Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> 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.

How so? For example the case "Brave injected/modified referral links" https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/master/components/o...

The "problem" of open-source is, that you can see what is happening.




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/


But that is exactly what injection is. But anyway I'm glad you fixed it.


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.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: