Brave is interesting because its users fall for the 'VPN' fallacy.
Rather than having your traffic logged by your local ISP, bound by the laws of the land and all the privacy regulations in your country, you send all your traffic through a third party based in a foreign country with no oversight whatsoever.
Or - with browsers - rather than install and configure Firefox to disable the (very limited) telemetry and configure ad blockers etc, you install a chromium derivative with all the Google pieces replaced with a different flavour of mystery sauce. You're still having all the analytics captured, it just goes to somebody with far less scrutiny than Google.
Brave is interesting because some non-users have a complete misinformed idea of what people actually use it for. Brave is one of the best things to happen to the web and actually has a chance at saving the web.
Brave allows me to easily donate money to creators. I currently fund the internet to the tune of $10/month using Brave. Someday that will be $100/month.
Brave removes ads "pre-render" so it is the fastest experience one can get. Other ad-blockers remove them after they have already loaded via JavaScript. Brave does this natively.
Brave has features to let users watch ads and earn currency, I don't use that at all. But some do, and it is consensual and fine for them.
Brave has an option called "Private w/Tor" and that is what yabones is claiming that "its users fall for the VPN fallacy". Which may be true for a small percentage but yabones is making a sweeping generalization here by implying "all users", which is not even close to true. I don't even use Private w/Tor mode. I don't consider anything truly private on the web and nobody else should either.
Brave is one of the best things to happen to the web as the web has become swamped with tracking and ads. Brave does remove all those by default.
Brave users seem to parrot all sorts of nonsensical marketing lingo. I remember being told that Brave is the first browser to support "Web 3.0", with no explanation what was that supposed to mean.
> Brave allows me to easily donate money to creators. I currently fund the internet to the tune of $10/month using Brave. Someday that will be $100/month.
Isn't this only for sites "signed up" with BAT with Brave keeping the BAT if the site isn't enabled?
NB: It has been a long time since I've checked out Brave so my info may be out of date.
I have been using it along with Firefox for a while. It doesn't have any of Chrome's worst behavior. When Google starting forcing the Google profile stuff into Chrome I dropped it cold. Firefox is alright. Brave is alright.
> I currently fund the internet to the tune of $10/month using Brave. Someday that will be $100/month.
Honest question - how much does that money actually reach the creators? Brave is sitting in the middle and I assume a. is charging a fee and b. has to be trusted to properly account for the money it has to pay creators.
It's a weird sort of marketplace where supply (content) isn't constrained at all, since it's trivial to duplicate. This means there's limited incentive for Brave to be nice to creators.
Are there any (3rd party, not Brave) stats on how much money creators are getting?
Or NextDNS.io, which opens the can of worms of trusting a 3rd party, but I trust the team behind it (for the time being at least) and it's insanely convenient, not being tied to your local network (as with most setups).
So many shills in Brave threads every single time. There have been numerous instances of clear evidence than Brave and its founder are running a scam and Im surprised tech literate people on hacker news (which is an assumption I guess) fall for it. They literally run their own ad network and collect data for analytics on user behaviour. How is the best thing to happen to the web? If you want to give to creators, there are so many other ways to do so. You dont have to do it via a middle man that runs an ad network using a made up crypto coin
>Rather than having your traffic logged by your local ISP, bound by the laws of the land and all the privacy regulations in your country, you send all your traffic through a third party based in a foreign country with no oversight whatsoever.
which is precisely the point because one of the most popular use cases of VPNs is to send copyright infringement letters to /dev/null.
Every single time when VPNs come up there's people talking about all the pitfalls of VPNs when the vast majority of people just want to get past geo-restrictions or avoid being sued for torrenting.
If you’re in Australia, no fallacy imo, government mandated data retention laws in place. I believe started that very few gov departments could see this data but has increased over time to the point I believe is accessible for some civil cases and to organisations [0], so please don’t dismiss VPN privacy use case as it is very applicable for some. I don’t use Brave and there are a lot of problematic VPN providers which makes it complicated for those who want to use them.
> Rather than having your traffic logged by your local ISP, bound by the laws of the land and all the privacy regulations in your country
That's nice if you live in one of those countries. Some countries have very little privacy regulations for data collected by ISPs; others actually mandate collection and storage of data.
for one it sounds like then I would have to use Firefox more often, I like the Chrome interface more although I can concede the resource hogging has gotten annoying
for two, I don't know anything about Firefox profiles, does that create a profile for my extensions too? Will multiple firefox profiles have different metamask instances segregated?
I've been using this combo for a while and it works really well. I have 2-4 profiles open at one time and just whitelist my inbox and a few other sites/apps I frequent while working. Great Suspender makes it totally viable.
I've started using them recently to have entirely seperate environments for personal and work websites and it's a blessing. Previously I used 2 browsers just like you, now I have the unlimited power of Firefox AdBlockers in every environment.
Doesn't that just provide separation of cookies (and maybe cache)? If you want entirely separate environments (cookies, cache, bookmarks, history, extensions) I believe you need to use multiple profiles.
