It seems like Chrome is going to make a massive fortune from webmasters or organizations that rely on ads, since it will unblock the ads for them by blocking the ad-blocker extensions. Quite silly, given the fact that Google used to pay "adBlock Pro" a good sum of money to whitelist their ads. Man, Internet Advertising has turned into a huge pile of clusterfuck. Why? disable your adblocker for 5 minutes and visit some websites and you will instantly notice that ads on the internet have gotten way nastier than ever.
Strangely enough, Firefox has held its ground. It fell behind in marketing which is why Chrome (and Safari/Edge) took over, but Firefox still remains popular for being that unshakable browser. I went back to it recently and wondered why I wasn't using it in the last 5 years or so.
I don't know if any marketing could have helped Firefox not lose to the shitty dark practices from the three other browsers you mentioned:
- Chrome: Spam ads for Chrome on all Google services (incl. YouTube and Google Search which probably are the two most visited websites on this planet?)
- Safari: Make it the default and prevent users from using any other browsers (on iOS every browser is Safari under the hood and will reports as such to browser census)
- Edge: Make it suck less and also make it really hard to remove it from your system or switch to a different browser
Defaults matter and, especially when they are this toxic, they are hard to beat :/
I honestly solve that issue by just not visiting those sites.
Sites with ads so obtrusive they interfere with my use of the site don't need my traffic. The web is a hugely redundant datastore and I can just find the info elsewhere.
How does this work? Do you have a fixed list of websites you visit and never stray from? Do you avoid clicking on links you don't recognize? How do you use HN, which by its very essence points you at new, unrecognized web sites every day?
I'm not the same person, but I have a similar philosophy. HN tends not to link to sites with really bad ads. If I find that it happens, I just close the tab. I don't intentionally have a whitelist of websites, but in practice maybe I practically do.
This is why I don’t use an automatic adblocker. I block ads by closing pages that have ads. (And if the information really is quality information, then I reward and support the website.)
> you will instantly notice that ads on the internet have gotten way nastier than ever
Anyone that remembers the advent of pop-ups and pop-unders, never ending cascading popped windows, flashy, shaky, and just terrible ads might beg to differ with you.
I remember those. The interesting thing about those is that browsers went out of their way to add features disabling those, only to then implement the infrastructure for them to be re-implemented in-page in ways that are harder to block.
Brave is fine enough I guess but something about their business model feels slightly skeevy. I'm also skeptical they can afford to keep Manifest v2 support going in their fork. I know nothing about the chromium code base but such a large divergence is going to have ongoing costs.
Not to shill for Firefox but I haven't had issues with it and don't plan on switching anytime soon. Plus no other browser has tree-style tabs.
Brave's "skeevy" business model at least is trying innovative ways to get revenue. Firefox on the other hand get's 90% of its funding from Google, which to me generates a clear conflict of interests.
My understanding is that when the firefox 57 was released (I believe that was the version that dropped the old XUL add-on model) they did do some work to allow the add-on developer to port it to the new model.
Why exactly they still haven't implemented an easy way to hide the redundant top tab bar I can't explain though!
> I don't use it, but Edge has built in vertical tabs fwiw (I know, that's not tree-style).
I've tried Edge's vertical tabs and it's ok but it's a weak implementation of the idea. It only supports a flat list, and I think new tabs also open at the bottom, not even next to the current tab. TST is vastly superior.
Vertical tabs don't really have anything to do with tree-style tabs except a superficial similarity. The entire point is the automatic hierarchical organization.
I think tree-style tabs can be quite useful to those that care to utilize them, but I think the vertical nature is the much better selling point for most people, since its advantages are very easy to grok. I would like to see better integration of addons like it into firefox so it doesn't feel so hacky, though. It would also be nice to be able to toggle between horizontal tabs and vertical ones like in Edge, rather than having to edit css files to get rid of them like you have to in Firefox.
I did use Brave exclusively for a while, until I realized that on mobile, Brave blatantly ignores my provided DNS (pihole). And if there is something I really don't like it's software/hardware which ignores network-wide settings (also looking at you chromecast music...)
So, I switched to Firefox on Mobile and by now I moved my desktop as well, so I have all the same addons etc. on all devices.
I've not noticed this with Brave, but wasn't it FF, out of the mainstream browsers, that pioneered DoH (ignoring local DNS). pihole I think makes the requisite setting to tell FF not to use DoH but users can override it IIRC (not the behaviour I want).
That also enables a hostile network to downgrade from DoH.
Anyway, we're investigating what might have gone wrong. So far we can't find a difference between Chrome and Brave regarding DNS and DoH configuration and configurability. More info welcome, thanks.
Not allowing the user to override it locally would be quite user-hostile! Of all the missteps Mozilla has made with Firefox (in my opinion), giving the user more control isn't one of them.
The network owner is free to allow or deny connections to IP addresses or ports and drop whatever packets they like by configuring their systems, the routers!
They do not get to determine the configuration of _my_ system.
Brave is Chromium-based and will also suffer from the Manifest v3 change. They're just activating the extended enterprise support to delay the inevitable. So no, Brave will not keep those extensions alive.
With that said, Brave's built-in ad blocker should not be affected by the change.
I don't know if this really counters my point, mainly because the tweet this is in reply to was deleted, so there might be more useful context there.
I don't have the link handy since I'm on mobile, but they've stated in a GitHub issue that they're not going to maintain v2 support, just activate the extended enterprise support to give users more runway. This just seems to be a mock-up of a toggle for that extended enterprise support and links to the extensions since they won't be downloadable from the consumer Chrome extension store.
I will admit that they haven't been clear (perhaps intentionally), but I have yet to see an announcement that explicitly states that they will independently maintain v2 support.
I assume Brave will continue to rely on Google's app store for extensions. When Manifest v2 stops being supported, aren't v2-based extensions going to fade away?
It's more of a branch than an actual fork. It's using an automated build process where they add/tweak/enable/disable stuff on top.
The analogy I like to use is they (Chromium-based browsers) are in another lane on the same road whereas a complete fork diverges to their own road. The former is still beholden to whatever direction the Chrome road goes.
Yeah, at some point Google may just straight up remove the Manifest v2 code from Chromium rather than just disable it. At that point it can get harder for Brave. Happened to them with eg. mobile slideshow tabs. Google disabled it, Brave kept the feature alive until Google removed it from the codebase.
I'm not familiar with Brave development, but I assumed they are mostly using the off-the-shelf upstream engine and putting their own browser (chrome, UX, etc.) around it.
Until Google removes the Manifest V2 code from Chromium. Then we'll see how long Brave can hold with such a large divergence of codebases. Will they stop updating their engine and stay stuck ? Cherry-pick each and every patch ?
Feels like it wouldn't be impossible to shoehorn some of the old functionality that extensions rely on into V3 without supporting V2 entirely I imagine?
Then again I'm sure Google went out of their way to make it as hard to do as they possibly can.
Stumbling from one terrible solution to another. A few years later Brave will be the black sheep and shinynewvendor the benevolent knight...
There are other, much cleaner ways to ignore ads... that would satisfy both sides. Client doesn't have to see it, advertiser has the illusion that it was watched. Everyone profits, just like in the old days with TV ads. Yet people fight over this lame manifest fiasco :DDD.
I already switched back to Safari, which is an odd choice for a dev. Firefox seems to be in a malaise and is getting clunky. I simply do not like Chrome. And then there's Safari, okay-ish, but with growing/good integrations (passkey, private relay), and bookmarks synced with phone, and it's backed up by a super-profitable smartphone platform. Done.
I don't think Chrome will actually go through with it. It would drastically push away the nerds (who are the ones what setup stuff for the rest of the family). Nobody cares if the browser is technically better, if it is infested with ads.
>Anyway, Brave seems like a great option to keep extensions alive that can actually block ads/trackers. Chrome is about to can that ability.
You are the one who is uniformed because Chrome extensions still have that ability with manifest v3. The move to manifest v3 is about improving performance, privacy, and security which means that extension authors need to migrate to more thought out APIs. It's canning old APIs, not ad blocking / trackers.
The APIs usable for adblocking in v3 are extremely limited in scope relative to the equivalents in v2. You can make a v3 adblocker, but it can't have all of the features that e.g. uBlock Origin users have come to rely on such as "cosmetic filtering" (blocking page elements, not just URLs).
>uBlock Origin users have come to rely on such as "cosmetic filtering" (blocking page elements, not just URLs).
Manifest v3 doesn't prevent that. uBlock Origin Lite choose to not require broad permission for every single site, but instead it choose to have the user grant it permission on a site by site basis.
It's a stylistic choice, I do it to avoid putting myself as the focus of a sentence. In the OP comment they probably want to emphasise the switching to brave, over the fact that it is them personally doing that switching.
If you'd stated "Don't quite get ...", IMO it would have been no less understandable. Usage progresses.
This setup will automatically accept or reject, whichever works, the cookie nonsense and get rid of them once you're done with your tab. CAD comes with a friendly interface to white/greylist cookies you want to keep.
One of the default blocklist for uBlock Origin aims to remove cookie banners too, but a lot of them cannot be simply nuked that way, hence the above method.
This comes down to what you care about. Third party tracking is largely stopped by uBlock Origin, which is my primary concern. If the server I'm currently on does anything to analyze my browsing, that's fine with me. Not because I don't care, but because there's nothing I can do either way. It could lie about it and I would be none the wiser.
Some of us don’t care about this. It’s always worked like that and it doesn’t bother us. We just want to access the information that we are interested in.
There's also Consent-O-Matic: https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic
It allows to decline all the cookie banners. However, it doesn't work with many websites. In fact, it works with relatively few. Still, I like the approach to actively reject all cookies.
The best part of "I don't care about cookies" and "Cookie AutoDelete" combo is that you don't even have to think about it, because even if it accepts everything, it will be cleaned. 0 mental load required.
Here's my story with Brave. I am obsessed with browser interfaces, and have tried them all - Safari, Chrome, Vivaldi, Orion, Arc, Firefox. Because of my specific use cases, I always returned to Chrome.
Brave initially turned me off - I did not care about Rewards and Wallet. However, after turning them off, I found that it's basically Chrome (e.g. Figma works fine, unlike Webkit-based browsers), but de-Googled and with ad blocking natively implemented.
FWIW, I used to feel the same when Firefox was trying to make their brand scream “we are hackers” and the UI had extra junk everywhere. But the latest versions are very minimal, so if you haven’t checked in a while you might want to give it another look. And it’s really fast now too.
Have you tried Arc? (https://arc.net) because I'm with you, re: browser interfaces. Couldn't really get Brave to pull me enough since it was pretty much the same. But with Arc, I'm 1 month in and uninstalled Chrome entirely now. Would be so upset if I could no longer use it anymore.
1. Profile sync is client-side encrypted and doesn't require an account with anyone
2. Built in support for tor, ipfs, and webtorrent
3. Built in support for blocking social media embeds and tracking
4. Easier access to useful settings that would usually be buried in chrome
flags (disable drm, always show full url, etc..)
5. Mobile app has a way better UI for tabs
6. Built in ad, script, content, cookie, and fingerprint blocking
Cookie control should have been part of the browser UI all along rather than the responsibility of individual sites. Then you could have a global “allow all” or “deny all” setting or site-level control.
But browser vendors dropped the ball because they make a lot of money selling ads that exploit cookies. The EU had the power and could have simply ordered Google and Microsoft to implement cookie settings in their browsers, but they blew it.
It was, first with P3P and then with DNT, and adtech undermined these every time. Back when P3P has been supported in IE, Google used a deliberately bogus P3P header to bypass it. Google has also been fined for abusing a loophole in Safari's 3rd party cookie protection to bypass it. Google will not take your browser's "No" for an answer.
AdTech just doesn't want cookie consent to be easy, because they know it would kill their tracking business. The popups are intentionally cumbersome and annoying to make people associate privacy with annoyance, so that people will be tired of them, and give up on demanding privacy.
AdTech might care now. When a good technology exists to do this from the user agent side, the EU might force them to comply.
The EU likes standards to problems the market won't solve (see: mandatory USB-C), especially if the market has been given more than enough time to adapt.
I can see Mozilla starting an initiative for such a protocol, Apple falling in line because it doesn't extract ad money from its users (yet), and regulators responding. DNT is too crude a tool for tracking purposes, but I can see a popup with simple defaults and a P3P like protocol as something the EU might just force companies to comply with.
The EU recognized that cookies are only one way to track you and so made a law that requires informed consent for all kinds of tracking. Most tracking cannot be simply blocked by the browser because it happens entirely on the servers.
People like you being mad at the GDPR is exactly what the advertisers want to achieve by making needlesly annoying consent banners.
I would really like ad blockers to ratchet up this war, blocking cookie banners, "please subscribe to our newsletter", "5% off, get it now", "we need to talk about your adblocker", "subscribe to our newsletter", and all other forms of popover BS. That stuff makes the web suck! I find it so jarring and rude that now I usually just close the page. If books were like this I would probably have never had the attention span to learn anything. But they have a lot of experience boiling frogs and most people just put up with it.
I’d love to see browser become true “user agents” — working on behalf of users.
I’d love them to block, ignore, combine, reformat or whatever the data spewed out by a server to provide the best possible view of the site for the users need.
I’ve been wondering about some kind of AI based reinterpretive browser that consumes the site (or perhaps even many sites matching a search) for you and emits different content depending on what you asked for.
Honestly can't make up my mind between Brave or Firefox. There isn't much discussion that happens before diving into the same arguments on both sides.
Past two years I have been happy on Firefox again (switched to Chrome early on). I switched back when Ublock Origin started advertising that it worked best on Firefox.
I have experimented with Brave a few times here and there, and it definitely feels faster on Android, not so much on desktop.
I just want Mozilla to start focusing on performance instead of themes/ui changes (I am not in the camp that gets angry over the UI changes).
For being an opt in feature, Brave's release notes are always filled with crypto focused changes. I get that crypto is their main source of income, but would be nice to see more features being developed.
For me what convinced me to switch to brave is that actually do privacy by default, not just empty talk like mozilla.
- they have their own independent search engine
- and their own privacy respecting AD network.
- they block ADs and trackers BY DEFAULT
And many other things, I personally lost hope Mozilla is going to do anything meaningful, and I found brave to be actually trying to to change things.
I can give brave to my grandma and she would be instantly more private, yet its designed to not break anything by default.
> For me what convinced me to switch to brave is that actually do privacy by default, not just empty talk like mozilla.
That's one hell of a take.
- they have their own independent search engine
- and their own privacy respecting AD network.
