chrome and Search. Too much to chew? Yes, but we had plenty of fun. The only thing I regret after +6 years working there is the loss of such a great team.
Did Cliqz ever consider bootstrapping with Bing/Google/Yandex results? Supplement Cliqz results with those backends until Cliqz results got as good as you wanted them to be?
I'll always support privacy conscious search engines (I'm a DDG daily user), but Cliqz didn't really feel like an option to me because of quality degradation (and this is coming from a person who puts up with manually approving JS with uMatrix on each page I visit).
Yes, but once you have such a strong dependency it's difficult to remove it. Others have tried the approach and are still stuck with them.
Sorry to hear that the quality was not good for you, it depends on country to country (depending on the users-base basically). For Germany, quality was good enough, QA analysis on stratified queries backed it up. That being said, perceived quality from a person is not properly reflected on NDCG-like metrics, you do not remember the 9 queries it did right, but the one that was totally off.
In any case, DDG is good, and let me emphasize, they (and others) provide a lot of value to the users, privacy-concerned or otherwise. But the underlying problem is not getting fixed, unless, hopefully someday, they come up with an independent index (let's hope).
Brave is based on Chrome, whereas Cliqz is based on Firefox (just to be precise). Note that ownership of code is not the same of ownership of a service... if Brave is depending on Google services, then you would be right (what happens with the [meta]searchers. But the code is open, and can be forked at will (there are some caveats to that claim, licences, internal APIs, etc.)
You can collect data from users and still do not compromise their privacy, it's how you do it that matters, becomes a design requirement. Collecting a url visited, can lead to build a user history (privacy hazard) or not. It's an design choice. The whole mantra that data!=privacy is doing a lot of damage (for anyone curios we did publish plenty of material on the topic, https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-collection-evil.htm...)
> Note that ownership of code is not the same of ownership of a service... if Brave is depending on Google services, then you would be right
Unless Brave is prepared (i.e. has the necessary staff) to be able to independently develop their Chromium base without any help from Google whatsoever, then they are dependent upon at least one Google service - specifically, Google's development of Chromium.
> The whole mantra that data!=privacy is doing a lot of damage
No. The whole mantra that "privacy is possible when hoarding data" is what is doing damage. Every byte of data you collect is a liability - a privacy and security compromise waiting to happen. Even assuming your intentions were good and pure (which, as you might guess, I take with a hydrostatically-equilibrious and neighborhood-clearing grain of salt), even locally-stored analytics/performance data is a rich target for less-than-benign actors, and it's information that more often than not has no business being collected.
That is:
> You can collect data from users and still do not compromise their privacy
This is definitionally false. The very collection of data compromises one's privacy, by nature of it having been collected. Sometimes that compromise is necessary, but nothing Cliqz did seemed particularly necessary.
>> You can collect data from users and still do not compromise their privacy
> This is definitionally false. The very collection of data compromises one's privacy, by nature of it having been collected.
That's not definitionally false, if it sounds false to you is because you have an implicit assumption that does not apply.
Data from users does not imply user sessions on the collector side (session as a set of multiple data points belonging to the same user).
If sessions are collected, then, privacy is impossible to guarantee. We are well aware of that, having worked on this problems for almost 20 years. But that's precisely what Cliqz never did. All messages from our users are record-unlinkable for us, meaning that we have no way to reconstruct any session.
> That's not definitionally false, if it sounds false to you is because you have an implicit assumption that does not apply.
That "implicit assumption" is awareness of what "privacy" and "data collection" mean, and it very much applies (arguing otherwise is revisionist). Ergo: "definitionally false".
In particular:
> Data from users does not imply user sessions on the collector side
Yes it does, because otherwise collecting that data is pointless. Further:
> All messages from our users are record-unlinkable for us, meaning that we have no way to reconstruct any session.
Not if a malicious actor (which may or may not include a future or even current version of you) taps into the locally-stored tracking data. The very existence of that data and its collection thereof is a fundamental security and privacy risk. Just because you ain't currently siphoning it to remote servers doesn't mean malware can't do so, or that a "critical security update" can't reprogram the Cliqz browser/addon to do so.
That is: whether the aggregation happens client-side or server-side does not change the basic fact that the aggregation is happening, and that aggregated data remains a juicy target (and to make matters worse, even if you did want to safeguard that data, it's effectively outside your control). That very aggregation itself is therefore a violation of my privacy.