I rarely use the Tor feature which is the VPN "fallacy". It's a widely successful anonymity network w/ no relation to Brave. If you have issue w/ Tor, then dont use Tor.
There's no "mystery sauce". It's completely open-source.
>You're still having all the analytics captured, it just goes to somebody with far less scrutiny than Google.
Brave's completely open about its analytics, and they're designed specially to be privacy-preserving. (No, it's not some naive "anonymous identifier".)
for many of us who grew up in 'third world' (and/or 'developing') economies, this is not in any way better to "heavily regulated". I expect that people from very corrupt ex-soviet states will agree with this sentiment.
I'm still not sure what the VPN fallacy is, and I'm asking genuinely trying to understand.
If someone goes into private mode (and tor becomes enabled) and visits a site, wouldn't the owners of that site have less information on that person than if they visited from their own IP address?
The VPN provider knows everything you're doing. You aren't automatically anonymous because you use a VPN, you just shifted the party that gets to inspect your traffic.
Brave's adblocker is all native code, so it's a bit more memory/CPU friendly than uBlock Origin. There's also some enhancements like CNAME uncloaking[1], which only otherwise works in uBlock Origin on Firefox because Chromium doesn't expose the required DNS API support for extensions.
Yeah, what I do now on my ff fork is just use no script by default… would be great if i decided to add a function in the dom module that just stripped out all script tags, indexed them in a list, displayed that list in the UI, then another function to process a whitelist to allow specific script tags for… just haven't implemented it yet cause no script is enough for me but im perpetually tempted just from the performance boost.
Same for ad blocking but I have native mitigations with browser meta data spoofing on every http request (which of course gets unmasked if you log into sites, but its always funny to get a warning email from google when I check gmail occasionally).
CNAME cloaking is only the first of many possible mitigations. CNAME flattening would be the next likely angle of attack.
Advertisers can very well get websites to run "cloud functions" at the edge (with Fastly, Cloudflare, Netlify, Vercel, AWS Lambda etc) under the first-party domain, and the content blockers (native or not) will be none the wiser. This is similar to how content blockers struggle to block ads served from first-party domains on YouTube and other Facebook properties.
Of course, adblocking has always been and will always be a game of cat-and-mouse.
Interesting link. I will say though, Brave's been aggressively pushing for an end to third-party cookies, and if websites are increasingly forced to run first-party analytics as a counter-measure, that is still a major win for the internet as a whole.
Not a ton of difference on desktop. You can sync without logging in, I guess, but that's pretty minor. However, I require that my mobile and desktop sync, and as far as I can tell you can't ad block Chrome on mobile.
> I keep seeing people write that they "don't like ads", which seems silly because nobody likes ads, of course.
I actually do like some ads. I have money, and I like to buy cool and interesting things. Occasionally, ads tell me about a new thing or service I'd never heard of. Those are ads that I'm really glad I saw. When they're respectfully informing me of things I might actually be interested in, then I don't mind them.
When I don't like ads is when they slow the page load down by 100x. When I don't like ads is when they have malicious exploits of my browser to install malware on my computer. When I don't like ads is when they auto-play video or put intrusive obnoxious things all over the screen. (Seriously, does anyone respond to those kinds of ads?) When I don't like ads is when they chase me around the internet trying to get me to buy the thing that I just bought.
Using Brave, I see the static ads, and I get to choose to see ads through the Brave network or not. At the moment, I don't mind the Brave network ads -- they're mostly for crypto, which I don't care about; but they're not obnoxious and I know I can turn them off. And occasionally they're for things I might actually be interested in, like chess or electronics.
Right now only 2 of the sites I visit regularly are signed up to be Brave content creators; when this reaches a critical mass, I'll probably start putting in $10-20 per month specifically to support them. At that point, maybe I'll disable the Brave netork ads... or maybe I won't.
> Rather than having your traffic logged by your local ISP, bound by the laws of the land and all the privacy regulations in your country
That's only fallacy if you think I'm using VPN because I care about who has my browsing data.
I really couldn't care less. I'm using it because my country blocks certain websites and Netflix doesn't have Arrested Development or West Wing licenses for it.
Not everyone is perpetually stationary. IP geolocation amounts to city-level coarse location, and accessing a service over time basically shares with them your travel habits: at which dates and times are you in which places?
Using a VPN is a good way to obscure that information. Not every website you visit or app you use needs to know that you're in city X on Monday and Tuesday evenings, and city Y the rest of the week. That's pretty sensitive stuff for a lot of people.
In completely unrelated code paths, all open source, we have timing-channel blinded, few bits per answer, automated survey questions that tell us, e.g., how many people reset default search to a different engine (but nothing more). See https://brave.com/privacy-preserving-product-analytics-p3a/.
I'm not sure why you wrote what you wrote. Assumption? It makes an ass of u and umption, to quote Samuel L. Jackson's character from "The Long Kiss Goodnight" :-/.