- they block ADs and trackers BY DEFAULT
What is a "privacy respecting AD network"?
How are points #1 and #2 at all pro-privacy?
If they are embedding their own ad system, how is them blocking ads and trackers actually relevant? If all telemetry is not off by default it undermines the relevance of point #3 substantially.
#1 - The search engine works based off of what you actually query, not who you are, other sites you've visited, where you're located etc.
#2 - Ads are off by default, you can opt in to see ads and if you do you can opt in to collect a token that you can then either keep or donate to content providers that you support (ie tipping). I have never opted in so I never see it.
1. Actual competition to Google with no trackers, unlike DDG and start page and many others, which are basically new UIs for bing and google respectively.
The opt in by default in Brave vs Firefox's opt-out by default does speak value.
While a feature can be good/suggested to be enabled, a user won't know to look for it unless advertised or in settings. Most of the features in Firefox seem to be behind about:config changes. I imagine most users just install software and go on with their life instead of configuring.
Can be a double edged sword though. No sites that are memorable off hand, but I have had site that Brave with Shields w/defaults would not load vs stock firefox + stock Ublock would. Note sure if this is due to the "opt in" by default breaking a site.
Edit: Brave is opt out, Firefox is opt-in. I had them backwards.
I have a colleague that uses Brave. Sounds cool, but I don't want to use a browser that generates crypto and then gives it to me. I don't want crypto. Also, it's Chrome-based, and I want to use Firefox. I don't want to give up helping that 3% of us still using FF.
I was literally searching for something to do this earlier this week. I removed "I don't care about cookies" after it was purchased by Avast, and immediately my Internet experience became shit. Are "regular people" really filling out a modal form on every site they visit?
After seeing this this morning, I installed Brave. It imported my settings & extensions from Chrome. The whole process took about 3 minutes.
> Are "regular people" really filling out a modal form on every site they visit?
Many of us use Reader view which gets rid of all the junk. There are times when it doesn't work, and for that I just close the page and read something else. But it works something like 90% of the time or more.
Early-on I dismissed Brave because I really didn't like the idea of earning crypto to watch ads. However, I didn't see that this was something to opt-into and the exhaustive list of patches they've applied to provide better privacy than Firefox. I would switch, but there are 2 things preventing me from doing so: no good vertical tab extension in Chrome-based browsers, and I HEAVILY make use of container tabs in Firefox. It's too powerful to maintain several sessions to the same site in separate containers. Also I have 300 tabs open. This works for me. This is Web 3.0.
Brave are actually building vertical tabs to be available OOTB as we speak, much in the same vein as Edge. Just install Nightly and turn on a flag to see the WIP version.
I have to use Edge at work. If those vertical tabs are coming, I'd certainly welcome it. I wish I could get vertical tabs that are actually drawn like a tree though: Like with the box drawing characters and indentation.
The best feature in Firefox is container tabs - and there are a ton of uses outside of first party isolation. Chrome-based browsers need that.
Tab outliner is, imo, even better than FF's TST because outliner can also work as a persistent session/bookmark manager. It is really important to someone like me who doesn't like seeing a hundred tabs and yet want to keep them in tree. Outliner gives you the ability to close a tab without removing it from the tree so you can re-open it later. Some people use bookmarks for it, but to me this is a much more light weight and saner way of doing session management (essentially "temporary" bookmarks, if you will)
I have been using Brave daily for a few years now both on the phone and desktop. The experience has been quite good and I generally recommend it to everyone.
Install uBlock Origin, open Settings > Filter lists, and enable EasyList Cookie in the Annoyances section. As I understand it this will do the same thing Brave does.
It's not the capability, it's that the browser proactively asks the user if they want to subscribe to the cookie list. The list itself has been available in uBO and Brave Shields for a while.
ublock origin extension can be configured to do this. Go to settings -> filter lists, and under annoyances enable "fanboy's annoyance". Blocks most cookie/gdpr banners.
uBlock already does this, but sometimes this leads to an annoying side effect. Some sites put "overflow=hidden" on the main element to get rid of scroll bars while showing a modal cookie consent dialog. If you only block the consent dialog you'll see a normal page but you can't scroll or consent, so you have to open the page inspector and start editing.
I think scrollbar blocking is another website "feature" that browsers should disable by default. I don't want to have to deal with the page inspector to browse the web and that isn't even an option on a phone browser.
I can't think of a single legitimate use case for blocking the scrollbar or right clicking but just in case there is one the browser should still offer a way to enable such JavaScript code on a website by website basis.
This is impossible to implement in practice though. Scrollbar "blocking" as you call it, is just an overflow: hidden CSS style, which is perfectly warranted and needed in some cases on some elements.
How do you identify which element is the "main" one for the given website? It doesn't have to always be <body>, it could be something which is nested.
> Google has been pushing changes to the Web that would make it more difficult to block cookie banners and, more generally, to filter out unwanted Web content (such as intrusive images, videos, ads, and tracking scripts). Google’s WebBundles proposal, for example, will make it easier for sites to evade content blockers. Their Manifest v3 changes remove vital capabilities from privacy-protecting browser extensions.
Allowing Google to buy DoubleClick in 2007 was absurd and scandalous.
If it's now too late to undo that, it's vital for the future of the web that Chrome be separated from Google.
I have no idea how we achieve that, but I'm pretty sure that if we don't, we're doomed.
Yeah, and only a few million people had acess to slow ass speeds that took you days to download a small video.
Google and Facebook brought billions of people to the internet and gave them access to information they would otherwise have no access too. Thanks to them selling ads.
How would YouTube which give everyone free access to billions and billions of hours of content for free be possible without ads?
Donating to the Mozilla Foundation and to the EFF have been my strategy for this. I know that $20/month doesn't seem like a lot but it does add up at scale. If everybody reading this thread donated to those organizations, it would be a solid boost for them. (10k people * 240 = $2.4m per year)
I would do this right now if there was an option to donate to _firefox_ development and not to sponser exec bonus or whatever side project they toy around with.
Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation, an entity owned by the Mozilla Foundation. Donations to the Foundation go to woke activism and the like, not so much to software development. Buying add-on services to Firefox is the proper way to send money to the organization that actually builds the browser and to help it become more independent from Google as a funding source.
I've been contemplating switching back to Firefox from Chrome due to the upcoming changes to ad blockers - Is Brave a good choice for this, or should I go back to FF?
Been rocking Firefox as my daily driver for several years now. I don't understand why someone would not switch to Firefox at this point, unless there's just a really strong personal preference or niche feature.
Despite Mozilla's organizational woes, Firefox remains the one true "free as in free speech" browsers out there that has remained competitive. I'm of the opinion that we need Firefox to keep the Web open.
I just like Brave as a product more, primarily. Chromium native stuff like tab groups and PWAs are nice to have, and I like profiles over containers for isolation purposes (would obviously rather have both).
Plus, and this is somewhat beside the actual browser, I like that the Brave org is toolmaking focused, vs. Mozilla's activism schtick where they say they're just fine with platforms' algorithms getting tuned to favour sources the Mozilla activist people like. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
(Brave is not the only toolmaking focused org - see eg. Vivaldi. Both companies, insofar as they have politics, have politics of user control and privacy and leave the other stuff at the door, and it shows even in their marketing copy being more straightforward and less slimy than Mozilla's modern output)
Brave is a solid option if you don't want to leave the underlying Chromium and it's extension ecosystem but still have privacy capabilities that Google is axing with Manifest v3.
Firefox is also a solid option. Firefox is one of the few stable options remaining to use a non-Chromium based browser. Most popular Chrome extensions have Firefox releases as well so you may not even lose that functionality in a switch.
Advocates for Firefox frequently point out that part of how we got here with the Manifest v3 issues is by consolidating browser technologies. Chrome, Brave, Edge, etc all use the Chromium core which is part of what gives Google such a strong ability to influence web technology developments to their advantage and our detriment. If this is something you care about then it may be worth voting with your feet and giving Firefox a chance.
The new DDG browser may be interesting in this regard. It uses WebKit at least on Mac, but we'll see how their Windows version ends up like. Could very well be Edge WebView2.
I switched from Firefox to Chrome several years ago. After the announcement of the planned changes, I tried switching back to Firefox. I just couldn't stick with it -- Chromium-based browsers are faster (e.g., [1]).
I decided to give Brave a try because it's Chromium-based. It's been great. I did have to modify a few settings to get the look/feel how I like, but it I found it easy, and I expect others may not care. Brave shields block ads without the need of extensions like ublock. I don't have any complaints so far.
If you’re ok spending 1 minute turning off their weird crypto-powered ad stuff (or if you’re ok with it), I personally think Brave is the best Chromium browser available, and I believe they have said they will not be removing Manifest v2 support. Also their built in ad/tracker blocking is nice.
I like the mission of Brave, but some things just do not add up, like the crypto ad stuff. I just don't get how privacy will be their main interest. I'm watching the project closely, but for now will stick with Firefox.
Blocking cookie banners is not the correct solution as it breaks a lot of websites. What you actually want is to accept them with your preferred choices.
The cookies banner in the EU, California and other countries is just a failure to address real issues. That solves nothing. I have seen FB and Google able to track you despite cookies blocked with Adblock/script block, including PiHole. Just the other day, I was getting some visa info to visit friends in the USA next year and later opened FB and immediately saw ads related to visas and immigration ad from a legal firm. With or Without cookies, these companies have developed tech to track everyone.
The only thing is you don't see ads or banners with these extensions, but somehow they track you using advanced fingerprinting for sure.
The cookie banners aren't EUs fault, but the fault of companies who take the risk of noncompliance.
Also, most cookie banners I see are utterly non compliant AFAIK (just the fact that accepting tracking is way easier than denying tracking should be enough to verify that).
EUs only fault here is not being quicker and harsher with the punishments.
It's not that easy. Imagine some product owner, PM or exec reviewing a feature that "maybe" or "somehow" encroaches anything remotely seeming like "Personal Information". They freak the fuck out and want to cover their asses by bringing in lawyers. The lawyers want to pad their billing so they make it complicated. The marketers still want their metrics which in all likelihood don't break those laws yet, but because they might, because they use some tool like "Google Analytics" and no one on this entire planet knows how it works or whether it collects something that might be PII, they too get caught under this bus. And to top it all off, there are SAAS products out there now that prey on this "Fear" and happily sell you an overly complicated cookie consent popup banner product. And the cycle continues.
This is pretty encouraging. The cookie banners are an example of ruining the web and an active contributor to ruining the web. Can't wait to get Brave 1.45 on Arch, I just checked and it isn't out just yet though!
Long live the web!!!
I like Brave's focus on "user first":
"New versions of Brave will hide—and, where possible, completely block—cookie consent notifications. Brave’s approach is distinct and more privacy-preserving than similar systems used in other browsers (such as the “auto-consent” systems used in other browsers), and helps keep the Web user-first."
The new feature here is just proactively asking the user if they want to block the banners. The actual blocking is a uBO/Brave Shields filter list now part of the Easylist package. You can just enable it in your browser right now.
I'm surprised that no one in this tread has mentioned Opera. Weirdly, a lot of my son's Gen-Z aged group has started using Opera. When I asked them about it, it's because it "seems faster than Chrome." I haven't tried Opera in... like... forever (probably I last used it when they had their own rendering engine instead of being yet-another-webkit), so I have no idea how much veracity their claims are.
I just think it's odd that many of the young punks I know are switching to Opera of all things.
Opera advertises like crazy on YouTube in videos that appeal to a younger crowd. A lot of paid promotion. I've seen it pop up several times when my kids are watching and they've asked me about it before.
Opera was sold to a Chinese group a while back - I believe not long after they switched to chromium. For some, that's enough reason not to use it. That group started branding Opera as a gaming browser that uses fewer resources. The original Opera developers started Vivaldi, which is very comfortable for users of the old Opera.
I've been primarily using Firefox since 2005, but Mozilla has gotten a bit too woke[0] for my liking. I've switched to Brave search, and have been using Brave's browser on my phone, and I'm very tempted to switch on my desktops and laptops, too. This feature just might do it for me.
I am not sure I would call an article that praises Facebook controlled media access woke. However every reminder that Mozilla considers Facebook a decent business partner is a reminder that they are still a corporation and where your privacy and rights end at the convenience of the CEOs paycheck.
There's a political angle to a lot of the work around internet freedom, and a surprising number of people/lobbyists operate on the touch point between browsers and public policy. Faction-choosing is, I guess, a side effect of that dynamic.
What's woke about any of the points in the article? What does the word mean to you?
The points in question:
> Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.
> Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.
> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.
> Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
> What's woke about any of the points in the article?
Assuming this is a sincere question - take the sentence "the rampant use of the internet to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy is about more than any one personality", for example. It includes several key words and phrases that appear almost exlusively in a very particular kind of discourse - specifically, the words "hate" (in this vaguely identifiable meaning), and "white supremacy". These are strongly suggestive that the whole communication belongs to the kind of discourse that many have come to identify with the word "woke".
It was certainly intended to be a sincere question, thank you for your perspective! I do have a few follow questions if you're happy to answer:
Why does it matter if it's woke? The majority of the points seem to be purely beneficial. Isn't it better to support the ones that would provide a benefit and challenge the ones that are disagreeable?
Do you not think that there's a case to be made that white supremacy has found a voice in certain parts of the internet?
If you do agree, how would someone go about discussing how to tackle it without being dismissed as woke?
Personally I feel like discourse has grown more toxic. At the risk of "both sides"ing things, people generally seem much less willing to understand each other's positions and I believe that these algorithmic bubbles play a big part in that.
> Why does it matter if it's woke? The majority of the points seem to be purely beneficial.
This is a very good point. Let me provide an argument:
The woke ideology/movement does attempt to address some real social issues (e.g. racism, classism, and areas where the disabled aren't served as well as they could be). However, on many of those issues, they either (1) attribute a specific cause to the issue that isn't universally shared (2) attempt to manipulate the language around the issue and/or (3) use unethical means to attempt to fix the issue.
This wouldn't be a problem by itself, but is made into one by the woke movement's totalitarian facets - the redefinition of common words in order to push an agenda, the suppression of dissenting thought (either through censorship or through extra-judicial persecution), and the weaponization of emotion to win arguments.
This means that while basically everyone (aside from white supremacists) can agree that white supremacy is bad, as soon as the woke movement gets involved, you lose the ability to tell what is white supremacy, because participants in the movement actively twist speech around the issue and emotionally attack those calling for reasonable discussion. For instance, in my work organization, a recent internal discussion thread had multiple employees claiming that "white supremacy" was the reason that Black people happened to be underrepresented in specific branches of that organization - and then attacked those who disagreed using emotional language instead of reasoned arguments.
