To start a call, there is a requirement that you are
1) Using the Brave Browser
2) Have Brave Rewards (their crypto-and-ads service) turned on.
Not loving that.
Edit: the first one is fine (although a little strange that it is a requirement here but not for their other products, like Brave Search). I'm irked by the second one.
There is an alternative option 2 available- you can subscribe to Brave Premium for a cost (shows as $7 USD/month). Just wanted to share as I hadn't seen it mentioned here
For the no-cost option, enabling Brave Rewards helps Brave to cover the costs of video infrastructure
Sorry but why is Number 1 to be expected? HN often shows a lot of hate when any Google products like Gmail or Google Meet works well on Chrome, but not on Firefox.
The first one is because we have to use native code with our partner for a user hosting a call to create one. After the call is up, any modern browser can be used to join, given the unique link provided by the host.
The second one, I addressed directly for all Brave products that have significant fixed and per-user/usage costs, the other week on Reddit:
"A free browser is a free lunch, and TANSTAAFL. Brave has sponsored images on by default, we don't pretend to be free by selling default search to Google as Firefox does. Privacy-conscious users know that nothing on the Web, no app or service, is free.
The salient difference about Brave in this context: we put users first and deal them in for >= the revenue we make on any attention-based revenue where we take the gross. This can't be done with search deals: Google, Bing, and others forbid paying users a share of the revenue that the search partner shares with the browser maker. But we aim to do it when ready with self-serve keywords-at-auction private search ads.
Before then, we hope to offer private ads via a partner, but that's not a sure thing. Details if and when we have a deal. That's the free leg of Brave Search. The premium is ad-free search for a small monthly fee (a few dollars, discounted if paid annually).
This is necessary because Brave Search has per-user as well as fixed costs, which we must cover with a reasonable margin. I think users understand this. In all cases, Brave Search remains private: no tracking or use of IP even for short-term query-refinement "sessions". But if users won't pay, we will put private-until-and-unless-clicked ads in the free leg. This freemium model goes for Brave News too."
End Quote
TANSTAAFL = There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch (popularized by Robert A. Heinlein).
Hackers here on HN may be able to self-host a Jitsi instance, even build their own browser. Most users cannot. We at Brave aim to provide all users with a truly user-first, privacy-designed+engineered-in-&-on-by-default products to take on Big Tech with its centralized data collection, surveillance based ads, fraud and abuse problems, and monopolistic, user-hostile tendencies.
We know TANSTAAFL is true so we don't pretend to offer a free lunch and we don't track users. We will work to add more "buy out my ad inventory" ease of use, including for Rewards as well as News. Those who can't or won't pay can still use Brave as a fast, tracking/fingerprinting-blocking browser. We aim to get enough of you using Rewards to keep our lights on, and we'll have to work on distribution and promotion of search to get it covering its costs (premium ad-free or free private ads leg, you choose).
I hope this helps explain what we're trying to achieve, and that you'll give us a try.
This is the wrong way for them to do it. It must work on all browsers and the they can possibly add features that make people WANT to use Brave, not force them to do it.
I don't care what kind of code is required for it to actually work. If I can't start a call in a browser other than Brave, then it by definition does _not_ work in every browser. You stating that it requires native code that's not present in other browsers is clear evidence that it doesn't work in all browsers.
No one disputed that but I gave reasons why this is so. You can use Gmeet in any modern browser (it breaks more often in non-Chrome browsers IME). Is it better on that basis alone? I think not because TANSTAAFL. Why is Google subsidizing it that way?
Free is great, free is what they advertise. However, I don't personally like Brave Rewards because I am not bullish on crypto and I don't think most of BAT goes to creators, because Brave Rewards market usage is really, really small, so it gets used speculatively.
My perfect world solution is that they either
a) advertise that Brave Rewards is required ("Brave Talk is free, ad-supported), or
b) have a payment tier between premium and free that allows me to pay-per-call or something, without the premium features.
Frankly it was an interesting observation of yours, but a less charitable view of your comment is that you were subtly trying to start the same idiotic flame thread found at the bottom of any Brave post on this forum. And you did.
In case your observation was in good faith, I don't think Mozilla would have gone so deep into crypto and those little unsavoury sponsorships (Binance, etc.) had Eich never left his top spot, and I am positive his governance would have kept Mozilla and Firefox itself in a better place than whatever is happening over there right now.
Feels like we're watching the slow death of a beloved tech company that's one of the cornerstones of net neutrality, and I can't see a way out for them without radical changes in direction and management.
> Frankly it was an interesting observation of yours, but a less charitable view of your comment is that you were subtly trying to start the same idiotic flame thread found at the bottom of any Brave post on this forum. And you did.
Nope. I simply stated the facts, not that it really was the point of my comment anyway, hence the edit.
> In case your observation was in good faith, I don't think Mozilla would have gone so deep into crypto and those little unsavoury sponsorships (Binance, etc.) had Eich never left his top spot, and I am positive his governance would have kept Mozilla and Firefox itself in a better place than whatever is happening over there right now.
It's hard to say. I don't agree with crypto and think it's not really a great way to go, but Mozilla has Google funding - I don't think it's ridiculous to think Mozilla Rewards or equivalent could've been introduced somehow (with or without crypto)
The "without crypto" path would have been a regulated-in-most-regions in-game token, a gift card or existing portable-points system (TAP network), Amazon Prime, or something super-high-friction involving credit card or ACH. There aren't other options AFAIK.
I didn't say Mozilla fired Eich. The reality is, per your own source, is that Eich was going to be CEO, and he was no longer given that role, so he left. Given that he was already CTO before this debacle, the board trying to get him to stay in another C-suite role is effectively a demotion.
You also don't acknowledge that half of Mozilla's board resigned immediately after his appointment to CEO and one board member cited his appointment as explicitly being the reason.
No one is going to stay under those circumstances. So his choices were basically stay at Mozilla, whose very own employees were protesting his appointment, or leave. I'm going to stick with "forced out." I find it amusing that Mozilla in your source insists that he wasn't forced out, when their own recounting of the events only leads one to believe he resigned to due the intense organized protests surrounding his appointment. Ultimately you'd have to ask Eich privately to know for sure. All I'll say is that when someone is demoted, they're going to leave. Whether that's CEO or Senior Software Engineer.
I don't even agree with Eich's own (former) positions on same-sex marriage, but let's call it what it is, yes? Now, whether or not his forcing out was good, or just, is another matter, and discussion entirely.