And this is all taking Cliqz' claims at face value. We could certainly dig further into how we're supposed to take your word that you are indeed discarding unique identifiers (including IP addresses). We could (and should) certainly do the same for other sites claiming to discard such identifiers, but given DuckDuckGo (for example) ain't in the business of peddling sleazy-looking adware¹ (to my knowledge at least), I'm at least slightly more inclined to take their word for it.
I'll give Cliqz credit for at least trying to address these issues in the hopes of finding a creative solution that gives advertisers what they want without egregious privacy violations, but - having read the papers before, and reading them again - I'm still pretty thoroughly unconvinced. I'd much rather not have tracking at all, like how newspaper and magazine ads work (barring some substantial leap in technology, newspapers and magazines never tracked my "engagement" with the ads within or how long my eyeballs were looking at them or how quickly I turned the page or what have you).
Well, it's Chromium, and that's the caveat: In the past, there has been at least one DRM-related issue[1], which needed to be resolved by - Google, because they own Widevine. So you need your competitor to be able to provide an adequate product. Let's say that's kind of subpar.
I'm a little sad about it. I've been using Cliqz from the browser search bar for a few months only because it's not Google. I'm probably switching to DDG now.
The search engine kind of works, but years behind Google. The most annoying missing feature is no "exact terms" search, which is a problem when googling error messages.
All considered I pressed the Google button at the bottom maybe half of the times, and I bet very few people would stick to such a search engine.
> Cliqz failed because of our strong passion for technology and a missing drive from business development
I don't know about Cliqz but this is generally true. We developers do a great job building (oh well) but if somebody doesn't do an even greater job at selling the outcome won't be good. The importance of selling vs building is 80-20 IMHO.
If you are searching for privacy-focused Google seaarch alternatives and are not happy with DDG, you may want to give Qwant (https://www.qwant.com, best one regarding privacy I've found so far but since the quarantine began it's been a bit slow) or Startpage (https://startpage.com, they actually show you google results) a try as well.
Up until a certain threshold, I think company names are unimportant and one can succeed despite having a silly name. But once a company steps over that threshold with a name like "Cliqz", it becomes difficult to overcome the embarrassment you're generating whenever someone has to read or say your company name out loud.
A common argument I've seen used to defend bad names is "Google and Twitter have silly names, and they succeeded!" Well, I was there when those companies first came on the scene, and I didn't find their names embarrassing, so there's a difference between silly and embarrassing, I believe.
I love Beaker Browser and its vision for a P2P web, but it hasn't had a major release in a while (despite seemingly having active development) and it appears it will be desktop-only for the foreseeable future. I don't think Dat will have much uptake until there is a solid browser on both desktop and mobile.
(There was also the Bunsen browser trying to support Dat on Android, but it seems to be abandonware and I was never able to get it working anyway: https://github.com/bunsenbrowser/bunsen/ )
Beaker's going to finally release a new version in ~2 weeks. No solution to the mobile browser yet, but I hope somebody will pick up the mantle from Cliqz and Busnen.
I spent a good amount of time using Cliqz. For creating their own search index, it was pretty good. But it was nowhere near as good as Google or Bing, and to the average end-user that's all that matters. Most people don't really care about the engineering behind a tool, they just want the tool to work.
The company name never bothered me, but from the comments it looks like I'm in the minority there. Is it any worse than DuckDuckGo?
If you are looking for another search engine with their own search index, also check out Mojeek. https://www.mojeek.com/
The search really wasn't bad. I made some test searches and wrote a small article about it, comparing the results. Cliqz did really well in it. Not everything was perfect, but neither was Google. I was impressed enough to use them as my own search engine and that worked just fine. Sure, sometimes necessary to switch over, but that's the same with ddg. I would have loved to see how they'd perform in a few years.
And while I don't like some political positions of the backing publisher they had: It is true that Europe and Germany needs enterprises like that, companies that can be alternatives to the US tech giants. Not sure they should be publicly funded, but should they get support? Of course.
Thanks for the link to Mojeek, seems worth a look.
Good riddance. "Privacy-oriented" is the most egregious tagline I've ever seen from a company like Cliqz. Their real motus operandi was spying on users for targeted ads.
Wow, I came in to joke we know DuckDuckGo must be doing well if it's killing competitors but sheesh.
It amazes me so many companies (not just privacy oriented) don't think the ground truth of having a useful product which treats users with respect is necessary in order to be successful.
Agreed 100%. The article presents a whitewashed rose-tinted picture of Cliqz that's very different from reality, and it's alarming that its (former) employees continue to propagate that reality distortion even beyond the existence of Cliqz itself.