This is why Scott Alexander doesn't like "SJWs" and tries to keep them out of his discussion forums - not because he finds their views bad, but because a core part of the movement is tribalism, censorship, manipulation of language, manipulation of emotion, and other anti-intellectual things that are definitionally unsuitable for the rationalist community (and, topically, Hacker News), and probably unsuitable for liberal democracies like the United States, as well.
> Personally I feel like discourse has grown more toxic.
It has - as a direct, causal result of the woke movement's aggressive propagation of the idea that "everything is political", which necessitates conflict and politics spreading into every area of life where there formerly was none.
That's why you have to be careful to separate the woke movement from the individual issues that they claim to represent - because the movement isn't just about (the very real issue of) racism, it also includes redefining the definition of "racist" to advance a hidden agenda.
I'm not even saying that all of the movement's tactics are bad (I really like some of the community-driven work in accessibility that it's driven, for instance) - just that most of the prominent ones are, to the point where I personally am strongly opposed to the movement itself.
> Again, say what you want about where it's gone if that's your thing, but stripped down the core of wokeness is "people should be more sensitive to marginalized communities" is it not? Once you get the swinging dick culture war BS out of the way, that's the original impulse right?
I'll reproduce my answer here since it goes into detail on why people react badly to wokeness:
---
This kind of sentiment gets expressed often, but I'm skeptical of it being the original impulse, given a lot of the woke theory's roots in neo-Marxism and the like. For a lot of the average people who go along with it, that kind of impulse is how it sneaks itself in. People want to be kind, and wokeness speaks of kindness in a way.
But ultimately kind, it ain't. For example, a person who really was concerned about racism would be pleased to hear people were not racist - the world's a better place with a little less racism in it. But that's not the activists' reaction, is it? They vehemently deny it's possible to be not-racist - you have to be actively antiracist (ie. actively onboard with their specific program, other ways of getting to the goal are wrong) or you're a racist (and thus need to be pressured to get on with the program).
Both positions allow the activist control over the other person - them not being a racist would mean the activist can't exert pressure on them, since they're already not racist and there's nothing to fix. The person can go on with their life. But that is not okay to the activist, anything but! It gets spoken against vigorously, and much is spent defining terms and theorizing how that stance of non-racistness is impossible. They also actively disparage and fight against people who try to get to the goal in other ways.
Many think eg. individualism-focused 'colorblindness' works better and makes for more pleasant environments than 'antiracism', but the activists are viciously against this, because meeting people as individuals and trying to not let their skin color influence decision making means the activists are out of a job, and they can't boss the colorblindness advocates around. One thing that clearly betrays their allegiance to their method rather than their stated goal is that they're not interested in whether what they do actually works.
If someone's concern really was ending racism, they'd be very interested in learning things like different methods, comparing them, is the goal ultimately even possible, and if not what's the best that can be done, and so on. 'Antiracists' do essentially none of that. Instead, they try to shut down other approaches, and hold utopian perfection as essentially the only acceptable end-state. This doesn't really fit the profile of someone who really open-mindedly wants to get things done. It fits with a person whose goal is to be able to fight.
Fighting for a righteous cause feels really good, so it's no surprise people want to do that. If you gain earthly power over other people in the process and feel you're a part of something greater than yourself - two deep, primal human motivations - all the better. Fighting or raw societal power to order others around as the actual goals have some very perverse effects on the activists' incentives. It would actually be really good for them to pick methods that intentionally do not work. Why? Because then they never solve the problem. This means they can fight and feel important - how terrible the foe if they and their comrades struggle and struggle and it still just won't be destroyed. Clearly, the activist is very necessary! Power, same thing: If the excuse exists, they can keep using it to boss people.
It's worth noting another perverse incentive too, namely that rebuilding your identity is psychologically expensive. If you build your identity around being an activist, and then succeed on your goal, you get a nice dose of satisfaction but your identity ends up being a fat load of nothing if you have nothing else going on. It's like an athlete getting too old to play competitively and having to transition to a coaching or commentary role. That is hard, and often unpleasant. An eternal cause pursued with ineffective methods is a perfect solution to the issue. A person who set themselves an actual project, like, say, building N wells in Africa, knows that the job is done someday. They build themselves in a way that's capable of moving on to a far greater extent than the warrior who wears an abstract fight as their identity.
And as far as I can tell, this is exactly the pattern of the activist class today: They work in simple good-evil binaries towards a utopian end-state, and are fiercely attached to the methods, not eg. news that the problem is overstated and things are surprisingly good. So even if I can regard most ordinary people as basically motivated by a need to be good, polite and decent, the activists I can't in good conscience think of as being genuine or benign. They use the kindness as cover for less savory ends.
> Do you not think that there's a case to be made that white supremacy has found a voice in certain parts of the internet?
> If you do agree, how would someone go about discussing how to tackle it without being dismissed as woke?
I find it hard to address these questions, because I do not know what the person who uses the phrase "white supremacist" means. To me, it's hardly more than a slur, like the word fascist or, to some people, communist; so imagine my confusion if you asked me whether I thought fascists have found a voice in certain parts of the internet. Merriam-Webster's dictionary offers two definitions of white supremacy, of which the second — if the Internet Archive is to be trusted — was added only in 2020. The first, traditional, definition, which I share, says that it is "the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races". The second, recently added, definition says (and you can clearly hear the political background in which it was added), "the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races".
I have not, personally, seen or corresponded with a person who would profess to be a white supremacist in the first sense; so to me, they are as exotic as flat earthers. It is hard for me to believe that they need any more significant tackling than the Jihadis, or any other violent whackos (and only when they are violent, mind) — and you do not hear the media and the twittersphere constantly taking the names of those other groups of whackos in vain. So, to answer your question, if there arises a terrorist group of militant white supremacists, then yes, it would need tackling; but I am sure that in that case both the danger will be seen as clear and present, and the language will be not of shaming and moral outrage, but of concrete measures of law enforcement.
> Do you not think that there's a case to be made that white supremacy has found a voice in certain parts of the internet?
> If you do agree, how would someone go about discussing how to tackle it without being dismissed as woke?
Yes and yes. Though the kind of genuinely heinous stuff that actively wishes ill on our fellow men is generally very, very niche.
Wokeness is a very specific way of approaching things, so you definitely can. The issue is mostly that woke activism has been steadily eating left-liberalism alive for the past decade and more. The result is that a lot of avenues for talking about a topic or for understanding them are very limited.
It's like 99% of math teachers went gaga over Common Core and did nothing else for twenty years. If you protested against Common Core, would you be protesting against the idea of teaching children mathematics? Hardly.
But once you're familiar with wokeness, it's a very distinct thing and you can definitely distinguish people coming at it from a different perspective. It's not hard at all.
There are issues with at least two of the things they suggest, though:
---
Let's start with
> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.
(PSA: I lean right)
This sentence could be good, on its face. But Mozilla for example linked to a Facebook post about Facebook manipulating their own algorithms specifically for the election. The entry lists various websites that are both mainstream and lean distinctly to the left. Facebook's outlet choices may have been less partisan back in the day, but certainly are not in today's world. Imagine CNN touting "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" in front of a burning building.
Second, the whole idea of factuality is a purely partisan issue: Most fact-checkers police not factuality, but narrative.
See this famous Snopes rating, for example:
---
Claim
Susan Rosenberg is a convicted terrorist who has sat on the board of directors of Thousand Currents, an organization which handles fundraising for the Black Lives Matter Global Network.
Rating
Mixture
What's True
Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed robberies.
What's Undetermined
In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
---
One look at that should disabuse the reader that the purpose of the site is to honestly assess factuality. Membership in a bombing organization and being sentenced for possession of a shitton of explosives apparently just isn't terrorism. At that point, you shrug and file the fact-checking enterprise into the same bin as claims about racism - so frivolous they don't even merit consideration anymore.
---
The second one that's problematic is this:
> Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.
This could actually be very nice. The downside to it, though, is the sort of thing where people knowing what you spend money on politically could be used to harass you. We can just look at how a couple political donations outside of work cost Brendan Eich his job at Mozilla. Some people are so big they can't reasonably be persecuted in these ways, in which case transparency isn't a bad idea.
This one has a good ideal, but history is full of ideas that sound good and have good intent, but disastrous second-order consequences.
I don't want my browser, its vendor, or even my search engine to decide what is or isn't "disinformation", or "white supremacy", or whatever today's distasteful views are. I'm an adult human, and I'll do that for myself. If someone wants to make a Fisher Price browser that only shows approved things, go for it, but I'll start looking elsewhere.
The article doesn't suggest at all that Firefox or Mozilla are looking to limit what you're shown by your browser.
3 of the 4 points involve making the reasons you're being shown something more transparent.
The remaining point suggests that other platforms make changes to their algorithmic content feeds. These platforms are already deciding what you see in those feeds and what's "approved".
> I don't want my browser, its vendor, or even my search engine to decide what is or isn't "disinformation", or "white supremacy"
Good! Mozilla isn't saying that browsers should do that at all. I don't know how you got that from the article.
> I'm an adult human, and I'll do that for myself.
The entire problem is that you will never be able to do that, in the context of social media. Simply by using YouTube, or Facebook, or whatever other social media feed, you've already trusted that website to decide what you see. The alternative is you having to sift through hundreds of thousands of social media posts yourself, and again, humans can't really do that.
So (unless you have a better solution) the billions of people who use Facebook are at the mercy of its ranking system. Shouldn't we thus demand that Facebook consider the societal consequences when they decide how to rank things? Or should Facebook do whatever they want when they decide what billions of people get to see?
That seems to be thrust of the "disinformation" line you're referencing:
> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.
We need a better general understanding of what good sources of truth look like, for one. We seem to collectively have this notion that some youtube rando can do enough research in two hours to destroy the credibility of someone who has been researching something for years. That is insane. We need to start holding every participant in a debate to the same standard. And randos on the Internet start at the bottom of the scale.
What do you think such an understanding would look like? A youtube rando may well have been researching something for a decade too yet be completely wrong (see: many conspiracy theorists), research time is often not particularly relevant.
Stepping to authority over youtube randos on the other hand seems like a flawed idea too, 'authority' is often a biased group of the old guard. And in the most controversial topics, you'll have widely varying opinions on who the authorities are.
Evidence then? Evidence can be cool, but is often really easy to spin whichever way the talking head wants. And that is if isn't outright doctored.
The scientific process, including peer review? Maybe, but this doesn't work particularly well on some of the most important things we want to discover truth in such as politics an recent events
Even in some kind of ideal world, where we can theoretically try to find the most truthful answer, we'd struggle hard. Let alone in our chaotic society where what's loudest and most catchy is surely going to outcompete whatever is the most truthlike
It may not be your intention, but it is a gotcha, by virtue of the surrounding context.
The implication is that any person would be too biased to be able to do the job, but the reality is more interesting than that.
And, of course, you aren't getting an answer to your question, because a random HN commenter doesn't know exactly who. In fact, the article itself doesn't know either, because it's making a recommendation of what should be done, not a declaration of what they are doing.
But when it comes down to it, the "who" isn't nearly as important as it sounds. Most of the human pitfalls we are concerned about when we ask "who" are adequately answered with "how". In the end, it's the implementation that really matters.
Disinformation on public forums is not a new pattern. Traditional forums (including HN) manage it with moderation. In this case, we have an answer to "who": the moderators. And "how" gets clearly outlined in the rules of the forum.
But social media - like Facebook and Twitter - doesn't have moderators. Recently, there has been effort to do moderation with algorithms, but that tends to fail in a lot of edge cases.
There have also been grass-roots efforts to fight disinformation, but in this case we can clearly see the "how" failing to protect us from the "who". There will always be groups that use the same patterns to promote disinformation, because the goals of a grass-roots information campaign don't react to criticism.
This question seems to get an outrage-filled HN thread every week or so, which is probably why people think it's a gotcha. Latest post I can remember is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33202549
I do, after reading the information and reasoning about it for myself. Other people deciding what information I have access to are trying to disempower me from doing that whether I like it or not, and something stinks about such an approach and I'd like nothing to do with it.
Other people are already deciding what information you have access to each time you visit one of these sites.
While they might allow you to alter the probability of certain types of content showing up, the platform is already the arbiter of what content appears in your feed and is recommended to you.
An example of this would be engagement. Platforms have generally made the decision that they'll promote content other people have seen and interacted with. You typically won't be shown content that has low engagement unless you've gone out of your way to find it. This already has huge effects on the type of content that reaches or is created by people.
I understand that point in particular might be disagreeable to you but it'd be nice to know how do you feel about the other three. So much of the current discourse focuses around what isn't or can't be agreed rather than calling for action on points that are relatively settled.
The people who already have absolute control over what you do and don't see in your feed.
The algorithms of these platforms have been extremely effective at enabling the dissemination of lies and misinformation. When you consider that they're also designed to essentially reinforce any particular view you might have then it becomes clear why we've seen such extreme polarisation.
I have absolutely zero problems with those algorithms being altered to break people out of those filter bubbles and/or limit the reach of people with a history of making wildly unsubstantiated claims.
"out of filter bubbles" == "into other filter bubbles". This isn't empowerment, it's hijacking.
Even in 2022, the world wide web is still a hell of a lot more diverse than one single organization. Especially Mozilla.
Should you trust any one website? No. But which websites you frequent is your choice, and it's one of the few dimensions of freedom remaining to the internet. The only job of the browser is to facilitate this freedom, and any divergence from that goal will only diminish what free choice remains.
> "out of filter bubbles" == "into other filter bubbles". This isn't empowerment, it's hijacking.
It's hardly hijacking when they placed you in those bubbles in the first place. I'm quite happy to break algorithmic filter bubbles given the rise in both extremism and lunatic conspiracy theories we've seen in recent years.
> Should you trust any one website? No. But which websites you frequent is your choice, and it's one of the few dimensions of freedom remaining to the internet. The only job of the browser is to facilitate this freedom, and any divergence from that goal will only diminish what free choice remains.
It's a fantastic thing that Mozilla isn't suggesting that any of these changes be made to your browser then isn't it.
> It's a fantastic thing that Mozilla isn't suggesting that any of these changes be made to your browser then isn't it.
When a browser vendor advocates for "amplifying factual voices", in my mind's eye I see a browser tab filled entirely with a well-styled notification: "This site may contain misleading or harmful information. It has been blocked for your safety."