I'm not trying to rewrite history or pick sides...but... if I remember right wasn't it basically that everyone at Mozilla kept calling him a bigot and saying they wouldn't work there? And rather than argue back and forth, he realized it would be easier to just resign? That's what I remember, at least. It is true he wasn't 'fired', but basically pushed into a wall and told to do something.
I hate playing cards and hate disagreeing with a personal hero even more, but as a gay person I frankly have a hard time caring. Eich is an idiot on the same level as Rob Monster, but he has a right to espouse or endorse whatever completely bonkers shit he wants. That's the reason why open source exists, and why we reserve the right to maintain a fork of someone's software if their leadership comes into question. I use Firefox every day, not in tacit recognition of homophobia or gamergate, but because I need a good browser that isn't made by Google. Mozilla is the second party, the leverage I need as an individual, and I should hope that they have dissenting opinions in their corporate structure. That's what drives innovation, it only becomes an issue when he abuses his power as a CEO to push his personal agenda. He didn't though, so I have a hard time pointing out where the "abuse" is in this situation. If it makes people uncomfortable to know they're constantly surrounded by people who disagree with them, maybe developing a web browser isn't the right line of work.
I have no dog in the "he quit/fired" race, but I find it disappointing that we've stooped to finger-pointing as a community. Open source was built to be better than this, not stooping to the same level as bigotry.
It is impossible to have an HN post about Brave without two mentions:
- Brave's foray in the crypto world
- What Eich did in his last moments at Mozilla
It is a rare and bittersweet joy to see someone try their hardest to detach for the constant, angry mob that forms every time there's a chance to. We are no better than Reddit or YouTube comments, however we want to think we are.
100%. All the histrionics would be screaming ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM! You support the status quo! You're alt-right/Nazi adjacent with your complicitness! etc. ad nauseam.
smoldesu's take is refreshing, even though he's absolutely be skewered for it if he dared to say it on the company Slack.
So how did they harass? They told about harassment against their employees by Brendan Eich. I guess the main question is whether that is harassing. Brendan Eich did the same publicly against his employees.
I never harassed anyone at Mozilla or anywhere else. You wrote "They [Mozilla] told about harassment against their employees by Brendan Eich." Where did Mozilla allege any such thing?
Hi Don, you shouldn't jump in here to harass me. BTW, I still have all those Facebook messages you sent years ago, some violent in tone and metaphor, to which I never responded (but I did report to Facebook). Should I publish them here?
I was not talking to you, for good and now obvious-to-everyone reasons. You are so unbalanced when it comes to me that you didn't even read the comment above to which you copy-pasted the same blob of text that you've spammed elsewhere on HN, about how I quit and I wasn't fired. The commenter above never said I was fired.
The issue with Prop 8 was the definition of, not right to, state licensed marriage (it proscribed bigamy and polygamy too). Try not inserting your hostile conclusions as premises of your questions. I'm not going to reply further to you.
Feelings alone without action cannot be considered harassment, legally or by that definition. Words are the means to meaning, and if you continue to misuse them, no one will talk with you.
Quite the bullet we dodged. It’s a good example for my pet theory that seemingly irrelevant (for the work) things like homophobia tend to pretty good heuristics for general shiftiness (I had a different word in mind, but autocorrect did a smart thing)
No, it's not pointless. Jitsi's terms allow them to get calldata and other metadata, Brave's do not. Equating all "free" legs or free-only services is a good way to get pwned. Good luck!
Hi blitzar, I'd like to clarify a few points here. First, meet.jit.si is a free development/experimental version of the Jitsi software that powers the paid 8x8 Meet product. From our discussions with the 8x8 team this is where they pilot new and potentially unstable features over weeks or months before they deploy it on their paid infrastructure. Per the privacy policy here https://jitsi.org/meet-jit-si-privacy/, they mention: "To provide the meet.jit.si service, 8×8 processes network and usage information.." That data is of course used to improve the service before deploying to the more stable versions.
Brave Talk, both free and premium, is powered by the stable/production 8x8 infrastructure, that has been vetted, usually for weeks before. Brave intends to run this as a fully reliable service that our users can count on.
> Brave Talk is powered by the Jitsi as a Service open source video meeting platform from 8×8, a leading integrated cloud communications platform provider (NYSE: EGHT), using WebRTC open source technology that enables developers to embed HD video directly into the browser.
By replacing ads on websites with their own, and url hijacking for referral profits. They are not a good service, they're content thieves with a mask on.
No, we never replaced ads on websites with our own; and no, we made nothing from the binance.com/.us autocomplete bug (no other URLs, no links in pages) getting affiliate codes.
Be careful what misinformation you parrot. It doesn't help anyone looking for better privacy products or trustworthy commenters.
How would you describe stripping ads from websites and then displaying different ones? Personally, I'd call that replacing website ads with your own.
I'm fully aware that you don't show them within the content (but in notification) and that it's an opt-in thing, but that doesn't make the statement inaccurate. You absolutely are removing them and showing others. In other words, you're replacing them.
verb: replace; 3rd person present: replaces; past tense: replaced; past participle: replaced; gerund or present participle: replacing
1. take the place of.
"Ian's smile was replaced by a frown"
2. put (something) back in a previous place or position.
"he drained his glass and replaced it on the bar"
Using "replace" implies in situ (which is false as you admit), or else you seem to think the page owns all your display and OS-mediated window-system attention "surface area". It does not, no page even needs to show for an opt-in Brave User Ad to be posted.
So as you've kindly admitted the "in a previous place or position" sense is false, you must mean any page owns your eyeballs if it's anywhere near a user ad. I demur and so do our users. Publishers don't own your eyes, desktop, toolbars, tab strip, new tab pages, or notification channels.
If I take your laptop and put a different one two meters away, I've still replaced it. If I take your glass at the bar to fill it up, is there a requirement that I place it in the exact same position as your previous one, or is there a pretty big margin of error? What makes screen estate different than that?
In general, I'm all for the concept of micropayments to websites. But your implementation, weasly language (like here), and of course your homophobic donations makes Brave pretty unappealing to me. I'd rather choose freaking Chrome with a stripped down ad-blocker than it.
...I mean, using Brave is still using Chrome(ium) with a different skin on top, leaky Tor integration, and your own coin that you own... how much of?