I use it because it blocks ads and it isn't Google Chrome, meaning no forced logins, not much BS except for the rewards which I disabled and hidden. I can also block scripts with two taps. Didn't know it had a VPN. On the desktop I use FF, on mobile the UI is quite underwhelming.
Brave is interesting because it's taking a firehose to the current ad-tech system, and anyone who's spent time working in ad-tech understands it's is a towering inferno of fraud and abuse.
Some don't like Brave's approach of an alternative, opt-in ads / rewards system because in their view everything crypto-related or ads-supported is scammy. That's an understandable perception: a significant number of crypto enthusiasts appear to be scammers pumping pyramid schemes, and we've already established the ad-tech industry is a towering inferno.
But technically I think you have to concede Brave's on-device ad relevance model is a better way (and the only conscionable one) to run an ad system that delivers relevant ads to interested users, and even directly reward them for their attention. If you think ad-supported anything is a non-starter, then you'd just never enable Brave Rewards, or use another browser (although they're entangled in the current ad-tech system so...)
What you say about 'VPN fallacy' makes little sense.
By default Brave is the most aggressive in blocking trackers, adware, and spyware compared to Firefox and Google — and this is actually a problem for Brave.
Follow their web-compat issues on Github [1] to see the kind of things they're dealing with (an example of the very problematic and kind-of-unresolvable issues that come up include the Duolingo issue [2]).
Users can disable shields on a per-site basis to deal with these things, but it's an open question as to whether this kind of friction will increase or decrease, and whether it's a barrier to larger adoption.
There is no question though that the Brave team have the most commitment to privacy compared to Firefox and, of course, Google.
Your statement that the Google spyware Brave has removed in their Chromium derivative has been replaced by some mystery sauce is based on...?
I do find it curious that whenever this little challenger brand pops up on HN there's a predictable surge of hot take / bad take commentary which aggressively tries to paint a picture of Brave as anything but a plucky challenger brand full of technologists who are expending a lot of energy on privacy, security, and moving browsers forward.
The accounts trying to shop a myth of Brave as a low-rent scam operation will inevitably find buyers for various reasons, but you'd hope technologists in the main will do their research and ignore, or even become curious as to what is driving this continued negative opinion-shaping...
I did mine, and I fell for Brave due to a desire to opt-out of the worst of ad-tech surveillance, get a faster browser, and participate in a novel attempt to bootstrap a frictionless crypto / tipping / payment economy. Not all of these novel ideas will work, but they're worth exploring.
For now Brave's been a dream, and when I accidentally use another open test browser for normal browsing, I'm taken back to a gross dystopia of a web experience.
It all comes down to which company (or people who runs the company) do I trust. As of now. Google, FB group are not truthworth with any of my data. I'm still not sure about Brave, however willing to give a try. The founder is the mozilla firefox founder BTW. And with the way how Mozilla suck up to Google. Building an alternative that destories goole is always good. Would like to find out the people who are funding Brave at this point.
Anyone here in HN has any clue as to ethics of those VC funding Brave?
>Rather than having your traffic logged by your local ISP, bound by the laws of the land and all the privacy regulations in your country, you send all your traffic through a third party based in a foreign country with no oversight whatsoever.
I have seen that argumentation only in reverse when people were defending DNS over HTTPS by Cloudflare.
It’s also a matter of strength in numbers. It’s impossible to go after every little VPS provider in the world, or at least significantly harder, than it is to just tell Google to shut down person X’s account and give us a nice report.
> I could care less what some abstract country has on me. My own country - different story.
What some other country has on your country’s citizens (whether friend or for) is a target for your country's security services, by exchange or espionage, so you can't ignore one if you are concerned about the other.
>"you can't ignore one if you are concerned about the other"
Yes I can. I understand reasonable security concerns and that is why countries have various security agencies who are being paid to do their job so I let them worry about it. My job is to worry about myself personally and I really do not care about what Timbuktu knows about me. They can't do shit to me personally. My own government and corporations however can.
The exception of course are large neighbours and their multinational corporations. I was surprised and irritated when I've discovered that Amazon knows exactly what kind of car I have even though I bought it from a used car dealer without any Internet involvement and I do not keep Alexa and likewise spyware in my place.
> My job is to worry about myself personally and I really do not care about what Timbuktu knows about me.
They can't do shit to me personally. My own government and corporations however can.
If “Timbuktu” has information about you and it's friendly with your government, it's likely to trade it; if it has it and it's unfriendly with your government, it's a target for your government’s espionage. In either case, it's a place where your information is that your government is likely to be trying to get it (unless you are a particular target, not in isolation, but along with other information), so if you are concerned about your government, you should be concerned about it.