But I'm sure there'll be an about:config setting to bypass it and it only gets reset every two or three updates.
Mozilla should stay in their lane. -No, that's not accurate. Mozilla should get back in their lane. Maybe then they can finally find the time to finish implementing all the APIs that they removed without replacement with the Quantum rewrite.
> When a browser vendor advocates for "amplifying factual voices", in my mind's eye I see a browser tab filled entirely with a well-styled notification: "This site may contain misleading or harmful information. It has been blocked for your safety."
The browser vendor is explicitly suggesting that platforms like Facebook "amplify factual voices.". That quote is literally a link discussing Facebook's work in that area. There's no suggestion whatsoever in the article that they're planning having the browser do this
What you're picturing in your minds eye could be concerning if it was at all close to the point of the article or being suggested as a solution. There's been no indication that there is even a plan to do so.
> It's hardly hijacking when they placed you in those bubbles in the first place.
Don't people create their own feeds? I hardly ever go on these sites, but I just checked my Facebook, and it's still people I knew in high school/college posting pictures of their travels, kids, etc. plus some lawn/garden groups my wife subscribed to. Don't you have to follow people on e.g. Twitter for them to appear in your feed?
There's no definitive answer but I'd argue not really.
When you first land on a platform they decide what kind of content you're exposed to. For the majority of users any curation they're likely to carry out will be based on what the platform has recommended to them.
I think the crucial part is that these recommendation engines provide almost no room for rebuttal or content that leads you to examine your views. They function in such a way that they only recommend content that reinforces whatever beliefs you currently hold.
A personal example would be that I was fairly interested in the Atheism movement of the early 2010s. That movement largely collapsed and the zeitgeist moved on to "anti-SJW" content. During that period my Youtube feed became almost exclusively "anti-SJW" videos despite never having subscribed to them. I don't recall ever having seen a video from the other perspective in that period.
Around ~2018 I had largely moved on to more left-leaning content but had heard people mentioning Ben Shapiro. I watched one or two videos to see what he was about and my recommendations became nothing but Shapiro and other right wing content for weeks.
I noticed the same thing with conspiracy theory videos. You watch one out of vague interest and suddenly they become the only thing recommended to you.
None of these recommendations lined up with the content I typically subscribe to or watched regularly.
I logged into Facebook for the first time in years recently and it was full of quasi-sexual videos. I hadn't interacted with those at all. They mostly seem to be gone now but there was no reason for them to have been present in the first place.
It's interesting to me that people seem generally comfortable with the mechanisms browsers use to determine if a site is unsafe in the sense that it has a track record of carrying malware ("Google has detected harmful content") but get really upset about the possibility that a similar system could be used to protect users from having their minds hacked by info-charlatans.
I guess people know what malware looks like but the jury's still out on whether someone who's been radicalized into believing a demonstrable untruth about the world around them has even been attacked? Like we see as different, for some reason, grandma crying because a hacker stole her passwords and drained her bank account vs. grandma crying because she's in jail for having broken into a pizzeria because someone online convinced her vampires were using the pizzeria's basement to drain adrenochrome out of children for an immortality serum?
(My opinion has swung on this topic as I've gotten older and become responsible for elderly people's welfare in my life. The tools used to attack their ability to tell truth from falsehood online are refined, pervasive, effective, and insidious. I have to keep purging news aggregators from their smartphones because they click on an ad that brings them an ad that brings them an ad that brings them an ad, and the next thing I know their phone is locked up because three apps are bumping twenty notifications an hour about what the 'woke agenda' will do to the bathrooms in their homes).
> It's interesting to me that people seem generally comfortable with the mechanisms browsers use to determine if a site is unsafe in the sense that it has a track record of carrying malware ("Google has detected harmful content")
I am definitely not comfortable with that considering that I know it contains false postives that google does not care to do anything about. Most people don't even know about google safe browsing or how realize how much control it gives Google.
BTW, VirusTotal is also run by Google which they are not very open about.
> I guess people know what malware looks like
I have yet to find anyone that does. Certainly not the anti-virus industry.
> It's interesting to me that people seem generally comfortable with the mechanisms browsers use to determine if a site is unsafe in the sense that it has a track record of carrying malware ("Google has detected harmful content") but get really upset about the possibility that a similar system could be used to protect users from having their minds hacked by info-charlatans.
It's so much easier to tell whether a website is distributing malware than it is to tell when an "info-chartalan" is "hijacking someone's mind" that those things are in entirely different difficulty classes.
It's completely impossible to even get a small group of people in the same political party to agree on a definition for "misinformation", let alone a large group, let alone a group spanning multiple political parties, let alone be able to consistently tag content in the same way, let alone do that at scale.
We already have people who disagree about the nature of reality, or claim that truth and morals are subjective.
You might as well try comparing adding 3-digit numbers together with being a judge in a court of law. One of those things is mostly mechanical, although nontrivial to do at scale - the other is extremely messy and involves a massive amount of human factor. It's entirely reasonable to have significantly different views about them (and standards for who you let perform them).
This is a reasonable question, but at the present moment people pretend that the manufactured doubts, e.g. about climate change, are tantamount to real doubts, when they aren't. We live in an atmosphere where doubt, disinformation, and confusion is an active strategy. It isn't even so much about claiming "alternative facts" as it is keeping people triggered. I would recommend watching "Hypernormalisation" by Adam Curtis to understand what is going on.
Have you seen how Texas is going after anyone who participates in a boycott of Israel? Even if the governments you trust have a good definition of hate speech, think about how your least favorite politician might define it when they get into office. It's just too broad and easy to abuse.
i think this is a culture mismatch between America and other places. we have no hate speech laws and have historically really disliked the idea of something like that in part because we trust our government a lot less than other countries. like, even liberals here will trust the government way less than right wingers in other countries. so we are pretty settled with our "clear and present danger" standard.
also wouldn't you acknowledge the government continues to regularly lie to the public? e.g. "masks don't work" at the beginning of coronavirus to keep people from buying them.
let me put this another way: it looks like you're in sweden where people trust the government a lot more. but would you be okay with joe biden or donald trump having significant control over "the truth"?
uhh does it though? your example directly disproves that because freedom to lie implies freedom to dissent and vice versa. the fact that people can go spread misinformation and that most sane people disagree, but others are still free to go talk about it proves that nobody has "control of the truth" and that's on balance a good thing.
We can start with plainspoken intolerance, because it is pretty easy to identify. Going beyond that would be difficult, perhaps too difficult, but I don't think we need to go that far.
We may be talking about different things, then. Would you be willing to give an example of acceptable intolerance? FWIW, in my mind, when I say 'intolerance' I am specifically not including legitimate policy disagreements or opinions about behavior.
I have a similarly mercenary and utilitarian POV as far as using products that personally benefit me. However, it's understandable that the idealistically minded prefer not to use/support enterprises they see as lobbying to degrade their pet issues - be that the internet, or the environment, etc. It's not any different than those refuse to engage with Amazon, Walmart, Hollywood, Chick-Fil-A, or subsidiaries of the Kochs.
Advocating tuning algorithms to favour sources the Mozilla Foundation likes is not my idea of user control.
That said, I simply enjoy the product more. Stuff like tab groups and PWAs and other Chromium-derived niceties with a pretty thorough degoogling is a good combination. Add to that an independent search index and it's a pretty damn good package.
The "woke" crowd waves so many flags it often ends up shooting themselves in the foot.
People got outraged because Mozilla asked for donations in crypto, because it's not green energy.
They want a commercial grade browser, made with zero ads, zero crypto, with enough features to work both with DRM protected video but also with hardware video acceleration in even the most obscure OS, funded only by donations. And, in practice, money made from donations it's not enough at all for the amount of manpower needed for a project like this.
I'm in favor for being sensible and having an inclusive environment. But people expect too much from a software project.
PD: What's worse, the CEO of Mozilla Corporation raised her salary up to over 3 million dollars, while Firefox marketshare is down over 85%. Not very woke IMHO
- those pushing a political agenda they don't advertise
If you prefer clandestine back-room dealing to front-room blogpost announcements because they aren't all in-your-face about it, that's a fair preference. But don't fall into the trap of believing there's such a thing as a company pushing no agenda; companies are made up of people, politics is the interaction of people.
Every CEO, CFO, CTO, and VP has an opinion on topics like the one Mozilla posted about and the products they control grow to reflect those opinions
This kind of "everything is political" thinking is incredibly divisive and is literally the cause of the culture war tearing apart the US (not sure where you live) right now.
Plus, I straight-up don't believe it, and you've provided no evidence to support your claim.
> companies are made up of people, politics is the interaction of people.
conflates (intentionally or not) two very different kinds of "politics" - GP was talking about partisan politics, but you started discussing organizational politics. Unless you're claiming that all human interaction is intrinsically partisan...
Also, I don't believe the claim that all execs are unable to prevent their political opinions from leaking into their direction for the company. They're often motivated extremely strongly by money, and I'm sure that we all know of at least one person that is willing to compromise on their morals (-> political views) for money.
Finally, even treating the claim as true for the sake of argument - not all companies will push their own political agenda with the same strength, and it's entirely reasonable to avoid those that push harder.
> Unless you're claiming that all human interaction is intrinsically partisan
Basically, yes. Most people are out for themselves (which is of course partisan); those who believe in some other more altruistic model are operating under a philosophy that is also partisan ("We should be for others in addition to ourselves").
> They're often motivated extremely strongly by money
I agree; that is also a political position. When considering a company with that position, one must ask "Okay, so what is the most damage they could do in pursuit of the almighty dollar?" and keep an eye out for behavior fitting that (are they cutting corners, abusing workers, abusing resources in a way that pushes externalities onto other people), and make one's own decisions accordingly. There's a reason we have laws requiring declaration of activity.
> I straight-up don't believe it, and you've provided no evidence to support your claim.
That's fair; I assumed this was a given and didn't think it needed support because of observations of how things have gone in the past decade or so (as people have come to realize that there are consequences to the "just get along attitude:" things don't get better for those for whom getting along is not an option).
Most companies have some kind of agenda, yes. I wouldn't exactly begrudge hammersmiths having opinions related to hammers, for example.
But if you look at the breadth of company politics at say, Brave or Vivaldi, and contrast those with Mozilla, it's night and day. Brave and Vivaldi have politics of privacy and user control, and it shows. Mozilla has many other concerns, like cultural coolness (hello, color themes by an ex-Nike designer. Street smart, eh?).
There are narrow, relevant-to-topic stances on things which companies very well should have.
The browser war has ended up like every presidential election cycle.
In the end: two candidates to choose from, and the majority of people wouldn't prefer them as their president anyways. Both candidates are too milquetoast to accomplish what their constituents actually want/need, both are paid by the same people, both are friends in their little secret societies. Third party candidates never make it, because we're too far gone, and nobody has the will to vote differently at risk of wasting theirs.
It's actually funny and scary how similar the two situations are.
- Your browser already makes "your internet" different than mine. You will see different different content and (at stores) pricing in Chrome than you do Firefox on a bunch of major sites. Try it, it is pretty obvious.
- Second, the article is specifically referring to Facebook's "algorithm". This is frustrating, because we can't talk knowledgeably about what they actually did after Jan 6. But why anyone assumes the "more conflict" slider is somehow "more honest" is beyond me - it is a black box whose function feeds Facebook money. They were not tuning for honest before, and they weren't after. But of course, they were talking about FB, not their own product.
Now, can you name specific concerns about what you fear FF might do with their browser to start gaslighting you?
Instead of blocking... what about certain cookies that you can set as persistent inside a browser. So a persistent cookie will ask permission to store your given preference forever. So next time you face the same question, it just queries the persistent cookie cache, checks whether you gave your permission to store those fucking consent cookies for ad tracking and bugger off.
Those fucking cookie banners... if you search for something, each and every fuckin page asks whether they want to track you. And since the banners are not standardized everyone tries to fuck the user in the arse big time by changing button locations, hiding options, and wording it in a perverse way. So in essence people will go mad after the 3rd time and just press the shinyest button to escape the torture. It just doesn't work and makes your life miserable.
So what about ff, chrome, edge, brave plus the chipmunks sit together, hold hands and come up with a standard for it? You can even give a 3 letter acronym to it, so when people regurgitate it, they can go through an orgasm every time...
It would probably go exactly the same as Do not Track headers did: as soon as something allows users to automatically opt-out, web industry decides thats not tolerable and ignores it. Annoying you into clicking the wrong thing is the point of how websites implement it!
Do you realize that the whole thing is counterproductive, right? 99% of users do not want to know what the fuck a cookie is. Imagine you are right before coitus and in the beginning a little angel would pop up and warn you about STDs. And you must answer with an erect dick that yes, you understand. People want instant gratification. The information RIGHT NOW, the pornstar RIGHT NOW, the best pet food RIGHT NOW. PPl are already hooked on the internet, so why are you trying to tell nose jobs how to behave and endure this fucking practice?
It is not the users' job to know about whether the privacy aspects are shit and he/she is robbed of it. So the browser makers go on and solve this shitstorm together.
You've hit the meat of the issue. The legal process that got us to cookie banners was one of the most fascinating collisions of well-meaning but clueless privacy advocates, well-meaning but clueless politicians, and not-particularly-well-meaning-but-very-savvy-about-human-behavior web devs of the 21st century.
It was a trainwreck those who knew psychology saw coming from a mile away, watched get worse as the process progressed, and nobody wanted to hear their truth: this wasn't going to work because users don't care enough to disincentivize sites from tracking them.
Yeah. You have to educate people. And no one wants to educate people. The ruling caste wants to steer people in certain directions, but not towards truth and efficient systems.
It is in my first comment. People don't care about cookies. Browser is a common good, and an interface to the hive mind that must be developed by independent entitites, so GOOG must be robbed of their browser. Sorry, that's the way to go. Google is effectively policing the internet, time to wrestle that right away.
Just to add some alternative opinion here. I will not be switching to Brave because of this news, or Manifest V3.
In my perfect world, my browser has the ability to black list sites who abuse users with ads or carelessly implement banners. I let the rest of the internet serve me the experience that the developers intended.
I use a lot of sites that are sensitive to ad blockers in order for them to function. This is mostly negligible at this point, because ad blockers have gotten really good at not being too heavy-handed on certain sites, but the juice isn't worth the squeeze for me.
I also continue to see ads that are relevant to me, and those ads help fund the free and open internet. I do not have any illusions about my privacy, which ad blockers do not make a significant impact on (see: the phone in my pocket).
Brave is cool for browsing porn though. Although Librewolf is probably slightly better/cooler for that purpose.