Between Brave Rewards being opt-in, our putting ads into the user's -- not the site's -- "inventory", and private matching on-device/in-browser with anonymous confirmation, I think we are nothing like a "replaced" ad in a publisher page. If you don't agree, I won't try further to explicate your category and concrete errors -- just don't use Brave! But be careful what you do use. uBO recommended.
It doesn't? It adblocks ads like uBlock Origin and tracking blocking tech in other browsers (except the shields are not an add-on so they can exceed the Manifest v3 type limits). There are entirely separate channels (toaster popups, start page backgrounds) that they use to deliver their own ads.
I get the crypto stuff is not everyone's cup of tea (certainly isn't mine) but get the basics straight, at least?
uBlock origin is the only ad blocker worth trusting. Privacy Badger is fine but breaks things too often. PiHole is good but requires too much know-how for most. ABP and Brave both do the same garbage ransom-taking with their ad replacement schema. So few publishers have an account with them that the monies supposedly going to support content sits (at best) in an escrow account that is escheated at some point.
Brave rewards is opt-in. If you don't want to receive ads, just don't turn it on.
If you still want to support creators but do not want to receive any kind of ads, just buy some BAT at any exchange, load your wallet and schedule monthly contributions.
If you want to support a publisher who is not on the creators program - send them a message and let them know they have another income alternative.
Right. You’re missing my point. From the consumer side that makes sense. Very few publishers (ie those that are high quality and you’d happily spend on) are hooked up to receive funds from Brave, or will ever choose to receive funds from Brave. So lots of these transactions leave your wallet, Brave takes a cut, and then the remainder sits in limbo or is escheated to the state. The ads ecosystem is a 2-sided marketplace, and Brave really only supports/is supported by 1 side.
You're wrong, nothing leaves the user's browser for us to take a cut in the case of an unverified creator. Those tips or donations sit in the browser, and cancel after 90 days. The user gets the tokens back and can cancel the pending tips or contributions at any time.
The ad ecosystem is multisided, not two-sided. We put the user in first place and cut out the ad-tech intermediaries who raid privacy, enable fraud, and take north of 50%, 70% in one case (the Guardian bought out its ad space and got 30p on the GBP).
Please check your facts before attacking us. It's one thing to operate on misinformation, but another to throw "escheated" around like a lawyer. It sounds impressive, but it's based on falsehoods all the way down. Again, tips from rewards users to unverified sites and channels sit in the browser, time out back to the user, and can be canceled. Look for "Pending tips" in rewards settings.
Because you’re you and I was basing it on working in the space 3 years ago, I admit I was wrong. But I really do want to solve this problem. Despite my mistake, the spirit of the question is unresolved — you claim that you allow publishers/creators to be paid for their work. In the case a pub isn’t on your platform, you don’t pay them — you return payment to the user. So content continues to go unfunded. How do you intend to get publishers to hook in to your system and get paid, instead of just making users feel like they’re supporting the open internet and instead not actually funding the sites they care about?
Please be careful with "you". The tokens tipped or otherwise contributed to unverified creators never leave the browser. We do not track them or intermediate them. They stay pending as noted.
It's up to the browser user to notify the creator about the tip or contribution they're sending. We don't and can't know who the creator is and we wouldn't spam them. Fans can and do get creators to sign up. This is the clean way to do it, and fits our user-first principle.
If you want a publisher-first play, Scroll (Twitter bought it) was doing a portable paywall with publishers. Not user-first, no rev share to users, users pay. Not us. Have to serve one master or the other.
But I claim our user-first way is best because users can then get sites and channels they've tipped to come and sign up. Going the other way means getting users to subscribe, always a conversion funnel and usually low rate.
Can you give an example of publisher/creator that you support directly, and that is not interested in joining Brave Creators?
If I am a popular creator who relies on, e.g, Patreon or Ko-Fi for some sustained income, and I learn about a platform that gives people money and it makes it easy for them to pass along that money to me... why wouldn't I be interested?
FWIW, these sites are all setup on Brave Rewards to receive funds via Brave Rewards contributions. I got this list from my history by going to brave://rewards/ in Brave:
>Privacy Badger is fine but breaks things too often.
I know it's a bit of a tangent from the topic at hand, but I'm really curious what Privacy Badger has broken for you? I (and all the staff at my office) have been using it basically since release, and not once has the root cause of a website not working properly been Privacy Badger.
So I couldn’t tell you all of them because I don’t keep track of when I need to disable it and refresh to make a page work (and that’s not that big an inconvenience for me). But I used to have to travel a lot for work with strict travel caps. Working within those, I had perfected a few strategies to really get the lowest fares available. On one specific planning adventure, I found a way to book a business class flight through Air Canada’s website that took me through Europe and back across the US for the price of the standard economy fare for the same trip. Privacy Badger killed the payment flow, and I could never get that rate back. I ended up on over 30 hours of flights in economy, and I’ll never forget the refreshed faces of the business class travelers… But more seriously, that and similar situations were the only really bad ones. Many times it’s just disabling and reloading a page. But for a casual Internet user, identifying that fix might be too much.
I have 17 exceptions in PB that I've setup, including my ISP, my broker, and my local utilities. Those would all be since I switched to firefox (2-3 years ago now?). It used to be worse, I'm pretty sure I had many dozens of exceptions on my old chrome settings.
They block their rival's ads and bring their own instead. It might be visible on a little different location, but in the end the result is the same; replacing ads from the websites.
> Rather than displaying Ads on web pages, Brave Ads appear as push notifications on your device that you can choose to engage with or dismiss.
I did not say it is a default behavior, but in the end you are blocking ads and bringing new ads, hence replacing. Just an another way to provide ads. Just a different way of seeing the concept as a whole.
"They block their rival's ads and bring their own instead" would be taken by most people to mean replacement in the page, and no opt-in. It's misleading with a purpose. Brave is providing users a private (no tracking) ad option with 70% of the gross paid to the user. If only a "rival" did that. But they don't, and we block tracking scripts more than ads (this kills the whole waterfall so blocks most ads). Note we don't block Google or other search ads, or first party ads that don't depend on tracking scripts.
I've been using Brave for over a year now. I don't use the opt-in Brave Rewards Ads but do use the Brave Rewards Auto-Contribute. I love Brave and think it is actually going to save the web from becoming a shitty, slow experience over the years to come.
My only gripe is that the crypto integration with Uphold to pay creators is/was hard to use. I love the idea that I can pay $20/month to use the web and that money is disbursed to the sites I visit most!