For the government to get interested really in me - well I am pretty boring person and not up to anything. So I do not really care about that part. I am concerned about generic information gathering as it affects credit rating, various approvals, job prospects etc, etc especially if shared with corporations who are seems to be doing fine job in this department as well. So no. I do not think government will be hunting my info in Timbuktu and them knowing my shopping habits does not concern me.
gp is entirely correct in saying that it really doesn't matter what a country a continent away knows about some random and fairly ordinary web surfer. They probably aren't ignoring the risk of data flowing back as much as noticing that the flow is obstructed and that it is the flow, rather than the foreign counties knowledge, that is the problem.
Using a local ISP means that domestic spies will easily hoover up traffic and have easy ways link it back to all sorts of data about you. Using a VPN means that first the VPN provider has to be compromised somehow, the data has to be aggregated into the pool of domestic data - not a trivial task.
It is a pretty simple improvement that puts more of a burden on data collection agencies.
Tech illiterates tend to think of privacy first, when discussing Brave. Go into any geeky subculture not full of programmers, and ask about a privacy browser. Brave always comes up, the monetization model rarely does
Tech illiterates are typically not geeky subcultures, and they say they value privacy when asked but in reality they prefer free and easy to use/access.
I'm referring primarily to gaming subcultures (board and video). Tech illiterate may not be the proper term. But most geeky people I know (even the ones who build their own PCs, and dabble in scripting) have a very cargo-cultish understanding of computing technologies.
I posted this in another child comment, but I think the same response is appropriate. I've miscommunicated.
I'm referring primarily to gaming subcultures (board and video). Tech illiterate may not be the proper term. But most geeky people I know (even the ones who build their own PCs, and dabble in scripting) have a very cargo-cultish understanding of computing technologies.
I use it because it seems like it might be our only hope for a Blink based browser with minimal Google nonsense. For example, see how Brave, Edge, and Vivaldi (And Mozilla, even though they're not Blink based.) responded to Manifest v3.
> Rather than having your traffic logged by your local ISP, bound by the laws of the land and all the privacy regulations in your country, you send all your traffic through a third party based in a foreign country with no oversight whatsoever.
Is this in reference to tor?
I use brave because it's fast, compatible with chrome extensions, but a least a little bit disconnected from Google. Trackers and ads are blocked by default, and it's generally a nice browser.
No, OP is comparing VPNs to Brave. With a VPN, you don't actually gain privacy, you only replace your ISP with some foreign-country entity that operates under foreign laws.
Brave is like that, but a browser. You replace Google/Firefox with a smaller, maybe slightly less watched, browser that still does the same stuff.
At least with FF there isn't an incentive to sell your attention.
Brave is explicitly positioning themselves as a reseller of attention which they then obscure by pretending to focus on privacy. I'm not sure why anyone uses them - they're an ad company and their incentives are not aligned with their users.
I find them really untrustworthy and their pro-privacy branding has really confused their users.
I ask because I feel the same but don't actually have any proof that things are shady. It is just a feeling which obviously isn't enough to convince others but is enough to put me off using it the few times I've tried.
Something about all this 'rewards' stuff just feels dodgy. No idea why I feel this, I probably read something at some point but don't recall now.
I never understood why people think affiliate are bad.
I get that it's unethical do it without users consent,
but I am personally OK with anyone using affiliate links for whatever I subscribe to. I don't lose anything, I don't pay for it, some company is letting other people or smaller companies increase budget. I often ask my colleagues if they can get me referral link before I signup for something. What's wrong with it?
They create the wrong incentives. In a niche I operate in, there are a ton of otherwise reputable websites promoting inferior products merely because they make more money promoting those products rather than products whose owners don't have an affiliate system.
A widget hand-made by an owner-operator in small-town USA who sells from his own website gets ignored while the Amazon-listed widget made in a Chinese sweatshop gets shilled because Amazon pays affiliates.
There's nothing wrong with it, but it's a shady practice to do it automatically (no disclosure) on a Browser that claims to be a more privacy focused browser.
From a technical perspective, many affiliate links are redirect based. So the end user may only see the initial site they clicked from and the final site they go to, but there is a redirect in the middle.
This can be used to track users across the web without their knowledge or consent.
However I don't know Brave's implementation here. Just answering the question in the abstract.
So you are ok with people modifying input you put into an app you installed? What if they modified the query paramter automatically to send info from your computer/iphone? Why are you covering so much for Brave in this thread?
Of course you pay for it, it's the same thing as free shipping: the seller increases its prices to take into account how much they're going to pay to affiliates.
Well, a lot of reporting on the affiliate code situation partly mischaracterized what actually happened. There was an auto-complete suggestion that was auto-selecting when you pressed "enter", and it was fixed shortly thereafter. There is a blog post about it called "On Partner Referral Codes in Brave Suggested Sites".
That said, it does essentially the same thing Firefox does when you do a search on Firefox. Try right now: go into Firefox, type in a search in the URL bar, press enter, and you'll see it appends/"injects" a Firefox "affiliate code" as a query parameter so that Firefox gets a cut from Google. One salient difference is that Firefox's "affiliate code" is a vanity code (human readable: "?client=firefox-b-d"), so it isn't viscerally shocking.