Popups were an evil of the Dark Times (the 1990s). Web developers stopped using them more than twenty years ago because they are garbage. It is straight up embarrassing that the new generation of web developers have embraced popups again. Not just the preferences popups, but the nigh-ubiquitous popups begging people to subscribe/register. Have some self-respect!
Fundamental system design rules include: Don't add garbage which prevents users doing what they want to do. Popups prevent users doing what they want to do. Don't use popups.
Totally agree with the principle, but you memory may be off there. New window popups mostly went away about 20 years ago. These kinds of overlay dialogs never went away. I remember visiting plenty of WordPress blogs in 2006 that had a newsletter subscription modal.
I wish other browsers would do this. I don't jive with most of the other stuff Brave incorporates. For a while I was using "I dont care about cookies" but it seems less effective as of late.
The problem with that extension is that it sometimes does accept tracking cookies, which makes it kind of pointless. I want a "No means no, goddamn it" extension, which this Brave functionality seems to supply.
The best way to do this without switching browser is to use ublock origin's filter lists (in the settings dashboard) and enable "Easylist Cookie" under "Annoyances".
Yes, that's exactly my point! I care about rejecting cookies, which is why “I don’t care about cookies” is a useless extension to me. This Brave solution is much better.
Cookie banners are seriously one of the most obnoxious and user experience-destroying things on the web. So much so that I use that "kill sticky" bookmarklet[0] to kill them. But it still sucks especially since, as far as I know, there's no way to use the keyboard to trigger the bookmarklet (maybe there are extensions that let you run custom JS with keyboard shortcuts?)
Is there any way for the browser to know what the effect of suppressing the banner/popup is?
Can it reliably suppress it in such a way that it represents the user having opted out?
Brave is great and I love the nonsense it blocks. I wouldn’t recommend it for non-technical users however as Brave features may disable certain websites which may be confusing to the end user.
An example is I logged into a telecommunications provider to pay a bill. Because of all the tracking BS integrated with their site I wasn’t able to view or pay that bill and only after looking into the Network tab in dev tools was it clear to me why.
I've tried this myself but it's not as easy. Some sites blocks the scrolling while the cookie dialog is shown and when you just remove the dialog, the scrolling remains disabled. If they add touch start event listener as anonymous function I'm not sure if it can even be disabled. I couldn't make it work on 9gag mobile site so I just clicked the accept button but that's beyond simple css filter.
It’s legal already, websites are just being overly cautious.
You just need to not be using third party ads and analytics software, more or less, and you’re in the clear.
The cookie banner is a nice CYA “we do it because everyone does it” kind of thing, and most people don’t care about degrading the UX because what’s the user gonna do, NOT read our content? And also everyone else does it so shrug.
GDPR is pretty sensible overall. The cookie banner is ad companies making it as painful and difficult as possible to reject their crap. Most of these banners are automatically inserted by the third party libraries people pull, not even by the site authors themselves.
One thing that the article doesn't mention, but which I think is important: Under the GDPR, blocking a cookie banner is legally equivalent to rejecting all non-essential tracking, which includes tracking for targeted advertising. This is because the GDPR requires consent to be explicitly granted, and a lack of response is not explicit consent.
Whether websites actually follow the law is another matter altogether, but the GDPR is very clear that consent may not be assumed.
Can anyone recommend any read on what the story of cookie banners is, why they are there, and so on? It’s the single most annoying thing in today’s browsing, and I wish it would just go.
Really, is anybody glad the thing is there? Why? Asking sincerely
I believe it's a protest, by data-collecting websites against GDPR. I do not think websites inflict banners on you out of an exaggerated desire to come into compliance; the banners are supposed to annoy you, and you're supposed to blame it on the EU.
Blocking cookie popup would break Youtube/Twitter/Instagram embeds on some websites which hide embeds unless you accept cookies (Spiegel.de as an example, many in .nl)
what is not clear to me is: does this new "feature" is like "auto accepting" cookies?
because it is exactly the opposite of what a privacy-friendly browser should do.
I want a system to AUTONEGATE every request of cookie consent.
This feels like something which could get non tech-savvy users to switch.
At this point, almost everybody knows about surveillance capitalism being a thing, but most people would rather see targeted advertisements than pay for their YouTubes and their TikTok's.
Everyone (in Europe) is constantly annoyed by cookie banners though, and getting rid of them would cause a noticeable difference.
I don't see an option to just answer "Yes" to all the cookie banners by default. At least some websites don't have their full functionality without cookies enabled, and I'd be happy to just enable all the cookies, provided my browser blocks the ads.
In general I think extensions with functionality like this that require unfettered access reading and modifying every single page you visit are a huge security concern so having it be part of the browser itself makes sense. Same logic applies to ad- and tracker-blocking.
> But why did Brave have to put it into their browser and did not publish it as a plugin?
I don't know if they do that in this case, but one could assume having access to non-public internal APIs might improve filtering capabilities/performance.
For example if brave was to implement manifest v3, it wouldn't impact their built-in ad/cookie blocking features.
This isn't a plugin. The cookie blocking is just an extra filterlist that's built to be compatible with uBlock Origin and Brave Shields, and has been available for both for a while. The innovation is simply the browser proactively using a prompt to ask the user if they want to subscribe to the list.
It's an uBO compatible filter list. The Brave speciality here is that their blocker is built in and that the browser now proactively asks you if you want to give cookie banners the finger.
Why would you switch people to Brave and not to Firefox..? Brave being a cryptocurrency scam should be enough to enough to turn people away, but I'd also worry about the position of a browser which is in a hostile relationship with the browser engine it's based on.
> You can use the browser without any of the crypto features, or the ad rewards program. They are opt-in.
Nobody claimed Brave is forcing crypto down its users' throats. Instead, that their embrace of crypto signals characteristics about their management, culture and priorities. Some are attracted to that. Others don't care. Still others see it as a red flag. None of these positions rises to the level of disparagement, or accusing others of lying.
I disagree. I thought the ads and rewards programs were an interesting concept. I don't use them but interesting nonetheless when mainstream web ads involve all kinds of privacy invasion. Blockchain here was actually a good choice for implementing a simple and private payment system. Rather than send any signal about the characteristics of management, some people are looking at this as a guilt by association kind of situation because they don't agree with how some completely different group of people has implemented and used blockchain or engaged in pump and dump scams.
I don't like crypto so I was pretty skeptical of Brave when I first looked into it, but after reading about it it came not so much as them trying to piggyback on the crypto train but rather as them prototyping different funding models to see what sticks. I prefer this approach to Firefox's who is fully dependent on funding from Google to survive.
One of those prototypes IIRC was them disabling the ads that companies used to fund their operations, collecting crypto donations in a pool on 'behalf of' those websites, holding them hostage until the site signed up - and if they didn't sign up within some period of time keeping them for themselves [edit] ('putting them into the user growth pool' [1]).
> collecting crypto donations in a pool on 'behalf of' those websites
No. The rewards program is centered around the people. It just happens that the way to discover the people and address the payment is through some specific platforms (like Youtube, twitter, reddit, github, etc).
> holding them hostage
Nothing is held hostage. The only legal way that they can pay someone is if the person goes through KYC. The system can only recognize the recipient as "authorized to receive payments" if the creator has signed up to one of the partner exchanges.
> keeping them for themselves
This is false. Contributions were going to the user pool. Now they are returned to the original donor.
No, I think I'd be significantly angrier if they'd collected actual money and withheld it from its originally intended recipient and instead put it into a fund that they used to grow their business. That was actually more offering them the benefit of the doubt. Crypto tends to cloud a lot of judgement and relax the definitions of 'financial fraud.' If it were done with actual dollars they might already have met with the DOJ.
> Nothing is held hostage. The only legal way that they can pay someone is if the person goes through KYC.
So what you're saying is, you can't get it unless you sign up even though they'd already solicited the donations on your behalf. Got it. So exactly what I said. This wouldn't be an issue if they had people sign up first, right? Then they wouldn't be soliciting donations on behalf of unregistered individuals and the whole point would be moot.
> This is false. Contributions were going to the user pool. Now they are returned to the original donor.
Right, the marketing budget. They stopped after they got called out for it.
Exactly what I said.
[edit] Side-note, if they'd done this on the websites of charities, it may actually be illegal in a number of countries.
> Charity fraud is the act of using deception to get money from people who believe they are making donations to a charity. [...] Charity fraud not only includes fictitious charities but also deceitful business acts. Deceitful business acts include businesses accepting donations and not using the money for its intended purposes, or soliciting funds under the pretense of need. [1]
Now I'm no lawyer but soliciting donations that people think are going to a charity and instead putting them into your 'user pool' if 'unclaimed' sounds a lot like [1].
Anyway, what they did was no different than any other tip bot did on reddit, or any other company that needs to find a way to bootstrap a marketplace that depends on network effects: they made it easy for people to initiate a transaction and then would go after the other end to close the deal.
> The marketing budget.
The "User Growth Pool" was a literal pool of extra funds that would get distributed to the users beyond what they collected from the ad-selling. It takes a special type of cynic to think that they would use that as a ploy to increase their "marketing budget".
What I really don't get is why people are so sensitive against these actions only when the company is involved with crypto. Google and Facebook are making fortunes out of fraudulent ad views, and I can bet good money that you don't mind having them in your stock portfolio. But here is one company building a model on actual privacy and fraud-free ad views, and you are here calling for "financial fraud". For what? Eight people complaining about the improper messaging on their beta product?
How much did they get out of this "fraud"? A few hundred dollars, that didn't even get to go to their pockets? Is it really believable that a company with millions of dollars in funding and one of most successful ICOs from the 2017 craze would run such a ridiculously unprofitable "fraud"?
I believe that's more or less how it works today, although I'm not sure about the part where they eventually keep the money. The browser essentially blocks ads and rewards users with BAT crypto in exchange for viewing privacy-respecting ads run by Brave. The BAT is then credited to the sites the user is viewing based on time spent on the site. The rub is, as you pointed out, that not every site signs up with Brave and won't ever receive the BAT.
It's a great idea with a good implementation that's primarily marred by poor uptake. It could have been a game changer if it had been embraced. The idea that Brave still shows ads and essentially holds the revenue in escrow for a non-member publisher is somewhat uncomfortable. But I also realize the likely reason they did it that way is it's much easier to get a publisher on board if they can show that there's already engagement and revenue waiting to be collected.
I use Brave from time to time with the wallet and rewards disabled. It's a couple settings and you never see it again. I probably would enable it if publishers actually used it. As things stand now, why should I be willing to accept ads the publisher won't be paid for when I'm already unwilling to accept ads that do pay?
So I think that, ultimately, it's not the use of crypto or the rewards program that comes off as a little skeevy. It's the idea that that stuff exists and the money never goes where it's supposed to go.
> So I think that, ultimately, it's not the use of crypto or the rewards program that comes off as a little skeevy. It's the idea that that stuff exists and the money never goes where it's supposed to go.
Yep, I agree with that. It gets a little guilt by association but that's not where the fundamental issue is.
Red flag is fine “brave being a cryptocurrency scam” is not, without strong evidence for the scam portion of that statement pertaining to Brave specifically (either commenter needs to provide evidence or Brave being a literal scam needs to be publicly known and widely accepted).
It is completely insidious to the goals of this site that we allow lazy accusations that anything remotely associated with crypto is a scam without a shred of evidence.
Some other crypto being a scam or even holding the opinion that there are so many scams in crypto that it’d better if it was banned / disappeared is not a good reason for the behaviour we see in comments like this.
They reduce the discourse to a meritless shouting contest at best.
> think it's the word "scam" they were taking issue with
I have no dog in this race. I use Safari and Firefox as products, but I don't have a deep enough connection to browser development and the web to feel like either is a part of my identity.
The original commenter substantiated their opinion [1] to a level that rises above deserving a caustic reply. That's all I'm saying.
Just checked on a fresh Nightly install, doesn't seem to insert tipping buttons anywhere if you haven't enabled Brave Rewards. I haven't, no tipping buttons anywhere.
I’m not as passionate about it as you, but I agree they broke their principal of being for the user by making it opt out. Among other issues, making it opt out makes it seem like large sites (like Twitter) endorse BAT. Maybe they do, but I doubt it.
> There is no scam about Brave's program. Stop projecting. If you don't like crypto, fine. But to disparage it on false statements is beyond lame.
Somebody who says that all cryptocurrency stuff is a scam is strictly wrong, but substantially correct. If 95% of door-to-door salesmen are high-pressure assholes and I say all door-to-door salesmen are scum, then strictly I'm wrong but I'm still mostly correct. It wouldn't be fair to the innocent girlscout trying to sell cookies, but the kirby salesmen can fuck right off.
Congratulations. You just managed to pontificate without making any actual contribution to the argument.
No one is arguing about the general case, but specifically about Brave as a browser. It's bad enough that people are trying to use their general bias about crypto as an argument against using the browser, you are going even further and saying that people should be guilty by association.
To follow your analogy, we are talking specifically about the girl scouts and you are saying you feel justified in branding them as scum because they happen to share a trait with door-to-door salesmen.
> No one is arguing about the general case, but specifically about Brave as a browser.
I'm telling you that the criticism against Brave's use of cryptocurrencies is informed by a well-warranted generalized belief that all crytocurrency schemes are scams. The only reason I don't slam my door on girlscouts is because it is immediately obvious to me that a little girl in a girlscout uniform is not a kirby salesman. I can see that difference plainly at a glance, without having to read or hear anything they say. To perceive the difference between Brave's scheme and a typical cryptocurrency scam takes a lot more effort and careful examination. It isn't fair to blame people for not putting in that effort, given the general odds in the cryptocurrency sphere.
> It isn't fair to blame people for not putting in that effort, given the general odds in the cryptocurrency sphere.
The low-effort thing here would be to ignore this and walk away, to not leave a comment at all. Instead folks are writing out comments that Brave is a "cryptocurrency scam". It's hard for me to believe that it's too much effort to verify whether something is a scam but it's not too much effort to write a comment dismissing Brave.
This whole thread is a trash fire. Most comments are saying the same things over and over again and only a handful are even comparing Firefox and Brave. Does this really need to happen on any remotely cryptocurrency related thread? It just turns people off from using the site.
What is so hard to understand about that? The crypto part from Brave is only if you want to receive a token.
They could change tomorrow to make the payments in greenbacks, and they would still have the same business model. But do you think that the people bitching about the browser would use it, if they suddenly learned they could win $5-10 per month? They wouldn't. They would just find another reason to complain or fight it, and those who actually want to use crypto would leave because they lost their chance to speculate.
