24 ms·

Brave Improves Its Ad-Blocker Performance with New Engine in Rust

669 points by teovoinea 7y ago

azhenley 7y ago
Does it automatically block ads that try to access audio? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20288768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20288768
- gravypod 7y ago
  It uses block lists so it will block the javascript that contains that payload.
- DoctorOW 7y ago
  Brave actually does. It broke my various VOIP sites at first because you have to manually allow audio access
RyanAF7 7y ago
Been using Brave for a while now... maybe 2 years? Have a lot of unused BAT since few sites recognize the payments yet. Once they do, it'll be pretty amazing.
- Scott_Sanderson 7y ago
  The nightly build has tipping buttons for twitter and reddit. Hoping this will finally execute the micropayment use case for crypto. The pop up ads have been activated and I have been receiving the token for clicking, about $8 month worth of BAT. I am hoarding the tokens so that USD value might go up if the token moons together with bitcoin.
muckrakerz 7y ago
Brave is doing some of the best anti-Corporatist work in the community right now.
- dymk 7y ago
  They replace other ad network ads with their own ~ads~ crypto currency. They monetize the content of others and don't tell them. If you have a youtube channel, they will swap out ads and collect the ad revenue without telling the channel that they're doing so. I'm not particularly impressed with their business. In fact I'm pretty disgusted with it.
  - saltedshiv 7y ago
    Are you saying that I should be required to execute all code on a web page? That's the eventual point this train of thought will lead you to.
    - woodruffw 7y ago
      This seems like an unreasonable interpretation; it’s much more likely that ‘dymk wants to execute the bare minimum amount of arbitrary code on a web page.
  - brandnewlow 7y ago
    Citation please.
    - dymk 7y ago
      https://www.altcoinbuzz.io/crypto-news/spotlight/famous-youtuber-tom-scott-frustrated-with-brave/ https://www.altcoinbuzz.io/crypto-news/spotlight/famous-yout... Tom Scott was not happy with Brave. They were collecting ad revenue for Youtubers who had never opted into their platform. He had to go make a stink to their CEO, and finally after lots of pushing back, the CEO ceded that maybe this is not the best thing to do! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
      - justsee 7y ago
        Actually I followed that whole episode as it unfolded and your comments across this thread are all sorts of wrong. Tom Scott ended up being happy with Brave resolving an early product misstep. You should really be across an issue - and its resolution - before deciding to use it to cast shade on a software project. For more reasonable-minded developer folk Eich addressed this again recently on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1139384765700685824 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1139384765700685824
count 7y ago
nice.
- MultusSalus 7y ago
  Nice.
gregorygoc 7y ago
So I’m confused about the results. Is the engine faster because of rust or because of improvements to the algorithm?
- spooneybarger 7y ago
  Sounds like algo.
- bin0 7y ago
  Algorithm. The title is a bit misleading, and conveys that "it's faster because we re-wrote it in rust". If any thing, the move to rust might cause it to be a little slower (compared to the same thing written in c++ and considering how heavily optimized they said it was; not dinging rust, but you can't just port cpp optimizations to rust with syntax changes due to safety requirements etc).
  - outworlder 7y ago
    Conversely, the language semantics make some more aggressive optimizations possible by the compiler, without the programmer having to drop hints.
    - tylerhou 7y ago
      Why is this necessarily true? All Rust gives you is safety -- no data races and better memory safety. But since data races and use-after-free are undefined behavior in C++ anyway, C++ compilers can still aggressively optimize by assuming those two don't happen. It's true that some compilers disable optimizations on certain undefined behavior to prevent unintuitive behavior (https://blog.regehr.org/archives/140 https://blog.regehr.org/archives/140) but that's unlikely to happen for data races or memory safety.