If it read "?client=brave" like it does on Firefox, it's very likely no one would have ever cared!
I've used it for over a year and yeah it's nothing more than a feeling -- experience has just been better than anything else in terms of the default ad blocking. "Disable your ad-blocker" things also leave you alone because they know if you are using Brave you aren't going to budge.
That's not how anti-adblocker banners work, generally. Brave is likely just using the anti-anti-adblocker lists, which uBlock and many others now use, as well.
Brave by default collects telemetry data. It is anonymized but any security researcher will tell you that metadata of this nature over time can be more revealing that is claimed. It's right their in their FAQ.
Brave's primary customers are advertisers. While this is not evidence in itself, it is certainly something to be wary of.
This appears to be the only FAQ that mentions anonymized data:
> Will Brave sell user data to advertisers?
>
> We do not have access to identifiable user data. The anonymized aggregated ad campaign related data we do collect is used for accounting and reporting, but this data cannot be mapped back to devices or user identities of any kind. Learn more
If you follow the "Learn more" link it says:
> If you switch on Brave Rewards and switch on ads (in Rewards settings) you will see ad notifications, and will receive BAT to reward you for viewing these ads.
>Brave by default collects telemetry data. It is anonymized but any security researcher will tell you that metadata of this nature over time can be more revealing that is claimed.
TL;DR It's an ad company posing as a privacy company. Brave replaces other ads with Brave's, created a crypto currency for the purpose of sharing profits with website owners, but in reality pockets almost all of the money since site owners rarely become aware of it [0] or more likely because it's spread so thin across the web that few sites reach the 100$ threshold.
Even without the crypto stuff, when I installed it, it felt like an intern first eclipse plugin. Few buttons more, a different help page and that's it. Didn't inspire technical strength and quality.
That's weird, it's pretty indistinguishable from the other browsers for me. Reminds me of a cross between Opera and Firefox.
It's run by one of the principle Firefox devs (Eich) and none of the stories about it ripping people off or being insecure appear to have been well founded.
I've used all the major browsers, starting with Mosaic and Netscape, was there when FF was phoenix, have been writing websites for 20 years (only a small amount of that time commercially). YMMV but it seems trustworthy, privacy focused, fast enough (ie I can't tell if it's different in performance terms).
It's just reskinned Chrome with privacy extensions built in and a system to enable people to try and send micropayments to sites if the sites are signed up.
It's not reminiscent of Eclipse in anyway for me (mind Eclipse to me most evokes poor DE integration, I'm a long time KDE user, and having a billion settings).
Yeah I wonder if most of the Brave allegations (that are usually attached to no actual verifiable facts) are in fact hit pieces on Eich from the bully crowd
Yes it felt like a reskinned Chrome with a few unfinished parts bolted on. And coming from Eich big new project I thought it would be way more polished.
Replacing ads on sites you visit with their ads, wrapped up in a cryptocurrency scheme, like you'd expect from a literal virus, brought to you by a guy too homophobic to be on Mozilla's board.
Plus, and I have no evidence of this apart the synchronized hype they do for the browser, but I'm pretty sure Brave is secretly bankrolling those very... political... Linux YouTubers.
I do enjoy the irony that Mozilla seems to have gone downhill ever since he left / got kicked out. The people replacing him, IIRC, aren't as knowledgeable or expert as he was. But then, I am somewhat a fan of pure meritocracy.
Of course (to reply to downvoted up-comment), we don't and never did "[replace] ads on sites you visit". But when it comes to evil-me, making false claims is justified? Seems so!
The important thing is that we punish companies that are actively trying to fix the problems we all care about because they didn’t fix them perfectly the first time or in exactly the way we would prefer.
Sometimes the users on this site sound like they are drowning, but when you throw them a like jacket, they push it away as they complain about the colour.
No, we punish them when they have fraudulent practices and when the product is a scam, like brave is. They modify user's input without their consent, they accept money with no guarantee of delivering to the intended target and talk about privacy as a selling point when they run an ad network . I cannot believe how much people turn in to a cult like fanboy for a product they understand very little about.
We fixed the bug where refcodes were added to binance.us and binance.com URLs. That was a blunder, but not a scam. We made no money from it.
As for "modify user's input without their consent", go type keywords into any browser, Firefox Safari Chrome Edge etc. You'll see search affiliate client code, same as we had by mistake for the two binance domains, and only as suggestions for other partners (all of this, we removed in the springtime, to quell concerns and misrepresentations such as you make here).
We do not "accept money" as intermediary, the browser holds the tips to unverified creators. You seem to be operating on misinformation here. In December 2018 we briefly shipped a system that sent our own funds when directed, back to us, on behalf of unverified creators. That too was a mistake, but we fix bugs and so such tips are now buffered client-side. In any case, we were the source of funds there, not the user.