Update: This motivated me to login to Uphold again and relink Brave Rewards so I can use the auto-contribute feature. Uphold didn't have recurring transactions for debit/credit cards originally so it was too much friction to use, but it is all working now.
Off topic but please shoot me a message (I'm easy to reach, first at company dot com) with what you find hard to use. I may agree and we're working on better ways to support creators, but I hope to capture your specific issues. Thanks.
I didn't think they did those anymore. True, though, they've tried endless very slimy business models - anything that works until they get caught or called out.
We never replaced ads on web pages. The binance.{us,com} auto-complete affiliate code was a bug and we renounced any (tiny) revenue that might come from it.
I think it's slimy to do what you just did. Why'd you do it? We didn't do the first thing you said, and we shipped and then fixed the bug on the second. I don't see how you can excuse your action.
Because I don't believe you. For example, I followed up on your claim about the second when it happened and it appeared clear to me that it was not a bug.
I'm now familiar with how you aggressively and dishonestly attack people who call out Brave's actions. I know I'm not special - that's just how you do business - but you aren't going to intimidate me.
I will make one concession to your attack though, I will declare that I'm not affiliated with any party in this and am simply doing my best to objectively judge the facts.
If you don't believe me, then there's no point in talking. But you can verify for yourself that we've never replaced ads in publisher pages. On the binance.{us,com} autocomplete with affiliate code, it was a blunder where two entries in a table had the wrong flag passed in. Not sure how to prove intent, so again: no point talking if you don't believe me but my work has been in the open for 23+ years and I stand behind it.
I'm not stupid: I'm not going to discard my judgement based on careful examination of independent parties in favour of how you want me to judge it. (Even if I hadn't seen that you are not trustworthy and will aggressively attack people for speaking the truth.)
> If you don't believe me, then there's no point in talking.
I didn't refer you to independent parties. You can check Brave (we provide old versions on github) and you won't ever find us replacing ads in publisher pages. We're all open source on the client side, so you can read revision histories too. If you don't check for yourself, then how do you know what you said is true?
It would help if you named your "independent parties" plural you're relying on. It seems you can't inspect our product or code for yourself. Are you sure you have a reliable and independent source who has checked our work? Hint: not David Gerard.
Honestly I’m glad to see some disruption in the web advertising space.
I’m not sure I understand Braves claim about “sharing revenue” with rewards users. Rewards users are getting paid in BAT no? I assume Brave is getting paid in USD. Do they have an arbitrary treasury of BAT tokens? It seems like Brave isn’t sharing any revenue if they’re paying out in tokens they created. Can’t they just create more BAT tokens or switch to BAT2 whenever they please?
I am genuinely confused here and would love to be enlightened.
BAT is capped by its genesis contract at 1.5B tokens, we can't make any more. It has broad and deep liquidity. Most ad buyers pay in fiat, but some pay in BAT, USDC, etc. When paid not in BAT, we take 70% of the gross revenue and buy BAT with market orders, to send to users as their ad revenue shares. See https://brave.com/transparency for these purchases. This makes a buy side for the ecosystem (there are others coming up). See also https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/psnn6o/first_2m.... HTH
Needless to say (I hope, but hostile and skeptical folks here), when the ad buyer does pay us in BAT, we send 70% directly to the rewards users based on anonymous confirmation protocol (blind signature certs; putting on a fast blockchain via THEMIS soon). That is to say, we always pay the opted-in rewards user 70% of gross.
Thanks for the reply! I appreciate you taking the time to respond to comments like mine. I tried brave several years ago but it seems the ecosystem has developed quite a bit since then so I’ll give it another go.
There have definitely been some really nice features shipped in other browsers, or by other vendors, in the past. Timing is often a curious element. I wonder if Hello might have found more success if it were introduced in 2020-2021, given the great exodus of people from offices, schools, etc., and their increasingly heavy reliance upon the Web to remain in touch.
I'm excited for our launch of Brave Talk in part due to the timing, but also for the technology, and the team behind the effort. WebRTC has come a long way, and the additional encryption options offered are really appealing.
First it was ad replacement, then it was a patreon thing that took donations (illegally) for third parties that didn't want it, then it was ad blocking, then it was a search engine, then it was videoconferencing....
No pivoting; just an incremental realization of a better Web. We never replaced ads. Brave blocks trackers, and their associated third-party ads for privacy and security reasons—we've done this from the start. But when you block third-party ads, you cut into the revenue of publishers, creators, and other content makers.
Cutting revenue for those who make the Web wonderful is not ideal, so an alternative approach was needed to help those who creator the content that keeps us 'coming back' to the Web. This is where Brave Rewards came in, and Brave's User Growth Pool. We distributed BAT to our users, inviting them to ear-mark it for the creators they appreciated most. Some of those creators signed-up to claim our tokens, while others didn't.
From the start, Brave has been focused on privacy, security, and sustainability. In the vein of privacy, we introduced Brave Search. An engine with its own index, not connected to you or your online activities, existing only to help you find what you're seeking on the Web.
Our revenue model is largely ad-based, but quite different from the ads we all have come accustomed to on the Web. Brave's Ad model is consent-based, user-configurable (you control ad-frequencies, etc.), and private-by-design. Rather than sending your data off to third-parties, we send regional ad catalogs to you. These are studied in the private enclave of your machine so that your data is never transmitted elsewhere. When users participate in Brave Ads, they receive 70% of the associated revenue (for their attention). Brave gets the remaining 30%.
How can you be so disingenuous? You removed ads, then introduced your own advertising. You may see those as two separate events, but the consequence is the same as if you had chosen to replace ads.
Replaces implies in-situ substitution (i.e. ads on pages, etc.); in fact this is often what is explicitly stated when the claim "Brave replaces ads" is made (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28619682 for a local example). Brave blocks harmful ads and trackers, and introduced an alternate model to supply missed revenue for creators. Brave Ads (desktop notifications) are off by default in Brave; users must opt-in. So there is no replacement (in-situ) of ads, but there is blocking (of necessity, for security and privacy reasons) of third-party trackers/ads.
I can't help but wonder if you were in politics at some point in your career, being able to hinge on a very strict and literal definition of "replace" and missing the entire spirit of topic at hand.
Words have semantic range, and this is no less true for "replace" than for any other word. In 2016 there were reports that Brave would replace ads [meaning in-situ, in-page substitution] with its own ads. This never happened. Yet the claim continues to live on (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28619682 for a local example). But anybody who downloads and uses Brave for a few seconds can quickly tell that this is not the case.
