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I moved to brave a while ago. Works great both in desktop and mobile, and you still get chromium under the hood. The metrics it shows about the amount of ads a

I moved to brave a while ago. Works great both in desktop and mobile, and you still get chromium under the hood. The metrics it shows about the amount of ads and trackers blocked is astonishing...

suby 7y ago
Is Brave 100% open source? I don't trust them at all because I feel that the underlying business model is shady (replacing website ads with their own ads).
- joeyspn 7y ago
  > Is Brave 100% open source? They have the project on github so I guess the answer is yes... https://github.com/brave/brave-browser https://github.com/brave/brave-browser The business model is also quite smart, since the users get paid BAT tokens for viewing ads.
  - tapoxi 7y ago
    Their business model is quite unethical, removing the page's monetization and replacing it with their own.
    - mc32 7y ago
      Arguably but arguably so is the business model of Chrome from a user perspective. So from that POV it’s not worse than Chrome but does benefit the user, whereas Chrome benefits Google, ad industry and sellers.
    - wickedlogic 7y ago
      Is it though? As long the person running the browser understands the tradeoffs? I mean, the browser is supposed to be your user-agent after all. To render and provide interactions as you deem fit...
- ajross 7y ago
  One of the great ironies of the modern tech world is that people who hate Google on tribal^H^H^H privacy grounds generally don't care at all about open source purity.
d1zzy 7y ago
Also Chromium is open source.
- garren 7y ago
  Open source or not, chromium is still fundamentally chrome and backed by Google, is it not? It can be used vanilla or built on top of (e.g., chromium and brave), but where Google goes so goes chromium. This is as much a privacy concern as it is a browser mono-culture concern, which has been a popular topic lately. Further, just because something is open-source doesn't automatically free it of corporate encumbrance - something Google knows quite well [0][1]. [0] https://boingboing.net/2019/05/29/hoarding-software-freedom.html https://boingboing.net/2019/05/29/hoarding-software-freedom.... [1]https://boingboing.net/2019/04/03/i-hate-being-right-2.html https://boingboing.net/2019/04/03/i-hate-being-right-2.html
  - d1zzy 7y ago
    The issue at hand is that Chrome may or may not perform surveillance or support it. If that is the concern, with Chromium you get to see everything it does and you know the code you're running, like any other open source project. So I disagree that using Chromium is a privacy concern similar to using Chrome. Browser monoculture has advantages and disadvantages and would be the topic of a separate discussion. I never claimed that Chromium is free of "corporate encumbrance" nor do I think that's a problem. I don't think there's any realistic risk that if Google stops developing on Chromium we would be losing that browser, there's too many people outside of Google with invested interest in keeping Chromium going so a popular separately maintained fork seems likely. And even in the extremely unlikely case that Chromium disappears overnight and nobody wants to touch that code base ever again, there are other browsers out there.

I moved to brave a while ago. Works great both in desktop and mobile, and you still get chromium under the hood. The metrics it shows about the amount of ads and trackers blocked is astonishing...

suby 7y ago

Is Brave 100% open source? I don't trust them at all because I feel that the underlying business model is shady (replacing website ads with their own ads).

joeyspn 7y ago
> Is Brave 100% open source? They have the project on github so I guess the answer is yes... https://github.com/brave/brave-browser https://github.com/brave/brave-browser The business model is also quite smart, since the users get paid BAT tokens for viewing ads.
- tapoxi 7y ago
  Their business model is quite unethical, removing the page's monetization and replacing it with their own.
  - mc32 7y ago
    Arguably but arguably so is the business model of Chrome from a user perspective. So from that POV it’s not worse than Chrome but does benefit the user, whereas Chrome benefits Google, ad industry and sellers.
  - wickedlogic 7y ago
    Is it though? As long the person running the browser understands the tradeoffs? I mean, the browser is supposed to be your user-agent after all. To render and provide interactions as you deem fit...
ajross 7y ago
One of the great ironies of the modern tech world is that people who hate Google on tribal^H^H^H privacy grounds generally don't care at all about open source purity.

d1zzy 7y ago

Also Chromium is open source.

garren 7y ago
Open source or not, chromium is still fundamentally chrome and backed by Google, is it not? It can be used vanilla or built on top of (e.g., chromium and brave), but where Google goes so goes chromium. This is as much a privacy concern as it is a browser mono-culture concern, which has been a popular topic lately. Further, just because something is open-source doesn't automatically free it of corporate encumbrance - something Google knows quite well [0][1]. [0] https://boingboing.net/2019/05/29/hoarding-software-freedom.html https://boingboing.net/2019/05/29/hoarding-software-freedom.... [1]https://boingboing.net/2019/04/03/i-hate-being-right-2.html https://boingboing.net/2019/04/03/i-hate-being-right-2.html
- d1zzy 7y ago
  The issue at hand is that Chrome may or may not perform surveillance or support it. If that is the concern, with Chromium you get to see everything it does and you know the code you're running, like any other open source project. So I disagree that using Chromium is a privacy concern similar to using Chrome. Browser monoculture has advantages and disadvantages and would be the topic of a separate discussion. I never claimed that Chromium is free of "corporate encumbrance" nor do I think that's a problem. I don't think there's any realistic risk that if Google stops developing on Chromium we would be losing that browser, there's too many people outside of Google with invested interest in keeping Chromium going so a popular separately maintained fork seems likely. And even in the extremely unlikely case that Chromium disappears overnight and nobody wants to touch that code base ever again, there are other browsers out there.