I personally don't care about the success of BAT - though I still buy it regularly. My main interest is in finding an alternative economic model for Surveillance Capitalism. Show me any other company that is doing anything that can become a real threat to Google/MS/Facebook, and I will support it as well.
It's a scheme, a business plan. If my understanding of it is correct, it's not a scam but it's certainly a scheme.
> Show me any other company that is doing anything that can become a real threat to Google/MS/Facebook, and I will support it as well.
Wish I could, Mozilla certainly isn't such an example. Brave is unlikely to ever get their foot in the door because their business model smells like a scam. I don't think there are any viable technical solutions to the threat of Google/MS/Facebook, only political/legislative solutions. But if anybody proves me wrong I'll be thankful.
Was there any evidence this ever happened? I feel like people conflate "a browser with an ad-blocker, plus a separate incentivized advertising system" with something that literally inserted advertisements where the removed ones were.
I get Brave ads as either on its main tab, or as separate notifications I get a reward for. I can believe there were variants on that, but I want more information about what they were.
>In June, reports emerged, which stated that the company had been quietly inserting affiliate links for certain search queries without telling users. For instance, Brave had added a home widget for Binance a month prior, which turned out to redirect users via its affiliate offering.
Replacing one ad system with another ad system/modality doesn't negate the presence of ads. It just changes the modus operandi. Much like getting your daily nicotine kick from vapes instead of cigarettes.
The ideal situation would be to have no ads if the browser is (often) advertised privacy-first. But then we know the world isn't perfect. We work around tradeoffs.
As long as Brave keeps these contentious options transparent, I have no problems in supporting them.
For one you can disable the popup ads. Additionally you get paid if you do enable the ads. So it's quite a different system where the user is put first in both cases.
> outside of screwing over the content creator. You're visiting a site for content, and the one really getting paid is Brave
I really wish I had focused on subscription growth instead of ad growth when I was in the content business (I had a few sites over 1m uniques per day). There's just something to delivering something so valuable that readers are willing to pay for it. You end up being much more focused on quality instead of driving ad clicks and directing your readers off site. That said, times have changed a lot, and people now seem much more willing to pay than 10 years ago.
You are getting paid as well. If you want to reward the content creator, you can.
To me that model is a lot better than the status quo. Content creators that I think are producing quality content get rewarded, while those pushing content to attract eye balls lose power.
Not with BAT. But Brave buys the BAT it gives users from the open market using their ad revenue, as far as I know. Which means the creators can sell the BAT for real money, which does pay bills.
The creators that I do support get more from me in BAT than the zero dollars they get from my viewing of their content in Google/Facebook/Twitter/Youtube. This is what matters.
Then what about when Brave hijacked affiliate links en-mass for all users? No 'not required' as it was maliciously done in the background (until they were called out on it at least).
Brave is a shady platform at a minimum; and has been caught in the past being actively malicious.
Web browsers are antiquated technology. IMO the original web UX is dying. I’m sharing data through private K8s + Kilo clusters. There is nothing “open” about a web of VC backed user interfaces and FAANG own private DCs.
I understand such economics are this websites bread and butter, but most of you produce b2b tools I have no use for. One could replace the web with AI bots posting the same content, I’d never know because I’m digging into ML generated games and other content on the down-low, with like minded hackers rather than existing in idolatry, white knighting in defense of of VCs and billionaires latest reskin of old technology.
Open ML generated content is going to do to digital media markets what open Linux did to Windows and MacOS; suck the profit out. I’m here for it and the evolution away from the web as we knew it.
No, it is not a better word. Please explain exactly what is fraudulent about Brave's business model. Who is getting duped? The advertisers, the users who receive their rewards in crypto?
> They added UI to the browser to claim users could pay individual site creators who'd signed up, but had scraped the names and photos of site creators who'd never heard of them. Brave planned to take the payments after they were unclaimed for 90 days. When caught, they claimed the funds were held "in escrow" but later admitted there were holding the funds themselves.
One side anecdote: just last week there was someone on HN arguing that "younger people were less susceptible to manipulation because they've grown surrounded by ads", and he gave the example of "fake news" being targeted and passed around by older people.
Reading about how something "makes you feel" reminded me of that. It's like people don't care about what objectively affects them or even trying to keep a sense of perspective.
It doesn't matter that it makes ZERO sense for a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to risk their whole business by taking petty cash from donations or putting "fraudulent referral link" that could be discovered so easily.
It doesn't matter that Mozilla/Firefox depends on the dirty money from Google to do whatever they do, or that they shove "opt-out" products into their users and don't track back, and that their management is running the corporation to the ground.
It doesn't matter that Google is doing anything they can to make life hard for users of ad blockers, or that their "privacy features" protects their users from everyone but Google itself. It doesn't matter that Apple is only concerned about privacy as a selling point for their overpriced crap.
None of that matters... what matters is "how people feel about a story".
Is Brave perfect? No, of course not. If you browse /r/BATProject you will find me calling out them for selling out (they got a partnership with Solana , who paid handsomely to get integrated into the browser) instead of leveraging their user base to promote the decentralization with Ethereum. If they ever (deliberately) do anything against the users, then I'll be the first to join the opposition. But none of the things that people hold against them fits this bill. None of it is shady or unethical.
Well, it's deception which appears to be intended to result in financial gain. That fits the definition of "fraud" which I use. It's incredibly shady in any case.
There is no deception. They promptly admitted the mistake and corrected it.
It is a lot less "shady" than the billions of dollars every year spent in Google/Facebook/Twitter/Bing ads who turn out to be fraudulent and makes business owners with no way to actually verify and recourse, and Mozilla directly benefits from.
You constantly repeating your opinion does not transform it in fact. Once again, stop projecting...
> You do you.
You started the thread with the implication that promoting Brave would be akin to getting people into a scam. At least be decent enough to admit that you are only arguing based on your own bias.
Sorry, I'm not taking your arguments very seriously. You're arguing that no there's deception in automatically silently changing links to contain Brave referral links, or to making it look like donations are going to a creator when they in reality don't. I disagree, but if you genuinely believe that there's no deception involved in any of that, our disagreement boils down to a simple difference in opinion about what constitutes deception, which I don't think it's fruitful to argue about.
My only bias here is against browsers which change links out from under their users to benefit the browser vendor or make it look like the user's donations are going to someone who's not receiving them. Nothing more, nothing less.
You are taking every story around and passing the worst possible interpretation as truth, when all of them have been already cleared and/or shown that the accusation was baseless. When there was indeed an error, it was promptly admitted and corrected.
Judging by your grayed out comments, the only thing that shouldn't be taken seriously is you. Have a good one.
That retort of yours is impressive: A) the validity of what I'm saying has no relation to upvotes/downvotes, and B) all my comments in this thread have a positive score regardless.
In any case, you haven't even attempted to show that any of the accusations I've brought up are baseless; we both agree that my re-telling of the facts is accurate (otherwise you would've contested it), you just choose an (in my opinion) unreasonably charitable interpretation.
or, instead of using a gun to make your analogy sound scary, we could use something that actually occurs in real life like getting a car with a tape deck you don't want.
> And they really go out of their way to make it as hard as possible to disable/hide the wallet and all related crypto stuff.
I looked at the link you provided. I must say, as a dolt-level techie (74-year-old retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist) that the instructions appear VERY involved. I expected a simple on/off button but instead it's like something I'd find on HN....
First, it's opt in. So you'd only need to opt out if you'd opted in at some point.
The instructions boil down to: Click settings, uncheck Brave Rewards button.
The rest of the article tells how to disable new tab background ads, remove the rewards UI, and how to do it again on mobile...but these are more personal preference things.
Edit:
Just tested it by opting in. Easiest way for me was -
1 - Click settings
2 - Click Brave Rewards at top
3 - Click Manage Brave Rewards
4 - Click Reset
This actually removed all the checkboxes and such, and treats you as if you'd never opted in in the first place.
How can you argue it's not a scam? The BAT Cryptocurrency is merely used as a mechanism to justify stealing profits from website owners. It literally has no other use or value?
The whole point of BAT is to reward people from removing ads placed by website owners and allow Brave to display ads of their own choosing and profit from websites that they have no involvement with.
It could actually be argued the whole 'privacy' angle they use is merely a way to justify the whole idea of ad-swapping. It's no different to what Apple have done with advertising of late.
Of course they justify this by saying the websites can take a cut, but that's only if the website owners know about it and forced against their will to do it.
It implies something has not been disclosed to users. Brave has been almost painfully honest.
> It could actually be argued the whole 'privacy' angle they use is merely a way to justify the whole idea of ad-swapping
Brave does not ad swap, and brave rewards ads show up as a browser notification, not inline with content. This idea came from a 2016 article where content publishers were afraid that Brave might launch with ad-swapping. Brave did get caught re-writing Binance affiliate links to their own affiliate code, but immediately discontinued the process.
I didn't mention that they ad-swap. I just refer to the fact they remove ads on the website but then display ads through the browser in terms of push notifications etc.
I'd argue that website owners are being scammed by a company stealing profits. Brave is literally going "We don't think you should earn money from your visitors because of factors we decide, but we're going to show people on your website OUR ads because we picked them."
Adblock is just as bad. They block all ads and then go "If you've got plenty of money and want us to let your ads show to our users, you've got to pay us for the privilege."
> Brave is literally going "We don't think you should earn money from your visitors because of factors we decide, but we're going to show people on your website OUR ads because we picked them."
I don't see how this is any worse for the site than blocking all ads doing nothing else. At least as long as the users aren't confused, which they aren't, because the brave ads don't get put into the page.
If ublock cost money to use, would that be a scam?
The problem is not ads, per se. The problem is (a) tracking and (b) ad-based business models who have misaligned incentives between users and advertisers.
If you tell me that Google/Firefox share their revenue with users and their ads don't collect personal data, I'll be rushing back to it.
There are some people however who do see the benefit of trading (directly or indirectly) their attention for services and products. These people should be able to do it without having to give away their privacy as well.
The thing is: we have two different business models. On both of them, ads are a reality. But one of them they are (1) opt-in, (2) private and (3) still give the user the power to "vote with their wallet", even if there is no money directly involved. The other is what we have: Surveillance Capitalism, big players exploiting user data and a total misalignment between producers and consumers. To me it seems pretty obvious which one is better and which one I'd support.
Brave has some "blockchain" based features, to appeal to those who are drawn to that hype. They make money by selling ads, either for crypto-related companies or else using a crypto-based mechanism.
Absolutely all of this is either opt-in, or else trivial to opt-out from with a few clicks.
Mozilla is an entity that essentially exists at the whim of Google. Funded by Google to sit in the corner and be semi-relevant at best, so that Google can stave off anti-trust attacks on Chromium. It earns a half-billion dollars per year in revenue, and essentially pisses away most of that on MBA nonsense that has nothing to do with maintaining a web browser.
You don't have to care about or pay attention to any of that to use Firefox.
Neither of these two organizations are indisputably "perfect". If you are the type of person for whom your web browser choice is a component of your personal "identity", then attaching either of these logos to your own personal brand can be problematic.
However, wrapping up your personal brand identity in web browser selection is ridiculous. All of the above is essentially irrelevant nonsense. Meanwhile, back in the land of objective reality... the world has standardized on Chromium for better or worse, and so Brave has a bigger plugin ecosystem and far fewer if any compatibility issues with any website.
You can do either. Out of all Chromium-based browsers, Brave seems to be the only open-source, the most secure and transparent browser with a lot of development capacity.
I currently only use Brave and Firefox on all my devices. Never liked the BAT crap Brave has built-in, but you can disable it and move on.
>You do know that FireFox gets paid for Google search referrals to this day right?
Messing with referral codes to websites is not even remotely in the same ballpark as being paid for searches from the default search provider. It's asinine to compare them.
Unless you are repeating the lie that we "hijacked links", the binance.{us,com} refcode bug arose from search bar code that does exactly the same kind of keywords-into-search-box client refcoding that Firefox uses to get paid by Google.
As opposed to building your entire product on your competitor's codebase?
That seems far more dangerous to me - at least Mozilla can make a deal with a different search provider (and they have, though I think it was kinda rough)
This thread is so surreal, way below normal HN standards, people blindly yelling their own truths, like we are discussing ie Trump.
And yes you seems to be one hell of a biased user, very hard to agree with you.
Why can't there be 2 alternatives to default Chrome, with their own strengths and weaknesses?
I personally prefer Firefox who is completely independent on code changes on chromium core code (but getting Google's money in same vein as ie Apple is) - once some privacy-removing code change is baked into whole Chromium codebase, Brave's main selling point is gone. But I respect them for offering the best-available solution on Chrome-inclined users.
It's a proxy war for Brandon Eich's political beliefs. Plus a few advertising webmasters thrown in who are really bent out of shape about an adblocker being enabled by default.
BTW I use firefox and voted for those things Eich is against. Not that it should even matter, but it does. That's what this whole flamewar of a comment page is actually about.
People hate Eich and hate crypto, so they get bent out of shape. I don't mind the dislike, but the blatant lies and low information posting gets tiresome.
Rewards are off by default. We support GPO for disabling torproxy.dll, IPFS, rewards ability to be enabled, and the self-custody multi-blockchain wallet. Global shields GPO control coming soon.
You mean except for Chromium as well. All this talk about Manifest v3 which has already resolved most issues and delayed launch to finish addressing the rest literally provides more privacy than the approach before. Whether you want to make it easier for malicious extensions to spy on you is a different story, however I'd imagine that there are other filtering mechanisms outside the browser if you want to give adblockers more control.
I'm with you, my jaw drops when I see so much support for brave on hn. Super shady. Do they still replace website ads with their own ad network? (I'm all for blocking ads, but does this really not seem wrong to anyone?
I use Brave all day long and have never experienced this. I see no ads, so working as intended, I guess.
Also, I love the useful little features they include like redirecting all http requests from www.reddit.com to old.reddit.com. One can also bypass paywalls at the NY Times and The Economist with the click of a button.
They never replaced ads... that's another myth about them.
They have a built in ad blocker and only block ads, not replace.
The OPT-IN text notification ad service is separate. You can enable it to get text notification ads in exchange for BAT. It's OPT-IN and completely up to you.
It's ALWAYS been like that. At no time did they ever "replace" blocked ads.
What's really shady is how these obviously false talking points about Brave get perpetuated to this day, in every Brave thread.
-- edit @Accacin --
I was responding to a very specific false claim that they replaced ads being constantly repeated.
If you want to go on a general rant find another thread.