      - damnyou 7y ago
        Rust also gives you strong guarantees around lack of aliasing. Brendan Eich remains a homophobe who abuses his financial power to oppress people he doesn't like.
ubercow13 7y ago
Can you use your own block list in Brave? Last time I checked on mobile I couldn't see how to. If not that seems like a major downside compared to other browsers.
- sexy_seedbox 7y ago
  I switched to Kiwi Browser recently from Brave (after their bottom tab bar drama). Kiwi allows extensions so you can install uBlock Origin and add your own lists.
- colordrops 7y ago
  You can install Chrome extensions, including uBlock origin and others.
caiocaiocaio 7y ago
Nothing less brave than a rich, white, heterosexual male using his money to attack a minority group.
robbrown451 7y ago
I'm impressed with Brave. I've started using it as my primary browser (after a couple false starts a year or so ago) and it has all the best of Chrome without the worst. There is controversy about how Brave does stuff, and I agree there is some sketchy stuff they are doing (replacing ads with their own). I'm glad they are giving us a choice, though, and exploring different options for sites being able to makes some money.
- WhiteOwlLion 7y ago
  I can't tell that I'm seeing "their" ads. The way I see ads is a notification type prompt where I have to click view and navigate to a sponsored page. Do you have a side by side where Brave replaces a site's ad with their own?
  - xur17 7y ago
    I don't think that's a thing they do, so I'm curious to hear from GP. And in terms of the notification prompts, that's something you have to enable (disabled by default) if you want to "earn" tokens.
- bubblethink 7y ago
  >There is controversy about how Brave does stuff, and I agree there is some sketchy stuff they are doing I would be more open to trying/using brave if someone respectable packaged it. As of writing, not a single distro packages it. It would lower my barrier to entry a lot if it were packaged by debian/fedora/f-droid. It doesn't imply anything serious, just that it can be built from source and that it passed the distro's basic diligence and guidelines. This seems like low-hanging fruit from brave's standpoint, and yet multiple issues on their github tracker about packaging downstream have remained open for a while.
  - jancsika 7y ago
    If they care about both a fast development cycle and rapid adoption then spending time getting an official package for Debian/etc. makes no sense. > It doesn't imply anything serious, just that it can be built from source and that it passed the distro's basic diligence and guidelines. For a modern web browser it probably doesn't achieve the latter. Both Chromium and Firefox are too complex for Debian's meager backporting resources. So they make an exception to their guidelines and ship the LTS release. I suppose the userbase just hopes that bad things don't if the browser LTS upgrade happens before the OS's LTS upgrade is ready.
wet_grass_sound 7y ago
It is more likely they hired a new rust developer that simply wrote better code.
ElijahLynn 7y ago
I think Brave has the ability to save the web, it has a great model of blocking ads by default, at a lower level than the extensions do so it is much faster. I think Opera had/has this too.
- catacombs 7y ago
  Sure, Brave can block ads, but isn't the browser exploring injecting its own advertisements?
  - ElijahLynn 7y ago
    No, it does not inject its own ads by default. I think there is a feature where you can do this to some benefit to yourself but that is not default. Brave removes as many ads as it can by default.
  - codehalo 7y ago
    Brave does not inject ads. This is misinformation.
    - bscphil 7y ago
      Ars Technica seems to disagree with you: > Brave will replace blocked ads with its own ads, taking a 15% cut of revenues. > In practice, Brave just sounds like a cash-grab. Brave isn't just a glorified adblocker: after removing ads from a webpage, Brave then inserts its own programmatic ads. It sounds like these ads will be filled by ad networks that work with Brave directly, and Brave will somehow police these ads to make sure they're less invasive/malevolent than the original ads that were stripped out. In exchange, Brave will take a 15 percent cut of the ad revenue. Instead of using tracking cookies that follow you around the Internet, Brave will use your local browsing history to target ads. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/mozilla-co-founder-unveils-brave-a-web-browser-that-blocks-ads-by-default/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/mozil... From my point of view it's essentially a scam on multiple levels: 1. It doesn't significantly change the Web - users will still look at ads. 2. Without providing anything of value (see 1), Brave gets a cut of publisher's ad revenue. 3. As incentive not to sue them into oblivion, Brave offers publishers a cut of the stolen revenue. 4. The whole thing is built on top of a sketchy cryptocoin system where a significant stake is owned by the developers.
shereadsthenews 7y ago
Alternate title: Until recently Brave was orders of magnitude slower than other blockers.
