Up near the top? It literally had a controversies section on Wikipedia due to all these shady things it did, with cryptocurrency and others, I am not sure how worse it can get [0]. I'll take URL ads any day of the week compared to the kinds of things Brave pulled over the years.
The list for Firefox over the years would warrant a whole page on Wikipedia. Browser choices are a who's who of who's debased themselves the fewest number of times trying to squeeze money out of a free product. The current state of Brave is better than the current state of Firefox right now.
I simply don't understand how you could think that about Brave yet in the same breath say that Firefox is worse, what exactly is worse about Firefox than hiding a literally cryptocurrency scam token in the browser itself?
Brave today: Here's a free browser with no ads, built-in adblock and user-respecting defaults. If you want there's also this crypto thing you can try. No pressure, most people don't. We also have an ad supported search engine as our default.
Firefox today: Here's a free browser with ads on the new tab page, ads in the url bar, ads in Pocket, ads for our VPN service, and we let advertisers collect your data same as Chrome with "privacy preservation ad measurement" and you have to turn all of that off. We have an ad supported search engine by default. We also redirect your DNS queries to a third party "for your privacy."
I think people want Firefox to be better than it is in practice because of the historical good will they've built up over the years. I wish they were better too.
Personally I'd much rather have a non-Chromium browser with some unintrusive ads than one with cryptocurrency, perhaps that is where our differences lie. And anyway, with Chromium being upstream with Manifest v3, who knows how long Brave can keep up its adblocking capabilities?
IIRC those are only 256 kbps. I get that MP3 is a lossy format, but still, they could at the very least offer 320 kbps. I was under the impression Amazon wasn't short on server space.
Hell, I'd even take $5/600. 300 is just ridiculously low. I like the service, mind you, but really can't justify paying $10/m (+ tax now) for it.
I should have jumped on the Neeva train when I had the chance. It was 50€/y. The results weren't as good as Kagi's, though. But anyway, Neeva's dead now.
You can install "Sink it for Reddit" to remove that obnoxious "pretty please install our app." banner. It also does other stuff to make their mobile website not as bad, but it still isn't a great experience.
If you're only searching for family-friendly stuff Kagi is pretty good (anything NSFW yields no result), but there's no way I'd be willing to pay that much money for a search engine.
$5/m for only 200 searches (reminder, 1 page = 1 search. So if you hit "page 2" you just burned yet another search from your quota) is insane. [1]
Love it or hate it but Neeva is also on the private search engine market, and you can get unlimited searches for 50€/y. I find their pricing way more reasonable.
That isn't true at all from my experience. I just tested it and I was able to search for adult videos, etc.
I decided to try Kagi two weeks ago after hearing about it and trying their Orion browser on iOS. So far it has exceeded my expectations. Results have been on par with G/B/D. The new summerizer has been pretty good and I enjoy getting summary of the results at times to save me time (although I've had a few it couldn't summerize or wrong results in past two weeks). I also love the ability to prioritize sites for your future results and the summary ability of individual pages.
I will stick with the $10/mo for near future. It is small price to pay to support their current goals and intentions.
Search has a cost and your searches have historically been paid by advertisers. Recently, also by VC money.
With Kagi it is neither, nobody is paying for your searches but you. Price also should not be the only vector of comparison - quality of results (which we prioritize and are known for) speed and privacy policy should be considered too.
Of course I understand if none of that matters if one’s budge for search is $5/mo. In that case it will have to be VC subsidized search as it simply is not economically viable or sustainable to offer unlimited search (at least of Kagi quality) at that price point.