The browser and search engine were a front for the "offers", plain and simple. The whole premise was Orwellian to its core; war was peace, freedom was slavery, ignorance was strength, and tracking was privacy.
I sympathize with the newly-displaced employees facing the grim prospects of finding work in a fractured labor market. Hopefully they'll all have a chance to put their skills toward more honest ventures.
> Some of the back-burner [marketing] ideas were: Changing the Cliqz name, turning the browser colors to pick for Valentine’s day, advertising on porn websites (okay, that one made it).
This must be a joke, right? Who the heck installs a browser (extension) that advertises on a porn website? Changing the Cliqz name would have been WAY better. Cliqz sounds super shady and I would never have guessed it was a search engine.
To me this product sounds like one of those toolbars in web browsers years ago.
For what it's worth, their engineering blog about how to build a large-scale search engine more or less from scratch was really interesting: https://0x65.dev/
Ok, so it's kind of difficult to compete with Google. I get that. How about building decentralized search engines? Basically ActivityPub, but for search engines.
There is YaCy which has pretty terrible results but is P2P. There used to be a P2P search engine called FAROO that was better but seems to have been shutdown.
I wrote a blog post comparing search results quality earlier this year. YaCy came in last, even behind Cliqz.
I remember YaCy, yes... I tried it once, and wasn't convinced.
I mean, obviously, there is more to building a "search engine" than just a big fat searchable index. I think where Google shines is to understand what you mean, not what you wrote. This is a pretty complex task, I guess.
> Cliqz lost the fight against Google. There’s no way to sugarcoat this.
> A cynic might say that Cliqz failed because of our strong passion for technology and a missing drive from business development.
A cynic might also say that you were dishonest and masqueraded as something different than what your business model represented, so people had no compelling reason to switch over from Google, which does a much better job at offering quality products and deceiving its users.
I hope Brave Browser is next. Brave is the kind of company that exploits people's desire for privacy to become a rent seeker for creators and publishers, sprinkled with some crypto tokens as bait.
Cliqz never masqueraded anything, only in your odd perception of the world. Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted. The same goes for data-collection, you can collect all and put the privacy of the users at risk, or collect only signals that cannot be record-linked, which is what Cliqz did.
Cliqz search was never on par with Google -- I build parts of it -- but was getting there little by little. To be more precise, it was getting good enough, to not be a factor. That has some merit given the totally independent index (not relying on Bing under the hood).
Brave the same as Cliqz are trying their best to offer an alternative. If you think you can do better, please do so. Believe, I'll root for you regardless of my opinion about you (we crossed path in the past). Why would I support you, even though that does not mean I use what you build? Because we are in need of having plurality on the Web, the more the better. Unlike you, I do not see the point of speaking bullshit, not sure if out of ignorance or ill-will, don't know, don't care.
Your employer being dishonest does not necessarily qualify you, so I'm not sure why it is being taken personally. There are also several incredibly talented people at Google who do awesome things, some even fight for human rights and privacy, but that does not absolve the atrocities Google as a company commits against the human race.
Nor does your team's work on search engines absolve Cliqz of attempting to build a company that is based on pervasive user tracking, anonymized (deanonymizable in the future) or otherwise. I'd rather not address the rest of your personal attacks.
> Advertisement as implemented today is a privacy hazard, but there are other ways to do it, client-side, which is what Cliqz attempted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox: "According to the Firefox support website, this version of Firefox collects and sends data to the Cliqz corporation including text typed in the address bar, queries to other search engines, information about visited webpages and interactions with them including mouse movement, scrolling, and amount of time spent; and the user's interactions with the user interface of the Cliqz software. This data is tied to a unique identifier allowing Cliqz to track long-term performance."
Yep, real "client-side", eh?
Even if it was actually client-side, that's cold comfort; the data's still being collected and presumably persisted, and there's no telling whether or not some future software update will make that locally-stored data not-so-locally-stored anymore.
This claim on the Wikipedia is factually incorrect: "This data is tied to a unique identifier allowing Cliqz to track long-term performance."
Thanks for noticing it, we will create an issue.
UUIDs only applies to telemetry, which is not the data being described in the paragraph: queries, scrolling, amount time spend, urls, etc. For this kind of user data (HumanWeb) there is no uuid, neither implicit or explicit.
There are plenty of papers on the topic, independent audits, the code is open-source and the data can be inspected. HumanWeb data is 100% record-unlikable, we have no way to know if two messages received come from the same person or not.
> This claim on the Wikipedia is factually incorrect: "This data is tied to a unique identifier allowing Cliqz to track long-term performance."