We've taken great pains with Brave Ads (not an "ad network" by the way) to avoid any privacy problems, starting by making them opt-in, using in-browser-only data matched against a fixed-per-population-per-day catalog, confirmed via Privacy Pass (blind signature cryptographi). This is the wave of the future, even Google is trying to do a Privacy Sandbox now, but they are piling up risks and letting partners into the sandbox last I looked.
It's clear you have some underlying problem with us, but it isn't based on the facts. What's the story?
Great - tell me how to make mouse gestures work on ALL pages - that include new tab page/speed dial and firefox internal and I am sold. Unfortunately I don't think that anything short of messing with the code and rebuilding makes it possible.
Yup, I use touchpad a lot and lack of proper gesture support on precision touchpads on Windows makes it unusable to me. To this day all bugs regarding this are open and only chromium based browsers support it nicely.
"Mining" in the context of crypto has a very specific definition, and Brave doesn't even come close. Mining involves using your computing resources to complete calculations that ensure the security of the blockchain, resulting in a cryptocurrency payout.
A company taking money on your behalf without notification, while slimy, isn't mining.
But last week I swiched to Brave, because Firefox simply couldn't deliver the performance I need for all the heavy weight web apps I use (Cloud9, VSCode, Gravit Designer, Slack, Asana).
Brave is overall pretty snappy and I only got problems with Recaptcha, which wants me to do a ridiculous amount of tests.
I don’t think I’m alone as a Brave user when I say that the crypto stuff and some of their default settings aren’t the greatest, but overall still provides a compelling solution to multiple problems. So while it’s not a perfect product, and the crypto stuff still weirds me out, I find it to be the best option for my personal use case. I get chromium and it’s large library of extensions, as well as having it be decoupled from Google, and some decent Adblock and tracker blocking built in. On the downside, because of the crypto stuff, I feel like I need to double check the news a few times a year to make sure they haven’t made it mandatory, or done anything shady. Overall I’m happy with Brave, and glad to see it growing.
They're obviously making up their numbers, probably by 10-100x.
Steam is somewhere between 95-105m real MAU, and publishes only real numbers on its games. I know lots of Steam users, many more than 5. I know zero Brave users. Really, there's no way it is anywhere near as popular as they claim.
> "The average CTR (click-through rate) for a Brave Ads campaign is 9%, well above the industry average of just 2%"
Again, another huge red flag. There's nothing special about Brave browser. It just means there is some adversary, like bots, clicking ads, or they are lying.
I'm sure people will downvote this, or talk about whom they know uses Brave. Whatever. I would love to see a real audited number here.
> Steam is somewhere between 95-105m real MAU, and publishes only real numbers on its games. I know lots of Steam users, many more than 5. I know zero Brave users. Really, there's no way it is anywhere near as popular as they claim.
For me, it's the fact that there is a toggle button on mobile allowing you to turn off scripts and third party cookies. That's great UX.
Ublock origin is an extension, so accessing the options menu feels a bit janky on mobile as the options are shown in default HTML styling, and you need a couple more clicks to turn off scripts.
Anytime any good news related to cryptocurrency / blockchain is posted, the trolls come out from under their bridges. HN is very anti-crypto, it’s hard to get unbiased commentary here.
Brave recently became my default browser, but I personally don't care for the crypto stuff.
The current iOS beta allows users to sync their bookmarks with Windows and iOS privately, and it's what convinced me to switch. I didn't need to create an account with my email address, or install iCloud...just scan a QR code.
I wish they'd fix the captcha problem though, a lot of sites that use ReCaptcha think Brave browser users are bots (due to the security).
Hello! The android browser has another captcha issue for a long time. The captcha is partially rendered outside the screen. I tested this on multiples devices.
On Brave Nightly since 6 months.
block ads, Fingerprinting - aggressive , 3rd party cookies blocked,
The one feature I wish any other browser would do as well as Chrome is on-the-fly translation. I think Microsoft Edge does this using Bing Translate but I guess as none of the other browser makers have a translation service they can use they instead rely on a wonky extension that uses Google Translate which isn't anywhere near as smooth as the built-in translate in Chrome (naturally).
If anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear them as it is the only thing keeping me on Chrome these days.
I imagine that google can do on-the-fly translation because they can eat the cost of the servers running the translation. Best I've seen for firefox uses deepl, which I've heard (on HN) is better than google translate.
https://Deepl.com/translator is really good IME. It provides more fluid translations and some better, more precise use of terms for me when translating technical documents (mechanical engineering) from French/German.
Not my experience a few weeks ago when I last tried. It prompts you to install a Google Translate extension that basically just sends the URL to Google's web translate service rather than translate 'in place' like Chrome does.
Google charges (quite a bit) for the translation service. Unfortunately, at this time Brave is only able to offer the Google Translate extension (which we agree isn't as nice).
This would be extremely cool - and we (at Brave) did put in work to get a solution working (huge kudos to Jocelyn Liu who did the work). Repo up at https://github.com/brave/go-translate
However, the problem comes to licensing costs :( Setting aside the privacy implications of sending content on a site (since you opt-in), the content needs to be fed to a service. Microsoft and Google charge a per-transaction fee on each of these service calls and it can end up being quite expensive
Pretty sure the goal is to block 3rd party ads and tracking scripts. The goal was never "block all analytics". For example, I don't think Brave will by default block 1st party analytics either.