-- edit @411111111111111 ---
Nice biased article, that's exactly where this misinformation came from.
Which talks about the BAT rewards program, which are opt-in text system notification ads shown in an interval. Not on the webpage, or while browsing, or by default.
-- edit @vegetable --
No you notice people bringing up 2 year old lies and people responding to them. The first people who act crazy are those saying these ridiculous statements like "Brave is a cryptocurrency scam!" Then the people who inevitably have to call them out, then comes the people who say the people calling them out are fanboying. It's a cycle that repeats over and over in every Tesla, SpaceX, Brave, etc. thread that for some reason (because the owners are hated) gets the same talking points spammed over and over.
Edit: it looks like you've been using HN mostly for flamewar and ideological battle. Can you please stop doing that? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we have to ban such accounts.
No, what's super shady is people who are so entrenced in something that they defend and get aggressive when people talk negative about it.
I have been using Firefox for over 10 years now, and if they do something stupid I'll be on here complaining with everyone else. If they crossed the line I would definitely look for another browser.
The problem with Brave users seems to be that Brave can do no wrong. Bundling crypto in a browser seems absolutely insane to me. Remember all the shit Firefox got for bundling Pocket? Difference is, Pocket actually makes a little bit of sense in the context of a browser.
At the end of the day, it's thin veneer over Chromium and IMO they won't be able to block manifest v3 forever. Firefox can.
> Bundling crypto in a browser seems absolutely insane to me.
Almost everything wrong with the modern Internet can be traced to payment being difficult. If you could get small donations to sites, they'd be able to pay for themselves and wouldn't need to rely on your friendly neighborhood mega corp and ads. Crypto's promise was to provide that, digital money you can move around globally over the Internet fast, easy and without a middle man. So it's makes a ton of sense to have that in the browser. That crypto currency so far falls quite a bit short on delivering on that promise is a separate problem.
> Remember all the shit Firefox got for bundling Pocket? Difference is, Pocket actually makes a little bit of sense in the context of a browser.
Pocket never made any sense at all. Why would you bundle some proprietary service into an Open Source browser instead of improving the built in bookmark and download functions of your browser? Software-as-a-service is a cancer that should never ever get anywhere near a project claiming to be about privacy.
Personally I really like the idea of micro-transactions. Brave’s cryptocurrency is one of the few models for them that’s more than white papers. Granted it was a bit shady seeming at first, but they’ve stuck to it and seem genuine.
I’d rather pay for articles than have ads blasted everywhere. YouTube premium as an example is very worth it! However when you subscribe to something like The Economist they still blast ads at you. Also I really don’t want to pay for one off subscriptions everywhere, especially when they don’t even turn off ads.
Long term, blocking ads isn’t viable, nor is it even really ethical.
Sure I’m bummed that brave didn’t go another route and try to get a group of publishers in on the attention token rather that the sorta shady interception tactic. Still Firefox is in a position to try and make a federated micro transaction system, but haven’t tried.
> Remember all the shit Firefox got for bundling Pocket? Difference is, Pocket actually makes a little bit of sense in the context of a browser.
Pocket makes people mad because we expect Mozilla to be better. By the way, where is the source for the server side of Pocket? I can't find it anywhere, Mozilla lied about it. Whatever Brave did wrong doesn't excuse anything Mozilla does wrong, nor vice versa. They're all snakes, corrupted years ago by Google's influence, kept alive suckling on the teat of the biggest monopolist in the room. Both of them.
I have noticed the same thing in multiple fora. Anytime there's any discussion involving brave, the comments are swarmed by rather vocal and hardcore fans and usually the discourse devolves into pretty extreme shilling.
I typically go through most Brave threads I see. There's vocal people on both sides, but a lot of the detractors are pretty much rehashing something they read in a hit piece, or some article that doesn't word things clearly. Yet people keep spreading the misunderstandings.
Not liking the product or the company is one thing. Not liking crypto is perfectly understandable (I don't have any real interest in it either). But I wish people could just say they don't like it, or make informed criticisms. In most cases it's painfully obvious people have never even fiddled with the browser and simply trust hearsay.
Sometimes news articles get details wrong. There are no screenshots and the blog post they link to doesn't say anything about putting those ads into web pages. Are you sure this isn't just a bad description of the program they have right now? https://brave.com/brave-ads/https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360026361072-Bra... "Rather than displaying Ads on web pages, Brave Ads appear as push notifications, as background images on the New Tab Page, or as items in the Brave News feed. "
The article literally says that they are testing a feature for a max of 1000 volunteers - which is wildly, categorically different than deploying to your entire userbase using an opt-out model.
what are you talking about ? Do you know how ads work ? Brave is literally stealing and profiting from it.
Brave will remove the ads from a site, that a person/company has paid for to ad provider. The ad provider thats supposed to pay the website host / content creator / whatever.
Now Brave will insert their own ads and that another company has paid them to insert. So they are stealing and making money from the effort that someone else is expecting.
What are you talking about. They are stealing from content creators / whom ever took the time to create the website to begin with and taking their money. They are literally leeches.
I don't care about the ad business and believe there are better ways to do this, but this is scummy stuff.
Use an ad blocker or whatever you want but this is another company profiting from it.
Brave's ad blocking and advertising are separate things - the adblocker is basically pretty much like uBO, but written in Rust and integrated as part of the browser.
Brave Rewards is a separate module that lets users watch ads that get delivered as toaster popups. Brave uses a part of the revenue to buy BAT from the open market and gives it to users who viewed the toaster popups. The company also operates a tipping service that lets users give those crypto tokens to content creators they like. (Since Brave buys the tokens, the tokens will have a buyer who pays with real money from the real, normal advertising business).
Second, the browser did actually start being built on top of Gecko - as far as I know they had an Electron-like solution just with Gecko, and used that for the first versions of the browser. Later they transitioned to being a Chromium soft fork.
There is a very active segment on HN who has a raging hate boner for anything having to do with crypto, so much so that a pro crypto statement will get downvoted drastically in a few minutes.
However that is a minority (and my pro crypto comments usually recover to +3 or 4 a few days after), and most of us are here because we like good technology.
So that is why Brave is relatively popular here: we don't think it is shady.
> (and my pro crypto comments usually recover to +3 or 4 a few days after
This is more general than crypto. I've seen a recurring pattern where a comment of mine gets downvoted pretty quickly after posting, and then gets upvoted hours (or days) later.
This is another reason why you shouldn't comment on voting - in addition to being against the HN guidelines (which should be a reason by itself), comment score can change drastically in the 2-hour edit window. Just don't do it.
They literally remove ads, that people and companies have paid for. Then they insert their first party ads that another company paid them for. Shady asf
> They literally remove ads, that people and companies have paid for. Then they insert their first party ads that another company paid them for. Shady asf
You're presenting a very persuasive argument for using Brave[1].
1. They automatically block ads.
2. By default, they show no other ads.
3. If the user wants to see ads, the user can opt-in, and then only receive text ads OOB (of the actual content).
I don't think that I've ever had such a joyful reaction to a feature-list in software before.
yes profiteering company stealing ad revenue by utilizing open sources extensions to an open source browser... this seems like the new HN crowd would like this because BAT pffft
Have you actually used Brave? Can you provide actual evidence this is happening?
Maybe a screenshot? Literally anything.
I’ve been using Brave for a while, even before the crypto stuff but all, and I mean all of that can be turned off. I haven’t seen an Brave ad in place of where a typical ad would be. Ever. That kind of defeats the purpose of Brave, doesn’t it?
The only reason I known internet ads still exist is because of Chrome forced on my work computer.
Any form of advertising will eventually corrupt the platforms that rely on it to exist. I guess any platform which supports advertising will eventually turn into an advertising platform. Brave essentially is an advertising platform through their brave rewards (however complicated they make this relationship out to be) and likely will at some point start behaving like one.
Even if this does not happen in a reasonable timeframe, it is indeed a question how long it will take before chromium itself is corrupted by the same influences.
I think it's reasonable to dislike crypto for any reason you choose, but merely having a crypto wallet feature (that you're free to never use) doesn't mean that something is a scam.
Scam is a pretty powerful word and shouldn't be bandied about so casually.
1. Brave replaced ads on creator's websites with their own ads.
2. Brave's ads generated some sort of tokens, that the creator then could claim and cash out.
3. Brave happily collected those tokens on behalf of creators who didn't want to be a part of the scheme (e.g. Tom Scott). They stripped the creators of revenue from the original ads and just kept the tokens/revenue from their ads.
I'm not a Brave supporter and hold no BAT, but for point #3 they only took back "promotional" coins that were given away for free for trying Brave. They don't take back "donated" coins from however one buys/earns BAT in the other methods. Not sure if they still offer this promotion.
Points 1 and 2 are mostly correct, but it's not like it replaces a banner with their own banner but they still show you ads while blocking other ads. I feel the others saying it's wrong are not being honest, the result is the same: a site owners ad is not shown and a Brave ad is. It's an extortion scheme IMO.
Yes, as many have parroted this defense the ad system is off by default. However, when you turn it on, it's effectively replacing the ads, and extorting content creators to say "if you want a piece of the Brave ecosystem, you need to play by our rules." This is why every thread about Brave turns into this conversation, and why it's clear to many of us the system is flawed. Repeating the same points about it being "off by default" doesn't change that Brave still uses this system, and it doesn't mean it will never change to be on by default. As Brave is a for profit company, I'm sure it will be at some point.
You're not having an honest discussion here, trying to spin this as if Brave gives the user more choice. What we're talking about Braves built in ad blocker and ad scheme. Users like myself in this thread have a right to call out what we feel is not an honest system.
> 3. Brave happily collected those tokens on behalf of creators who didn't want to be a part of the scheme (e.g. Tom Scott). They stripped the creators of revenue from the original ads and just kept the tokens/revenue from their ads.
People can't seriously be complaining about this given that everyone here is basically upset that Chrome is making changes that impact ad blockers?
Brave's ad blocking and advertising are separate things - the adblocker is basically pretty much like uBO, but written in Rust and integrated as part of the browser.
Brave Rewards is a separate module that lets users watch ads that get delivered as toaster popups. Brave uses a part of the revenue to buy BAT from the open market and gives it to users who viewed the toaster popups. The company also operates a tipping service that lets users give those crypto tokens to content creators they like. (Since Brave buys the tokens, the tokens will have a buyer who pays with real money from the real, normal advertising business).
> 3. Brave happily collected those tokens on behalf of creators who didn't want to be a part of the scheme (e.g. Tom Scott). They stripped the creators of revenue from the original ads and just kept the tokens/revenue from their ads.
As far as I know, this was a Brave-held extra pool of BAT they had to kickstart the whole tipping system. If a creator wasn't onboard, they held the BAT for 90 days and if the creator hadn't signed up by then, returned it to the pool to be directed by the users again. I don't know if it happened to the users' own BAT, but in any case Brave didn't hold onto the coins.
The original UI back when the whole thing happened was pretty bad at distinguishing whether a creator was or wasn't a part of the program, if old screenshots are anything to go by. They fixed the UI to be clearer.
> They stripped the creators of revenue from the original ads and just kept the tokens/revenue from their ads.
It's been a long time, but what I remember was the tokens went back into a pool that were used to pay out other creators who were signed up. Not sure if I have the details right, but when I looked into it I came away feeling like it was in good faith, though misguided.
Firefox is not what it once was. It ships with many user-hostile settings enabled by default. For example: telemetry, Pocket integration, sponsored shortcuts on the New Tab page, sponsored suggestions in the search bar.
The knobs to turn off each of the 4 things I just listed are found in 4 different places within the UI.
Literally all of that is opt-in, except for the sponsored new tab page backgrounds, which are one toggle (and a separate one from having other rotating pretty backgrounds delivered at Brave's expense)
Ohh Don't forget Firefox, for all it's privacy preaching:
- Hijacking all your DNS requests to Cloudfare by default
- installing a scheduled task to Windows PCs to phone home your Windows default browser setting choice (And if you delete this task it gets re-installed again at each update)
- Firefox Studies are OPT-OUT. I've seen a study active on initial install already (and sometimes THREE studies running at once in a recent Linux install).
- Google set as the default search despite many privacy oriented options available
- Unique ID generated upon install.
- A marketing company metrics enabled was included in Android/iOS (see link). See above about Unique ID and IP address collection to see how this could have been abused.
I have used FF daily since basically Opera went Chrome-clone. BUT having to research how to turn off all these things above and what you mentioned with telemetry etc over the past few years has REALLY sat bad with me to point I am ready to jump ship as well and let them figure out themselves why they continue to bleed users. Bring back Colorways again for v106 along with cutesy sayings?? UGH. But FF still is the lesser of evils imo among desktop browser choices.
... and once you do it (tbh the only thing I could care about is the telemetry thingie, but need to check details and I never see anything sponsored on new tab ) what are your objections against it?
yep, the respectful way all of these firefox additions that mozilla deems en vogue at the moment, is for them all the be opt in.
Firefox advertises themselves as user respecting but falls short frequently and that disconnect riles people more than being abused by google and chrome who we generally know don't care about respecting users at all (unless it's profitable)
I'm extremely critical of cryptocurrency, but what Brave is doing makes sense. Blockchain is useful for situations where you need proof of work with untrusted clients.
Firefox's entire revenue model is "get money from Google", how is that not a concern? Ultimately Firefox's money comes from advertising. Brave is trying to find a way to monetize the web that doesn't require user tracking and ads.
Not grandparent poster, but I have been using Brave for a few years. I disabled/removed all the crypto bits it just works as a better Chrome-compatible browser. I would have liked to use Firefox, but some websites didn't work well with, and at the time I tried it was slower so stuck with Brave.
I have never had any problem with Firefox on any website. It feels most time people say that, it is actually an addon that is the problem, not Firefox.
I even have a relocation Mozilla also have mentioning this, and if I remember correctly it was like 99% of the time people blamed Firefox it was a actually an addon that was the problem.
You comment is a very important reason. Why not use constructive arguments to state your point?
Brave has an option to use BAT to pay content creators, and to earn BAT by opting into viewing ads. That's all. I've been using Brave for years, have the option turned off, and never see any of it. Could you explain where the "scam" is?
Firefox has become a political organization. I used it since the "Phoenix 0.1" days. Stopped using it when it was taken over by hateful activists.
Brave initially launched using bitcoin micropayments [1], but they had a very hard time getting any traction, since people weren't really willing to pay to not see ads. Launching their own cryptocurrency seemed like an OK idea, and it seems to have worked out well.