But perhaps this first reading wasn't the proper exegesis; perhaps the author meant only "Brave blocks Google's ads, and has created its own advertising model in its place." If that's the intended understanding, then yes, that's correct. Google's ads are privacy-leaches who parasitically attack to non-consenting hosts, sucking as much data out as possible.
Brave Ads replaces Google Ads. Brave Ads is based on consent, privacy, and equity. With Brave Ads, you have to opt-in to participate. If/when you do, you receive 70% of the revenue, and you share [no data] in the process. Google's model is quite the opposite; you don't opt-in, you don't get revenue, and your data is piped out to a third-party where it is sold, rented, and/or amended onto whatever profile exists for you on the Web.
>Words have semantic range, and this is no less true for "replace" than for any other word.
I agree. Although I'm sure it's clear that I believe "replace" is semantically compatible with "remove advertisements from X, instead serving ads from Y in a different location".
>perhaps the author meant only "Brave blocks Google's ads, and has created its own advertising model in its place."
This was my interpretation.
>Brave Ads replaces Google Ads.
I guess we both agree that "replace" is within the semantic range. Which is why "We never replace ads." didn't sit well.
For what it is worth, I'm neither for nor against Brave. Just surprised about how vigorous Brave employees are being in the thread.
See my later edits to those comments, wherein I shared an example from another user in this thread accusing Brave of in-situ ad-replacement. That is usually the claim being made (first seen in 2016, and refusing to die since).
Brave is definitely working hard to replace that which doesn't work on the Web, advertising being one such thing. We're pushing for a model that is based on consent, equity, and an a priori commitment to privacy (don't touch the user's data). If we can successfully replace (however you wish to interpret that) Google with such a model, then I'm content
1) non tracking on page
2) tracking on page
3) brave ads
The user can chose to block or allow each. It could be considered Brave replacing them if the default was to not have (2) and have (3) but you have to enable brave rewards yourself. You could say it allows the user to replace the ads but that wouldn't be very specific as the ads are of a different type and value.
> How many times have Brave pivoted at this point?
On one hand, the features are at least somewhat adjacent to their core business of building a web browser. On the other, whenever Mozilla did something like this they were panned for spreading themselves too thin and diverging from their core mission.
On the other hand, Mozilla fans are mostly morons who are actively hostile to success and want a pristine FOSS project funded entirely on donations. (I was one of those morons back in the day)
I think initiatives like Pocket, Brave Search, Brave Talk, a privacy-respecting ads ecosystem, Vivaldi's Mail/Calendar/RSS setup and integrated barebones Notes module are all pretty much exactly what should happen. There was an article about how using Firefox alone is meaningless: http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.ht...
I'm drawn to agree: The browser alone is a hard sell, a bit like how Steve Jobs said that Dropbox is not a product, but a feature. A browser company needs to provide services for users to stay relevant. Search, notes and communication tools are part and parcel of that. If you're just a window, you're going to die.
Good point, Brave's responsibility as a for-profit enterprise is to attempt to go full Paperclip Game and grow to consume the entire universe.
More seriously, I don't think for-profit/non-profit really matters here. Mozilla's reasoning was pretty clear (for better or worse) that they saw these adjacent services as helping to break into the lock-in of Apple/Google/MS who used either their own browser-adjacent services to push their own browsers, or to provide privacy-respecting versions of services (in an attempt to displace, say, Zoom).
A nonprofit where the people at the top have multi-million dollar salaries (see https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html) Yes, Brave is for profit, but not at the cost of user data and/or trust. Brave doesn't collect or exchange your data. Firefox, on the other hand, transmits your keystrokes to Google right out of the box. Leith did a great side-by-side comparison of various top browsers (including Firefox and Brave), finding the latter to be in a class of its own in terms of privacy out of the box: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf.
Their business model is theft by another name, however they can manage to swing it. When they get caught, pivot and steal content for profit a different way. Repeat.
Saint Joseph on a hot plate, the intolerance and rigidity of thinking of people on this web page is too much. Hacker News and FB and Twitter and a million other things we use every day are also guilty of theft, theft of our time and attention and ability to think slowly enough to not just reinforce our own preconceived notions. Yes, those Brave people are shifting their model all the time. Eich and team saw first hand that a browser company is almost impossible to run for profit unless you own your own multibillion dollar ad network or half the global phone business. Eich got to learn that first hand at Mozilla. He's trying to find an audience and offer what he considers innovative products. He's no more deceptive than Google or Amazon or Ycombinator are about what gets done with the attention and clicks.
EDIT: some of you think we should do only a browser, but we also have a search engine now (https://search.brave.com/). We're going big across privacy and user-agent models that fit together well and provide our users with value in the form of products, also in revenue shares including >= what we make on any opt-in attention economics. Think big, avoid pigeonholing us as some of you did and still do Mozilla. My advice!
This is really neat to see. I'm actually working on an idea that involves conferencing and have been using jitsi's open source solution for the POC. I've been impressed with the openness and flexibility of the platform.
Are there any plans to enable installable third party app/extensions with talk.brave like zoom is currently rolling out their app store?
App stores require curation for safety properties (security, brand, abuse). We're not ready to take those on. But Talk's HTML-based web app can be user-scripted. Let me know if you develop anything.
That makes sense. App stores add a lot of cost both on the platform and developer side, and I think in this case a straight forward scripting api with some well thought security/privacy protections would probably be easier to integrate with.
Will definitely shoot you a note when we've got something built. Thanks!
What does "no tracking" even mean here? Does it include no facial recognition?
I mean, ffs, the FBI or Interpol or whoever could release such an app using keywords that mean nothing these days. Privacy preserving, no tracking, no installation, no special permissions.
We just match everyone on video against a criminal database, but it's fine, we don't save your mugshot if you're not a criminal!
No one in the middle sees unencrypted video. Two-party is fully end-to-end encrypted. We avoid overusing that overloaded phrase for multiparty and we're working on defenses against active (zoom bomb) attacks, that do not require a login. So any face scanner on a multiparty call would have to be someone the host invited who is doing face scanning at their endpoint where the cryptographic session terminates and video gets decrypted.
I didn’t describe the active threat correctly — not zoom bombing (auth system saves day), MitM from us or 8x8. We are closing off this attack surface in a followup release.
Apple whiffed it with NeuralHash, didn't they? Hard problem.
We don't host content. For Brave Search, we have been using a neat trick: not serving pages that Google doesn't index (we can cheaply test in our service with no privacy loss), but as we scale up, we are looking at top vendors who can help filter.