The opt-in ads are a bunch of shady crypto-currency things, but I love it. I've actually been making like ~$5/month from ads consistently for almost a year now.
Yes, 90% of the ads are 'shady crypto-currency things.' I've seen ads from Amazon in Brave though. I click on those (and some others,) not because I need reminders of Amazon's 'deals' and whatnot, but to support Brave.
By default (you can turn this behavior off if you wish,) Brave will periodically (every 120 minutes or so) popup an ad. The ad doesn't appear 'in the browser window.' On Windows 10, for instance, it pops up in desktop Notifications. The ad is a sentence of text and a button, full stop. No video, audio, animations, or anything creepy. Just a little dialog box you can click or dismiss.
Every time that happens you receive BAT, a cryptocurrency, that accumulates in your automatically created BAT account. You do with it what you will but, by default, it is periodically distributed to sites that opt-in to accepting BAT.
You have to "activate" the notification to open the resulting page, or you don't get paid. But it's a quick click and close. Honestly once or twice I've actually looked at the site a bit.
Can someone enlighten me on why does literally everyone use Chromium as the engine for their browser? Why does Firefox not have anything comparable to Chromium/Node/Electron? Is Chrome's JS engine that superior or what?
Mozilla had an Electron alternative before Electron even existed. It stopped being a viable option several years ago, though. The reason is the same as for every other problem that Mozilla is afflicted with: incompetent leadership.
(Note also that the choice is not a dichotomy between Blink and Gecko. WebKit exists.)
To say "it's diverging" has to be the understatement of season. Two simple questions for you: what was the purpose of your comment, and how is it relevant in this context?
I know there are browser fans who have a preference of UI or companies etc etc, but the answer to the question of why so many people choose to fork Chromium to make their browser distro is solely based on the fact that it's technically the best browser engine out there and to fork anything else would be putting you at an immediate disadvantage compared to forking Chromium, so you'd start with the best and then extend it from there.
The last time I looked into this (about 3 years ago), it was ridiculously difficult to embed Gecko into anything, almost to the point of being impossible. Chromium in comparison is relatively easy to embed (via CEF or LibChromiumContent).
I don't have a real answer for you, more just shades of understanding. I believe it's the case that Chromium is just more extensible and designed for reuse. Whereas Firefox is more monolithic and less able to be extended.
I don't think it has anything to do with the javascript engine per se, but more the general API surface that Chromium gives you. There might be some additional benefit that Chrome is the most used browser (currently) and so there might be some developer sentiment or familiarity with it; Chrome's popularity might push adoption for Chromium.
Because the people calling the shots don't understand the "market". They've been coasting on their (predecessors') early success for years. Their numbers with respect to audience size is dependent on the same factors that OpenOffice depends on: people with a faint awareness of what the project is / once was but no real exposure to the ins and outs of what has changed about the projects in the last several years.
I can see a lot of value in having their technology more widely distributed.
The same could be said of the browser tech itself. They could just switch to a webkit engine, have the same market share, and still "gain" whatever it is they are gaining now.
Recommend Vivaldi (https://vivaldi.com) as an alternative to Brave. Same Chromium based browser, but without any of the crypto stuff and has a lot of nice built-in features. Works on PC/Mac/Linux/Phone.
Vivaldi is a browser that feels like "it's almost there" to me. Opera feels like a fully fleshed out and different browser whereas vivaldi feels like "hey weve got a massive backlog of stuff that doesn't even compare to the competition yet."
My favorite lightweight browser though is fallon. It's like IE but not as bad.
I trouble wrapping my mind with the anti-Chromium sentiment. Isn’t monopoly a good thing if it’s an open source monopoly? I don’t seem anyone complaining about the Android monopoly for example or the Linux kernel monopoly.
Afaik Chromium is controlled by Google's devs. E.g. Google introduces quasi-standards because they benefit YouTube, without consulting anyone else. It's basically IE again.
You might say ‘just fork it’, but I'll see how you do that and keep maintaining a full-featured browser. That would also make it not a monopoly.
Chromium itself has features tied to Google. The ‘Ungoogled Chromium’ project is dedicated to undoing that.
Likewise Android goes where Google wants it to go.
Chromium might be Google dominated, but it's definitely an open source project. The reviewers I have worked with have been fair and have granted me more access as I've gotten more involved
Microsoft notably has a big presence in the source code and at events like BlinkOn. As each of these folks get their code merged, they gain privs like merge access and start getting tagged as a reviewer in other's change lists
I choose Brave for the privacy, Ad-blockers, degoogling, and pretty good maintenance upkeep. I think a sizable portion of your audience choose it for the same reason. Your crypto work is certainly interesting but I think should be entirely opt-in or an extension.