- xur17 7y ago
  Citation?
- woah 7y ago
  I've been using brave for a few months and I never noticed any difference in its ad blocking performance vs Chrome with AdBlock. I actually perceived it as faster, since most AdBlocking plugins on chrome actually let some ads through (ads that pay the plugin authors i guess). In what situation would this "orders of magnitude slower" actually manifest itself as a perceptable delay?
kodablah 7y ago
> was already implemented in heavily optimized C++ handling requests with sub-millisecond overhead, we found that we can further optimise it for a 69x average improvement Seems like an unnecessary optimization, though I'm sure it was fun. I wrote one a little while back in C++ also[0]. It's not documented the best, but uses a kind of custom tree to match. 0 - https://github.com/cretz/doogie/blob/master/src/blocker_rules.cc https://github.com/cretz/doogie/blob/master/src/blocker_rule...
- tolien 7y ago
  They're presumably gaining the other non-performance advantages of Rust over C++ (i.e. the borrow checker etc.) though, so safer and faster is a win. As you say though, they seem to focus on performance but that might just be the audience they see themselves talking to.
  - lemagedurage 7y ago
    I think "Chrome but faster" would convince a mainstream audience pretty well, even though they might not be aware that they're not going to notice the milliseconds.
    - vorticalbox 7y ago
      if you're moving from Firefox to brave you do notice the speed increase. FF on my work laptop (i5, 16GB of ram) and my s8 is significantly slower that brave.
      - potlato 7y ago
        It's been a gift to me, since I really just can't help but install extension after extension and FF is just not good at that in my experience (plus the selection is narrower but I don't put that on FF). Another thing is that Brave has the Chrome url search which I've come to realize is actually pretty central to me, I just can't stand the 'prepending a letter' type search. Overall it's the closest I've felt to chrome with the stated goal of addressing the the primary reason I feel uncomfortable with chrome, so I'm happy for now.
microcolonel 7y ago
Anyone familiar with configuring the Brave ad blocker? I find that by default it blocks fewer ads than uBlock origin. I'm not really sure what special sauce is involved in that.
- dpacmittal 7y ago
  You can just install ublock origin extension on brave and get best of both worlds.
  - _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
    Or AdNauseam ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19278936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19278936 )
jevans22 7y ago
As an advertiser, you hate to see things like this :)
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Why? Most people using Brave would never have clicked your ads anyway.
  - ec109685 7y ago
    Do you have a citation for this? Why would brave users be less likely to click on ads than a normal user if they weren’t using a browser that blocked ads?
Nyashka 7y ago
What's the point? Who would use a browser without tree tabs support?
fouc 7y ago
The discussion in this thread makes me wonder if Brave is a good browser to recommend to friends & family. The widespread usage of Chrome was probably largely in part due to folks like us recommending it to friends & family.
- kn0where 7y ago
  I think that was a large factor, but I think constantly showing ads for Chrome to anyone who views google.com in a different browser and telling them their browser is bad was a bigger factor.
  - cbdumas 7y ago
    I mean also the fact that the browser most people used at that time was bad may have been a factor. Chrome was a noticeable step up from IE.