I am all for a business model that has an opt-in feature that generates revenue. I love Brave, and want to stick around, so I have no moral qualms with them making some money. I personally opt out, but I am grateful for those who use it. Their crypto system itself is quite benign - I tried it, and it required no investment on my part, so I don't understand where the "scam" is you speak of...
I WANT to switch to Firefox but the reality is that the experience is still sometimes rough compared to chrome. It’s the small things that gets me. On Mac, clicking a link when Firefox isn’t open sometimes opens two windows. Sometimes the keyboard shortcuts stops working if you just tab to the app as you have to click on it for keyboard shortcuts to start working etc. I know other browsers plays a lot of tricks to feel snappy but reality is that the tricks works, Firefox can at times “feel” slower doing operations.
Chrome has none of these issues and as an effect brave is good. That’s why I’m testing brave.
Being honest? I use Edge or Brave over Firefox because of compatibility edge cases and battery life. And while Mozilla might be the least bad browser vendor, they're not exactly great and dependent on Google for funding.
The edge case compat issues are rare for me, battery life seems the same, and FF is otherwise such a good, fast browser with nice extensions... I like it a lot more than Chrome now
I don't understand the "dependent on Google funding" statement that everyone mentions. Yeah, they're Google's bitch. But for what purpose? To act independently and make their own decisions, otherwise Google has a monopoly and they're screwed.
No, Mozilla's purpose is to appear to act independently while never doing anything that would upset Google too much. This incentive works even without Google ever even hinting at the funds being conditional on Mozilla being their bitch - someone who makes 3 million a year from a failing browser is not going to risk that setup.
Because many websites don't work well with Firefox engine. Video calls are one example.
So I picked the most practical example, which was Brave. Mind you there is nothing scamming about it. I have no use for it (but I do like the idea of being able to give small direct awards to people for great posts), so I just turned it of.
Its not, but a lot of HN folks are blinded by their own stupidity whenever they see the word 'crypto'.
The knee jerk reaction to that word shields them from any engagement in thought - it's just simply "some association with crypto? - it's terrible!".
This phenomenon early on was even targeted at simply cryptography based security (Although not super common on HN thankfully), since the word 'crypto' was associated with the software.
Ironically, it was born as a response to the crypto-crazed people that had the same thoughtless reaction in reverse
They were, for a time, taking donations on behalf of websites despite those websites not knowing that brave existed, or the donors not knowing that their donation was going to an unclaimed wallet. I can't remember what happened to the BAT - held for them if they ever did pick up brave I think, but eventually dumped back into the BAT pool. That, and substituting Amazon referral links, engendered distrust that is hard to overstate. Do you think is just a crypto=bad thing alone? That wasn't my impression.
Not Amazon referral links. More like Firefox Suggest or the like: Write eg. "Binance" in the URL bar, and one of the results in the dropdown menu is a sponsored link to "binance.us" who are partnered with Brave. The feature had a bug that caused complete, valid URLs (ie. you wrote "binance.us") to be shown the sponsored link as a primary completion option.
The issue persisted, as far as I know, one day. The response was to both fix the bug and make the feature be off by default.
This isn't about just using cryptocurrency, there are absolutely uses of cryptocurrency which I wouldn't describe as a scam. Here's what's making me call Brave a scam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33262620
Well, they did mislead people on where that crypto went at one point, and at one point also hijacked Amazon referral links. The anti-brave sentiment isn't all anti-crypto zeal, imo.
Edit: it wasn't Amazon referral links but companies that had partnered with brave.
The first mistake they fixed very quickly, and "mislead" is a bit strong – they were explicit in their terms about where the crypto was going.
Not sure the Amazon link thing is true at all. What I remember is that there was a Binance referral link that was built-in to the browser, which would show up at the top of auto-complete when you started typing "binance" in the URL bar.
Oh, you're right about the autocomplete - which seems to have been restricted to not just binance, but a few other partnered companies - it might be a bit blown out of proportion - Still have to consider it and look at the UI; unwittingly using the auto-complete could be a dark pattern, like YouTube making misclicks on ads very easy. I'm guessing atm that that wasn't the intention or case. They did have to remove the referral links according the press release though right?
I'd argue that the UI of the brave donation feature had been a dark pattern however, even if they made it so unintentionally.
> They added UI to the browser to claim users could pay individual site creators who'd signed up, but had scraped the names and photos of site creators who'd never heard of them. Brave planned to take the payments after they were unclaimed for 90 days. When caught, they claimed the funds were held "in escrow" but later admitted there were holding the funds themselves. Story broke here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
People want their browser to take away their choices? You don't need to switch browsers for that, I'm sure there are extensions on FF or Chrome that do the same thing.
Is this a serious question? At the beginning of the web era, popup ad windows were a horrible scourge. That problem was solved, and there was peace for many years. Now the websites themselves produce the popups. Nobody likes popup distractions. Cookie banners are just one example.
I don't like popups either. Every modern web browser already blocks them. This is just about cookie banners. They may be annoying but they let me withdraw consent to cookies.
Every modern browser does not already block them. Cookie banners are popups. Email signup prompts are popups. Requests to allow notifications are popups. Etc.
So . . . the EU drives regulation to enforce seeking consent as a mandatory step, followed by browsers like brave programmatically defeating the ability of companies to seek consent? Two wrongs don't make a right.
What is the end game here, it's like watching dumb and dumber. I want a great web experience just like the next person, but not at the cost of jeopardizing the successful freemium model of the internet that has given billions of people access.
The EU didn't making seeking consent mandatory, they made tracking people without consent illegal (except to the extent that it's necessary for the service). These companies are perfectly able to simply not track people without displaying cookie banners.
This is simply automating the process of ignoring the request for consent to track you. The result is (legally) that the website may not track you because it did not receive affirmative consent. That really is the end goal, to stop companies from tracking consumes like this while still allowing for legitimate business deals.
I'd respect those moves grounded in the argument for a universal human right to privacy were it not for the glaring exceptions made to the EUs own security agencies and God knows what else under the national security exception.
Everyone in the industry tracking the privacy moves in GDPR acknowledges that far from improving privacy, they are intended to blunt US tech companies' success in the continent. And . . that's perfectly fine, i guess positioning it as a moral defense of privacy just doesn't sit well with me.
Everyone in the industry tracking the privacy moves in GDPR acknowledges that far from improving privacy, they are intended to blunt US tech companies' success in the continent.
No, this is by far the minority view and is held purely by people who are ignorant about the requirements and functionality of GDPR.
The likely endgames of 'no tracking' (accelerated by automating rejection rate up to 100%) are:
- drastically reduced free content (see the rise of paywalls on most news sites)
- an arms race to find other ways to track (see rise of cookieless tracking and retargetting approaches, first party cloaking, etc)
Not to say the latter wouldn't always be there, and but fact is a good chunk of the web is free and stuffed with ads because that's the only way to stay afloat, people simply don't want to pay for content.
How is Brave's action wrong? It's the user who needs top enable the feature of "I don't want to consent ever, please ignore such requests".
If this state was the normal, and later they were to stop blocking cookie banners that you explicitly chose to always reject, it would be seen like a huge harrassment from companies to the user.
Maybe the end game is that we managed to realize what practices were beyond acceptable, and finally forbid them via legislation.
I hate these banners. Often times, they pop up in a non-obvious location and cause the entire page to freeze - scrolling doesn't work, links and buttons don't work. I have force quit my browser on more than one occasion because I couldn't figure out there was a cookie banner on the screen.
So, in your estimation, which side am I on - Dumb, or Dumber?
Doesn't Brave block 3rd party cookies? What's the point of the banner? My cookie knowledge is entirely based on enterprise and small server-side web apps, but I assumed that 3rd party cookies were evil and allowed facebook\facebag's of the world to track people covertly. And not every webapp is going to use JSON web tokens so the ability to use first-party tokens is sort of a requirement for auth and session management
Analytics info can be interesting and neat, but given how bad the adverts I see on Facebook are, and how badly wrong Twitter categorised me according to what I found by downloading all the data they stored on me, I don't think it's anything like as useful as its proponents say it is.
(Except, possibly, for automatic bug tracking; but even then, the value is in the stack trace, not the personal info).
It's so simple: the browser should expose a user configuration setting, which can be used by any website to automatically answer whatever question the consent banner thinks it needs to ask. At the highest level, three settings: Ignore, Reject all, Accept all. More fine-grained settings could be standardized (conceivably), although I would be surprised if many people cared to use them.
This is one of the first ideas people tried, more than a decade ago before GDPR was even a thing. The Do Not Track header was proposed in 2009 and implemented only in Firefox. The problem is that advertisers don't want this solution, because they want you to accept all cookies and a single browser-wide config setting makes denying way too easy. so they just ignored the setting, and nothing ever came of it.
Please read my comment again. Comment banners are the consequence of regulation.
I'd rather poke my eye out than stick up for them. What i'm calling out is the dangerous series of events over the past few years which have been rooted in good intent to preserve privacy, that seem to be having the fallout of destroying the web experience.
[edit] I can't believe HN has turned into a reddit style downvote brigade so i'll just post my response to the below comments in this edit since i can't reply anymore <shrug>
And you've made my point exceedingly clear[1] That pretty much is the ambiguity left up to the whims and fancies of the EU bureaucracy to enforce.
According to noyb.eu , the entity behind famous decisions at the CJEU, consent IS INDEED required[2] for ANY cookies to be stored on a users device. It isn't about data collection , if some rando agency or court finds Github or HN use fingerprinting of user preferences (as an example) or are LIKELY TO. . . it is considered a breach.
A French agency fined Google and Facebook heavily for merely providing a more complex refusal flow for cookies than the accept flow.
Comment banners are the consequence of regulation.
No, consent banners are a consequence of scummy companies trying to vacuum up your personal data for nefarious reasons. They are not required by any regulation, aside from in cases where a company is asking to use your data in non-essential ways.
Consent banners are definitively not required by the GDPR. Consent is only required for non-essential collection of user data, or for non-essential processing of user data. For example, Strava would not need consent to collect user GPS location, as that is core to the product that Strava provides to users. Hacker News would require consent to collect user GPS location, as user GPS location is not essential for posting links/comments. In addition, because consent is specific to a use of data and not to the collection of data, Strava would require additional consent in order to use that GPS data for advertising.
The GDPR doesn't require consent pop-ups. Companies choose to add consent pop-ups when they exceed the minimum amount of personal data collection.
Please substantiate your claims. Your single sentence managed to pack three unsubstantiated claims into it.
* "Started with" implies that there were no motivating factors for the GDPR, nor a situation being responded to. Online surveillance is a clear harm being done to users, to which the GDPR is a clear response.
* "Ignorant lawmakers" implies that the law was poorly crafted with little subject matter knowledge. This hasn't been my experience in reading it, that the GDPR is well-crafted to make certain unethical business models be infeasible, while avoiding impact to data collection that is essential to a service.
* "Made web browsing worse" implies that the current state in which surveillance must make itself known is worse than the previous state in which surveillance could be done silently. I would argue that it is a better state, as knowledge of a hostile act is the first step in preventing it.
Has “surveillance capitalism” subsided at all after the GDPR? Did any company announce that it affected their revenue negatively?
How many people are saying “we are so glad we have cookie banners everywhere”. I’m also sure that every small business is glad to have to decipher the huge law.
* Explicit claim: "Websites complied with the law" The GDPR does not allow a refusal of consent to take more steps than an acceptance of consent. I have only seen a scant handful of websites where this is the case. Instead, refusal requires following additional links, sometimes disguised as "privacy policy details", disabling each pre-selected consent box, etc.
* Implicit claim: "Websites complied with the law" implies that the websites took the only method by which they could be compliant. This is incorrect. Websites had a choice, and could have stopped surveilling users instead. This is a breakage in the causal chain between the passing of the GDPR and the omnipresent cookie banners.
* Explicit claim: "Web browsing got worse". Appeals to a majority are not sufficient. A user-hostile website being required to announce itself as such is an improvement.
So your contention is that it’s not a bad law. It’s just an unenforced law and therefore is still ineffective?
As far as appealing to the majority, if the majority don’t like the consequences of a law, in a democratic society isn’t that prima facie a bad law unless the law is to protect the minority from the majority?
If the websites complied with a law in a form that made web browsing worse and didn’t achieve its intended purpose - isn’t that yet another sign of a badly written law?
The hitmen (using your analogy are the websites that track) are still killing just as many people. But now it’s just making it harder to drink a glass of water.
Are the two sentences completely uncorrelated? Yes, so is the effect of the GDPR on websites.
Well, it’s simple. Did Facebook announce any ill effects during it quarterly results caused by GDPR? No.
Did they announce a decline in revenue caused by Apple’s ad tracking transparency - yes by the tune of billions and they called that out as the reason,
He's not sticking up for it. He's pointing out a truth. For example, in countries like the UK, as a website owner I have a legal requirement to get consent. Brave in this example would be forcefully removing the ability for me to get the consent that I legally require.
I don't believe in consent banners but that doesn't remove my legal requirements. I've got to stick to the law whether I like it or not.
> as a website owner I have a legal requirement to get consent
Consent !== cookie-banners. Hey, you don't have a legal requirement to track people at all; it follows that there's no legal requirement to get consent to track. Tracking must be opt-in, so just provide a menu option or something, that lets your visitor opt-in to tracking, if they love being tracked (let us know how many people opt-in to tracking, if you haven't gated the entire site on a consent banner).
Maybe your site provides features that depend on tracking? No prob - gate those features with a consent dialog.
Maybe you don't want any visitors you can't track? Well, that really means that your homepage should be an opt-in dialog, returning a 404 if you opt out.
Brave is giving users the ability to automatically say no to your cookie banners. People who use Brave don't want to be tracked and will never consent to it.
You're making a mass assumption based on your usage of Brave there. Most people I know who downloaded Brave (general people, not the YCombintor/tech power user types) initially got Brave purely because they wanted to earn tokens while browsing.
They don't care about the tracking/ad blocking side of things.
Which is funny considering that Brave is a for profit company and nearly all of their money comes from displaying ads. It's popular for blocking a thing that the company needs to survive, while not caring about all the websites they block ads on.
Encouraging 3rd party patching tools to adopt it or the organizations I work with will leave them as a client.
Chocolatey already supports Brave in its packages for Windows.
Feels a lot like the days when Chrome came out and I championed it over Internet explorer and Firefox. Yeah, we all make mistakes, sorry Firefox.
Anyway, Brave seems like a great option to keep extensions alive that can actually block ads/trackers. Chrome is about to can that ability.
More info here for the uninformed: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-ma...