That claim comes directly from Mozilla's support page on the subject¹:
> Firefox shares the following data with Cliqz to provide functionality and improve performance of the Cliqz feature for everyone:
> - Search queries & webpage data: This includes text as you type in the address bar, queries you send to certain search engines, and data about the webpages you visit and interactions with those pages, such as mouse movements, scrolls, and time spent.
> - Interaction data: This includes your interactions with specific fields and buttons in the Cliqz feature. This data is tied to a unique identifier allowing Cliqz to understand performance over time.
So, if that's "factually incorrect", you should take it up with your business partners.
> There are plenty of papers on the topic, independent audits, the code is open-source and the data can be inspected. HumanWeb data is 100% record-unlikable, we have no way to know if two messages received come from the same person or not.
For now. Things can always change, and promises can always be broken. It'd be a lot easier to trust Cliqz if it wasn't collecting such data at all, let alone sending it to remote servers with a pinky promise that it's anonymized.
> we have no way to know if two messages received come from the same person or not.
This is accurate. They partnered with us at FoxyProxy to prevent browser telemetry from revealing users' IP addresses and other metadata.
These guys are above board and even if there may have been a problem in 2017 with Firefox, that was no longer the case in 2018, 2019, and 2020. They bent over backwards and jumped through many hoops to hide their users' identity. They were very interested in the solving the engineering problem around anonymization. I know this from first-hand experience.
This is a loss larger than many people realize. There are so few companies with such integrity and who put their users first, above profits or shareholders.
There were no problems in 2017 or before, we were doing the same exactly the same during Firefox times (we went through security and privacy audits). Data collection is and always was safe wrt to privacy.
Why the ruckus then? Because some assume that is data is sent, privacy is compromised, period. They do not know how to do it, and they assume it's impossible. Instead of checking the claims for themselves (code is public, data can be inspected, documentation, etc.) they prefer to stick to their belief system, which is more comfortable and does not imply hard work. The press release that FF -- written by one of these people with a lot of biases and published without review -- did not help as it was misleading.
We did a big mistake back then. Instead of rebutting it, we chose to ignore the FUD assuming that facts would prevail. They did not.
Sadly the community is "scared", we have been congratulated and lauded by anyone who checked our systems. But never endorsed in public, there is little to gain and a lot to lose (you are getting a sneak preview right now).
Sad story, extremely frustrating too, but there is nothing we can do now.
> Why the ruckus then? Because some assume that is data is sent, privacy is compromised, period. They do not know how to do it, and they assume it's impossible. Instead of checking the claims for themselves (code is public, data can be inspected, documentation, etc.) they prefer to stick to their belief system, which is more comfortable and does not imply hard work.
If my eyes rolled any harder I'd likely pull a muscle.
Let's dissect this a bit:
> Because some assume that is data is sent, privacy is compromised, period.
It ain't about it being sent (though that's bad, too). It's about it being collected at all. Cliqz collects and aggregates my data somewhere, and that is therefore a violation of my privacy, even if (for now) it's on my local machine (I could certainly routinely delete that collected data, much like I do with cache and cookies, but then what's the point of using Cliqz in the first place?).
> Instead of checking the claims for themselves (code is public, data can be inspected, documentation, etc.)
I have checked the claims for myself (to the best of my ability). None of them address the very real concern of the aggregated data being, you know, aggregated. Just because it's on my local machine doesn't mean it's guaranteed to stay that way; every second it's on my machine is a liability that anyone who's privacy-conscious would want to eliminate (and anyone who's not privacy-conscious doesn't care about).
Like, there's no argument that Cliqz's HumanWeb is at least less evil than traditional tracking systems, but it still relies on aggregation of data, and that is still a massive privacy hazard. Not to mention that the data that is sent¹ is still rich with datapoints that could be used for fingerprinting (the papers seem to suggest there are "heuristics" to detect and anonymize this, but said papers are pretty light on detail, and source code is meaningless since we don't know if it's what's actually running server-side). And also not to mention the rather sketchy distribution methods, like piggybacking on .NET downloads via chip.de in a manner that's been a hallmark of spyware since Y2K.
> they prefer to stick to their belief system, which is more comfortable and does not imply hard work.
"Am I out of touch? No, it is the children who are wrong."
----
> Sad story, extremely frustrating too, but there is nothing we can do now.