I'm not one of those people that doesn't like redundancy or thinks that people developing tools that serve a purpose for which other tools already exist is a waste of time. I like options, I want people to build what they think they should build.
But I honestly do not see a point of this, except that Brave is trying to become an ecosystem. I don't want another ecosystem.
> Have Brave Rewards (their crypto-and-ads service) turned on
If this is true then its another shady thing by a self proclaimed privacy company.
They used to do the protection racket thing where they indirectly threatened website owners with the ultimatum that if they don't work with them, they will man-in-the-middle them to replace the website's ads with their own and not give them a cut of the profit.
Also, Brave has been caught modifying URLs and adding its own affiliate links in them compromising user privacy to earn $$$ for itself.
I don't understand why Brave Rewards needs to be enabled, but it seems very normal for the company operating a service to require some kind of account or membership. If you don't trust Brave this is probably not the service for you.
No, it's intended that a rewards user can turn off ads. Some users who turn off ads then self-fund (via a custodian such as Gemini) to support their favorite sites and creators, even automatically via private browser-only analytics (so-called Auto-contribute mode).
I do think that Brave would be 100% in the clear (same with any browser or extension) to "MiTM", modify, or refuse to display any part of any web page.
I don't really want to set any kind of precent that browsers should somehow be forced to display web pages exactly as sent.
... I don't know how to approach that statement. You prefer arbitrary invisible changes by actors unknown? Or is it a part of some elaborate Phillip-K-Dick art project about unreliable narrator and "what is truth anyway"?
If Bob sends me a letter, I expect Postal Service to deliver it to me exactly as sent.
If Bob sends me an email I expect email service to deliver it to me as sent.
If Bob sends me a webpage I expect it to be delivered as sent.
We can discuss changes & preferences on presentation layer, but invisible, uncontrollable substitution of content, I have no idea how they're either justifiable or desirable.
I am likely not interpreting your comment correctly. Perhaps if you elaborate it may become clearer.
Reader mode proves that "exatly as sent" is the opposite of what I want.
I would like browsers to reinterpret what is sent for me (and noone else, definitely not for the browser maker) and display something more readable and useful (lightweight, queryable, cross-referenced, hyperlinke, actionable, etc.).
I'd love to never see the site owner's design or interact with their UX 95% of the time (if you're an artist or musician I probably want to see what you designed, that's about it). Reader mode probably makes it 50% but is not designed for any kind of interactivity so I still have to use horrible booking pages, shopping sites, etc. I'd love my bropwser to extract the ueful and completely standardise the UI every time.
I actually largely agree with you. I should clarify my original comment a bit, I think.
I want my browser to display the page exactly as sent until I tell it not to. It should be serving pages to me as-is, and things such as ad/content blockers, and reader mode, should be my choices. I don't want the browser making those decisions for me ahead of time and without my input.
This is fair, or at least, if they do make those choices ahead of time they should be well publicised and configurable, or it should be a specialised, single purpose browser.
To that extent, I think if Brave is open and honest and says "we're a browser that reformats pages in this way" that is ok. It's sneaky shit, dark patterns, bundling things you want with things you might not, etc. that make me distrusting of them.
I think it's one thing to strip out content or ads, but an entirely different beast to replace ads with your own. There are arguments for blocking ads, both ethical and security based. But replacing the ads with your own is basically the same as stealing the content for your own profit. Brave is a shitty company with no moral leg to stand on.
This is the crucial part. Is brave inserting ads on the SAME PAGE that it stripped out of? If so I agree completely. I thought brave had some sort of notification system though, which is a bit different IMO.
No, Brave does not display ads on publisher properties. Brave blocks trackers (which impacts most third-party ads), but does no in-situ substitution. First-party ads are generally untouched. Brave acts as a content-filter out of the box (similar to uBlock Origin), protecting the user and their data from third-party harvesters and more.
Brave does offer an optional feature called Brave Ads, which enables users to view privacy-respecting ads (as notifications, and high-quality New Tab Page wallpapers) for 70% of the associated revenue. This revenue (in the form of BAT rewards) can then flow out to verified publishers as a form of support. No user data is collected; ad-matching happens on-device, and in accordance with user-specified constraints.
Brave does not replace (meaning, display in-situ) third-party ads. Those are blocked, as you stated, for ethical and security reasons. Brave offers an opt-in feature of the browser called 'Brave Rewards' and 'Brave Ads'. This feature enables users to opt-in to ad-notifications (displayed as native prompts on the device; not shown on the pages you visit). Ads are displayed on every 4th new tab page for participating users (again, no ads on publisher properties). The user consents to these, receives 70% of the revenue for their attention, and sets threshold limitations for how many ads can be displayed in a given period. Brave has never replaced ads on pages; that would be highly unethical.
what impossible fantasy! you expect software you use, which a for profit company made to,, lemme get this right,, respect your requirements, wants and make your life less terrible? and not distract you? make things easier? hah! if only our big tech overlords meant what they said about caring for us /s
> I do think that Brave would be 100% in the clear (same with any browser or extension) to "MiTM", modify, or refuse to display any part of any web page.
Taken literally this would mean that browsers would be allowed to re-write, either actively or by deleting sections, the actual content of articles. Surely there has to be some expectation that what a person publishes on the internet will be faithfully represented? And if faithful representation of the original is respected for the writing, why shouldn't it be respected for the writer's business/advertising arrangements?
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills in this thread. Are we all suddenly against ad/content blockers and the built-in tracking protection that Firefox/Safari have?
Do you all not not feel that the browser is ya know the user's agent?
>Are we all suddenly against ad/content blockers and the built-in tracking protection that Firefox/Safari have?
No, but the point is that it's a bit more nuanced than your original post suggests. Users should have the control over how a page is displayed to them. I want to tell my browser to block ads, and which ads to block. I don't fully trust it to make the same exact decisions in that area that I might want, or to not selectively block ads based on an agreement it may or may not have with advertisers.
>Do you all not not feel that the browser is ya know the user's agent?
It is the user's agent, and as the user, I want the control. I want to make the decisions.
> I don't fully trust it to make the same exact decisions in that area that I might want
This is a very reasonable desire, but Brave also seems clear that their service does something different. Where other tools focus on blocking ads, Brave is more about their hybrid blocking of 'bad' ads (whatever that means) and replacing those ads with theirs.