Some times perform a bit of reflection, and scan over global objects in the document window. This can sometimes trigger our dApp-detection logic.
The experience should be better in Brave Beta, and in the future we hope to get rid of the problem entirely by removing the current injection-based detection.
It’s my daily driver. I’m happy with it. Out of the box, the web is useable. Can’t say the same for any other browser I’ve tried, other than DuckDuckGo on iOS.
Same here. I like Brave especially on mobile for blocking web trackers. I find the crypto attention token neat and automatically pay out a few bucks per month to my favorite websites as well as sometimes one-off tips.
I recently moved away from datahogger chrome. Google is throwing me captcha every single time I use Brave browser, but same thing does not happen when using Safari browser. Why is that?
User agent string, among orhers, affects how often you get captcha.
For example Tor Browser with default user agent gets all the captchas, many rounds per.
Same Tor Browser with manually overriden normal Firefox UA barely gets any captchas.
Tor browser uses the most popular Firefox UA, used by the extended stable version of Firefox, and used by the thousands of people who turn on privacy.resist.fingerprinting.
The HN crowd seems to really push Firefox. I would love to get an honest opinion on Opera. It's a chromium fork and the biggest criticism just seems to be that it is now owned by a chinese-based consortium. It has just been the most seamless and capable browser I've found with constant innovation.
As an Opera user since before the Cheomium switch, it’s honestly a piece of shit now. I constantly find myself annoyed by popups or features that just do not make sense. I really do need to switch to firefox, I just don’t want to lose my add obs..
The software is fine, but the BAT ecosystem disturbs me. As someone who has been involved in the affiliate space, accepting a token issued by an ad network seems like a terrible idea. Separation of concerns is important in this case.
Instead of the ad network facing the consequences of chargebacks, unfulfilled obligations, fraud and abuse, everyone holding the token will be on the hook. With all of the horrible things that go on in the ad/affiliate industry experienced publishers should be wary of this.
Also, as an expat the KYC stuff has generally been insurmountable. Hard to square that with the privacy angle.
However, I do look forward to innovation in this space. Brave/BAT has issues, but at least they're doing something.
I've been using Brave most of this year and really like it.
The killer feature for me is that it lets you disable scripts for individual websites or 'Allow scripts once'. This basically makes most paywall news sites readable.
Much of what Brave does out of the box can be achieved with an array of extensions which have existed for some time. One major appeal of Brave is that these features are built-in, on-by-default, and have no reliance upon Google to not break them moving forward (see Manifest v3 and uBlock Origin, and/or MetaMask being temporarily removed from Google's Web and Play Stores). With Brave, the type of privacy and control users expect is baked-in, and easy to use. Download, Run, and Done. The way it ought to be in 2020
I love this feature also. I just wish that when I disable scripts for a website, it would still let my browser plugins that inject JS work. On Firefox, whatever browser plugin I use to block scripts does this out of the box. It makes more sense to do it this way, since I’m not saying “don’t run scripts on pages of this domain”, I’m saying “don’t run scripts originating from pages on this domain”.
Well, a lot of reporting on the affiliate code situation partly mischaracterized what actually happened. There was an auto-complete suggestion that was auto-selecting when you pressed "enter", and it was fixed shortly thereafter. There is a blog post about it called "On Partner Referral Codes in Brave Suggested Sites".
That said, it does essentially the same thing Firefox does when you do a search on Firefox. Try right now: go into Firefox, type in a search in the URL bar, press enter, and you'll see it appends/"injects" a Firefox "affiliate code" as a query parameter so that Firefox gets a cut from Google. One salient difference is that Firefox's "affiliate code" is a vanity code (human readable: "?client=firefox-b-d"), so it isn't viscerally shocking.
If it read "?client=brave" like it does on Firefox, it's very likely no one would have ever cared!
- Uses far less phone battery.
- Blocks abuses of web technology, mainly advertising tricks.
- Almost identical to Chrome now but not part of the Google monolith.
- Use Tor w/ 1 click.
Disclosure: I'm invested in $BAT, the browser's native token
I dropped Firefox for brave because Firefox dropped support for massive amounts of simple power user features like RSS while claiming they were all “too hard to maintain”. Meanwhile they put massive amounts of time and effort into trying to be a chrome look-alike which adds zero value.
I can't even say why I don't want to use it without being downvoted into oblivion. I'm sure there are many wonderful people who use and develop it without going out and being a nuisance, but the fans I encounter the most are horrible. That's not an association I want, and nothing the browser offers is compelling to me.
Rather than having your traffic logged by your local ISP, bound by the laws of the land and all the privacy regulations in your country, you send all your traffic through a third party based in a foreign country with no oversight whatsoever.
Or - with browsers - rather than install and configure Firefox to disable the (very limited) telemetry and configure ad blockers etc, you install a chromium derivative with all the Google pieces replaced with a different flavour of mystery sauce. You're still having all the analytics captured, it just goes to somebody with far less scrutiny than Google.