Not with that attitude. The search engine technology y'all developed is pretty interesting from a technical standpoint, and could be put to use (I'm sure DDG would be interested in adding it to their mix, or perhaps Ecosia could use it to diversify their Bing/Yahoo results the way DDG does with their in-house crawler). Same with Ghostery's more efficient network request blocking engine² (though it seems like Ghostery's development is still ongoing, no?), which could be useful in other ad and tracker blockers. Neither of these are much in the way of money-makers (well, maybe the search one is, if y'all license it), but it'll at least help make the best of a lousy situation.
I get that it sucks - I've similarly felt the pain of a product into which I've put my blood, sweat, and tears ultimately failing. It's easy to write off the detractors and critics as simply uninformed masses who just "didn't understand how great of a product we have". It's harder to admit that the product wasn't great, or the name was terrible, or the market wasn't as big as anticipated, or what have you.
I'm confident that being the bright and enthusiastic people y'all are, you'll find your footing again. Just, um, try to come up a name that doesn't scream "adware" like "Cliqz MyOffrz" next time, lol. And maybe instead of writing off your criticisms as "FUD", actually examine why those criticisms persist and what you can do to better address them.
In your experience, what was the biggest challenge to be on par with Google?
From using Cliqz, I felt that the relevance of search results was fairly good.
The challenge I had in many cases was that the coverage was so much less for non-common search terms that the information I was looking for just wasn't there.
The Instant Answers on Google are also getting good to the point where sometimes I don't have to leave the SERP.
The problem with Brave is that they're curing the symptom (people disliking and/or blocking ads), not the disease (the current state of advertising itself).
Let's assume they hypothetically succeed and Brave's BAT-powered ad platform is the only thing available, they'll then have the exact same problem of fraud as the current ad industry and will need to deploy invasive tracking in an attempt to curb it, without success.
The problem is that the advertising model of "attention" is broken to begin with. Even without malicious intentions, how do you determine the value of attention? Is it "cheating" to look away or mute when an ad is shown? Is it cheating if you're looking at an ad in a foreign language you don't understand? Is it cheating if you're watching a video in bed and fall asleep by the time the ad is shown? Is it cheating to be looking at ads intentionally (because someone like Brave is paying you in tokens) without having any intention of buying the advertised products?
In my opinion the solution is to not base advertising on "attention" but base it on real results, aka the advertised product/service making more sales. Make the ads time-based ("your ad will be shown here for the next 2 weeks") and then the whole idea of tracking or fraud goes away because the only result is whether you're making more sales, and if so then it doesn't matter whether real people are looking at the ads or bots are "looking" at them because the advertisement is delivering results. This is how advertising has been done for a century in traditional media like print and TV.
And yet I just use Brave because it's a nice Chromium fork with actually useful built in anti-tracking tools and a focus on privacy that has been proven in detail by other people by simply sniffing network calls.
I don't use BAT (at least right now). I use Patreon which is a "rent seeker", or in other words someone providing a service for a fee for handling transactions without me having to physically go to the other person and give him money, and I find that very useful. So I don't see what the issue is with it even if I don't care about it.
I am also not quite ready to concede that a Chrome/Blink base is the only way a browser can be successful. I'm sure the day is coming, and I'm not sure that we can ever go back when it does.
Second, the product doesn't provide any practical benefit to google users, so there is no point to switch.
Cliqz didn't realize that you can't sell privacy as a primary product. Privacy is always a secondary attribute to a real product.
That's why DuckDuckGo is succesful. It profits from the increasing privacy-awareness, but people use it because it both works and respects privacy.
Brave is far from perfect, and to a certain extent it is indeed hypocritical. Brave sells us the idea of decentralization, even though in practice there is no decentralization at all.
Other than that, you can't compare Cliqz with Brave, and here's the reason why Brave will not fail:
- First and firemost, they have a consistent monthly growth in their userbase for years - In contrast to Cliqz who pushes their own products via Ghostery, Brave acts as a neutral middleman, thus creating a direct competition with Google et al., who are also middlemen. In other words, Brave offers every customer the same opportunity to serve ads - An innovative and unique product: The monthly growth proves this point, as innovation leads to demand. - user first ideology: Even though Brave wants to be a middleman for a privacy-preserving money-flow between creators and users, they allow the user to chose whether to activate it or not. By default, Brave is just a browser that blocks annoying and privacy-infringing stuff. With Cliqz it is basically impossible to get the Cliqz out of the browser, with Brave I can change my browser in a way as to never see anything related to ads, crypto tokens, etc. and Brave actively respects that decision.
As long as Brave respects users like me who deactivate everything in the browser related to ads and crypto schemes, they will continue to have a loyal userbase behind them.