Are you saying that you feel like Brave is deceptive in describing how their service works or that the entire idea of a tool that blocks some subset of ads that the user cannot configure and replaces them is fundamentally unethical?
> Are you saying that you feel like Brave is deceptive in describing how their service works or that the entire idea of a tool that blocks some subset of ads that the user cannot configure and replaces them is fundamentally unethical?
My personal issue is that Brave is an advertising company which is blocking competitor ads where content-creators are getting paid (the company which the content-creators chose to partner with), and replacing them with ads of their own (regardless of the format of them).
It's a great business model - but IMO it's just stealing or subverting ad revenue from the people who actually generate the content you are reading and maintain the infrastructure.
Hate ads? Get Firefox and block them.
Don't mind ads and are happy for the revenue to go to the content creator? Get Firefox, it blocks most tracking anyway.
Don't mind ads but hate the idea that the revenue will go to the content creator, and you would rather give it to some random shady company that might give you a cut of their subverted/stolen revenue in crypto? Get Brave!
Just in case there's any confusion, I've been speaking broadly about browsers in general, not Brave specifically.
I genuinely don't have an opinion regarding whether or not I think Brave is being deceptive. Rather, I've always been generally untrusting of bodies such as Brave making "it's cool, trust us" claims. It could be that they're being 100% honest and that's great, but I just can't get my own pessimism to get on board, particularly when there's money/profit involved.
Ultimately, yeah, I would say that the idea of a tool that doesn't allow me to eliminate ads entirely as it substitutes ads it says are "OK" is unethical (for/to me - if others are fine with it, cool, use Brave!). Going back to my lack of trust, I can't trust that they won't make a user-hostile decision around ads in the interest of their own bottom line down the road.
> It is the user's agent, and as the user, I want the control. I want to make the decisions.
What kind of decisions do you want to be able to make? Unless you're writing all your own filters (in which case, kudos to you!), you're still ultimately delegating these decisions primarily to a handful of filter list maintainers you've probably never met. Brave's source code and filter lists are all developed in the open and are heavily customizable, as well.
>Brave's ... filter lists are all developed in the open and are heavily customizable, as well.
As are so, so many of the filter lists developed by "maintainers [I've] probably never met." Every list I've added to my pihole is fully readable and customizable.
> Do you all not not feel that the browser is ya know the user's agent?
Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, depends on what the browser developers want.
That said, there is something dubious with how ad blockers take an author's written content, "liberate" it from the ads that pay the author's bills, and make it available for free.
I sense Brave is trying to solve that problem, but everything I've read about it seems weird.
(Separately I see nothing dubious about tracking protection. I wish tracking were less inseparable from the advertising; I'm perfectly willing to see ads as long as I'm not being shadow profiled).
Nice that there are no time limits. Not great that passwords are only for Premium customers. But if you're just doing 1-on-1 calls it's pretty easy to notice if an uninvited guest has appeared.
Does this offer scheduling, or just initiating calls in real time?
Easily the best browser on the market and continues to produce great features. Very bullish on its crypto token BAT which is earned by viewing their ads ($5-10/mo). If you're going to use a browser why wouldn't want to use Brave with rewards turned on, honestly?
Important to note that only 1:1 calls are E2E encrypted and larger calls are forwarded to a SFU that 8x8 calls "Jitsi Videobridge" where they are decrypted, processed in memory, and then re-encrypted for each participant stream.
Hi I'd like to correct this, if you have enabled "Video Bridge Encryption" in Brave Talk, this is not the case. Calls of up to 20 participants would be encrypted, using keys locally exchanged among participants. The SFU wouldn't be able to decrypt these video/audio streams. Of course, as would be standard and expected, the SFU would decrypt the transport layer of encryption, but wouldn't be able to decrypt the second layer of video/audio encryption. You can find more about the current underlying Jitsi encryption implementation here: https://jitsi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/jitsi-e2ee-1.0....
Once the moderator enables "Video Bridge Encryption" it is automatically enabled for other participants. I believe that if a 21st user tried to join it would error out, but let me confirm this with the 8x8 team.
Update, I checked with the 8x8 team, and it will warn from 21 to 25 users, and then disable when the 25th user joins. You'll see the green video bridge encryption notification turn off at the top at that point.
I wonder how all the US BAT users plan to answer IRS 1040 question "did you receive, sell, send, exchange, or otherwise acquire any financial interest in any virtual currency?"
It is just very hard to trust them... they get caught on very hostile things again and again, when they promise that won't happen again. In the end, they are yet another ad based company.
> "they get caught on very hostile things again and again"
This is not the case. The most common claims are "Brave accepted donations for others", "Brave replaces ads across the Web", "Brave injected/modified referral links"—each of these claims are unequivocally false.
You are right that Brave is an "ad based company," however. But that needs to be explained a bit, since Brave is unlike any other ad-based company you've likely encountered on the Web.
When people think of "ad-based company," they often picture something like Google. A company that has its hands in most of what you do on the Web, existing as a third-party resource in most of your traffic.
But compare Brave with Google for a moment. Brave's ad-model is consent based, while Google's is not. Brave's model follows the user's configuration for determining how often/whether ads should be shown, while Google does not. Brave's model pays the user 70% of the associated revenue, while Google does not. Brave collects [no user data], while Google does the opposite. The Brave model is built on consent, equity, and privacy. Google's model is the opposite, in every regard.
> This is not the case. The most common claims are "Brave accepted donations for others", "Brave replaces ads across the Web", "Brave injected/modified referral links"—each of these claims are unequivocally false.
No problem here; I'm happy you went straight to the source. You can also find this code at code.brave.com in the future (to save you some clicks). Note that the source to which you linked does not demonstrate Brave "injecting" or "modifying" any referral links. What is shown instead is our affiliate-code offering, which is presented in the UI of the browser itself when the participating user searches particular terms via the ominibox. We wrote about this here, including screenshots of how it appears in-app: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/
Injection refers to content inserted into a page from outside. An example of this would be Brave's "tip" buttons on Twitter. The browser [injects] an object into the page which can trigger tipping UI in the browser when clicked. This feature didn't inject anything; it displayed an affiliate-link option in the browser's interface.
Others have claimed that Brave modified referral codes; this too is false. While some sites have attempted this as a support option (Stack Overflow briefly considered/experimented-with modifying Amazon links in questions/answers, but chose not to continue down that path), Brave never engaged in this type of behavior. This claim implies that Brave has modified the DOM of pages viewed by the user to alter the HREF of links to various sites. This is not the case, and never was the case either.
Brave simply had a short list of affiliate codes which could be presented to the user, if they matched the user's search input, as a way of supporting development of the project. No network activity involved, no data exchanged, no modifying visited pages or anything else. It was presented merely as a pre-search suggestion when relevant to the user's input.
> Injection refers to content inserted into a page from outside. An example of this would be Brave's "tip" buttons on Twitter. The browser [injects] an object into the page which can trigger tipping UI in the browser when clicked. This feature didn't inject anything; it displayed an affiliate-link option in the browser's interface.
That is a one meaning for the injection. In this case, you injected HTTP GET parameters (referrals) for the domain URL suggestion which was written by the user. And that you can of course call only as "a pre-search suggestion", but in reality user had to remove them by hand/typing the whole url in that time to not use them, as it was injected into the url.
Do you want to talk about the very hostile things? We're not perfect (neither is Mozilla, people still roast them for stuff like bundling Pocket without it being uninstallable) but we fix and learn.
It is true that they get most of their income by setting Google as default search engine. However, they do not promote or support Google's way to do many things, and all of the evidence is pointing that privacy is everything they have in their brand, and they haven't done user hostile things in the past.
They have attempted many kinds of new business models. VPN partnership with Mullavad is really promising one, and maybe they finally get new source for income.
As long as they have Google's money and have them as the default search engine, their stance on privacy is a joke. In fact, they knew about the joke about 'Mozilla living without Google' since 2007 [0] and 14 years later they once begged to Google to renew that contract and now they continue to bite the same hand that kept them alive.
How many shady or user-hostile things has Mozilla done?
Receiving money is not making someone automatically bad. You become bad when you do other things than originally agreed for receiving the money, in benefit of money provider.
> As long as they have Google's money and have them as the default search engine, their stance on privacy is a joke.
Also to my knowledge, you can change search engine anytime you want.
Mozilla has been in hot-water in the past for silently installing extensions and more. But to your last comment (i.e. users can change their search engine whenever they want), consider the 'tyranny of the default'. Most users will not make changes to their browser out of the box. Most users frankly do not know how, or even know that they ought to in some areas.
When you install Firefox, and fire up that first session, your keystrokes in the address bar are sent to Google. There is no warning, or permission prompt. The same would happen if you accidentally pasted-in your social security number, or some other sensitive information—it gets sent right off to Google. It was this type of behavior, in part, that led independent researchers at Trinity College to grade Firefox lower than Brave in terms of out-of-the-box privacy: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf. In fact, Brave was found to be in its own class as the most private browser tested.
I'm glad you like Firefox, I spent a lot of years on it, and on Mozilla, Gecko, SpiderMonkey, and the XUL platform before it. But Mozilla is currently beholden to Google and this has left them with year over year market share losses against Chrome. I don't see how they've "undermined" Google. If they switch to Bing as scooped by TechCrunch, they may start.
Yes, I'm quite familiar with your record - you sell it endlessly. Your getting in early at Mozilla doesn't make up for the damage you've done to the web with Brave.
I'll gladly explain for the other people who might be scrolling by, since time immemorial has proven that user feedback falls on deaf ears at BraveCorp.
The internet is not made "good" by by browser manufacturers. This is something we fought about when Chrome assumed dominance, and it holds true today. The thing that makes the internet good is content: a perfect browser does literally nothing except format content properly into an open window. That's why power-users will still reach for Firefox, Chrome, or god forbid Safari before they consider trying "the cryptocurrency browser by a guy nobody trusts". Hell, I'd probably install the stupid Opera Gaming Browser before I'd be caught using Brave. That only leaves you the market of people who would like to earn pennies on the dollar browsing the web, but also pay for their DSL access every month. In all fairness, it's a market you've capitalized on very well, which is why it so closely resembles abuse. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and talks like a duck... I won't believe you when you're telling me it's actually a lion.
You are quite mistaken on "format content properly", as Firefox based on Gecko does not agree in detail (esp. on mobile) with Chrome, so people tend to go to Chrome over time. Worse, as Firefox loses share on this basis (among others), sites whose webdevs test in Chrome and Safari only (Edge is Chromium-based) tend to break Firefox. This spirals down. But keep pretending browsers are passive, blind formatting engines!
In fact Google did Chrome because it learned from Firefox that browsers are high-value user agents, and if they camouflage as passive/blind agents, then the big tech network superpower can have its way with the user, both through top sites such as Google search tied into default omnibus search engine setting, and over time via Google's browser tying (an antitrust term) other Google products, Google's accounts and analytics systems, and even full ad-exchange user-tracking, into its browser.
As for user feedback falling on deaf ears, you are simply making stuff up. Chrome ignores user complaints, Firefox too (roasted endlessly over killing XUL add-ons, Proton UX, etc.). Brave is all over Twitter and Reddit and we do live customer support there. I spend a good chunk of every day on it.
As Chesterton put it, one can always be blind to a thing so long as it is big enough. That seems to be the case with you and your "format content properly" statement here. If you are a Chrome user, I hope you disable account-based tracking in your Google account(s). If you use Firefox, ditto, and beware tracking pixels they whitelist on Google's SERP.
No, Apple stands in the way. If you mean browser engine, still true: WebKit was forked as Blink on 4/3/2013 and diverged on both sides since.
The time for a new engine may come, and I saw a clean room one go by on HN the other day. It's very hard to get to webcompat. Gecko loses compatibility as Firefox loses market share. For now, the more important fight is a level up: tracker blocking, users dealt into the economics, intermediaries and big tech dealt out.
sure... but lets remove the whole trust/ ad thing... Brave is a faster version of chrome, and Brave search gives me the code sample I'm searching for first thing in the sidebar...both are major improvements in my life. It's a better product.
This line alone makes Brace insecure. It relies on the upstream project. Whenever the upstream project gets a security patch, it will be exploited on the downstream and there is X time for the update, unless you have the userbase of Edge or something.
But everybody has opinions to prioritize and we can discuss about them forever.
We update within a day of Chrome on all channels. This is a piece of work, but much less than creating our own engine (which would have its own security bug habitat and early bugs to shake out, until maintenance using bounties and fuzzing). https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
1) Using the Brave Browser
2) Have Brave Rewards (their crypto-and-ads service) turned on.
Not loving that.
Edit: the first one is fine (although a little strange that it is a requirement here but not for their other products, like Brave Search). I'm irked by the second one.