    - jefftk 7y ago
      For me, Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was a noticeable step up from IE, and Chrome was a noticeable step up from Firefox. Chrome did especially well relative to Firefox when I had a lot of tabs, and for JS-heavy sites. I bounced back and forth several times: * I tried it for a month in January 2010, and went back to Firefox because Chrome was slower and less stable: https://www.jefftk.com/p/google-chrome https://www.jefftk.com/p/google-chrome * I tried it for ~6m in 2011, and switched back to Firefox because I missed side tabs: https://www.jefftk.com/p/side-tabs https://www.jefftk.com/p/side-tabs * In early 2012 I switched back to Chrome, despite the lack of side tabs (which I still miss dearly) because it was enough more performant. (Disclosure: I work for Google)
      - tomaskafka 7y ago
        Try switching once more, and turn on Webrender this time - it's still beta, but I had no issues and it made my FF Chrome-fast.
firecall 7y ago
Ah yes, Brave, the browser founded by the homophobic Brendan Eich. Lets continue to validate this odious individual. https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/04/brendan-eich-homophobic-past-should-we-forgive-him.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/04/brendan-eich-homoph... Why so many links to Brave on HN, is it astroturfing?
- oh_sigh 7y ago
  Sounds good, will do. I'm gay and I think you're over-reacting. Just my opinion - not trying to pretend like I represent all male male lovers.
- adamnemecek 7y ago
  You are using semiconductors designed by a eugenist.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    The eugenicist is not profiting from firecall's semiconductor usage.
- davesmith1983 7y ago
  Brendan Eich is a Catholic that is why he opposed same sex marriage. That doesn't make him a homophobe, that makes him someone that opposes same sex marriage because of his religious beliefs. People seem to constantly conflate opposition to Same Sex marriage with Homophobia. Sure I suspect that many homophobes are opposed to same sex marriage, but many libertarians are opposed to it because they don't believe Government should have anything to do with marriage that doesn't make them homophobes.
  - caiocaiocaio 7y ago
    I didn't call him a homophobe. I called him a coward. I was raised Catholic. I went to Catholic schools for twelve years. One thing I noticed is that they only seem to be against homosexuality when it's not a priest raping a child. Using a world-wide institution to protect people who harm children is another act of cowardice.
SopaDeMacaco 7y ago
Stop shilling this garbage, holy shit kys
mlinksva 7y ago
Will this be the first use of Rust in a non-Firefox production release browser? If not, what was the first? https://github.com/brave/brave-core/search?q=rust https://github.com/brave/brave-core/search?q=rust https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust-ffi https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust-ffi https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
ShirsenduK 7y ago
Slightly off topic: Does anyone else have the problem of constantly being logged out of your Google accounts on Brave. I keep getting logged out even without closing the browser. I have tweeted to them but haven't been able to get a response. I am so annoyed with the experience that I stopped recommending it and am planning to switch back to Chrome. Edit: I have multiple Google accounts signed into. And also, it does not block all ads in GMail which uBlock on Chrome is able to.
- jchw 7y ago
  The way they’re handling cookies may be just be strict enough that it can break security measures on some sites. Unfortunately, lots of websites have come to rely on things that maybe should’ve never been features (like third party cookies, for example.) Just out of curiosity, have you tried Firefox? I know it’s not perfect, but with minimal tweaking I think it’s very competitive.
  - ShirsenduK 7y ago
    Yes, Firefox is good for browsing but as a developer who has to work on the frontend, the ecosystem isn't there in Firefox. Many of the framework debugging tools for React, Redux, etc. don't work well in Firefox.
    - jchw 7y ago
      I will agree the devtools are not always as polished, but actually React and Redux debugging tools have worked fine for me. I have these installed: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/react-devtools/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/react-devtool... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reduxdevtools/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reduxdevtools... ...And I don't really recall many issues. Ever since WebExtensions, there's not really a good reason for the devtools to be much worse on Firefox. If you have used these extensions and have issues, I'd love to hear them. I've done React/Redux dev on both and I don't notice things working significantly better in Chrome. (Admittedly, I haven't done any in a few months.) The only real thing that gets me now is the lack of being able to inspect WebSocket frames. :(
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mindfulhack 7y ago
It's sad how, although I personally prefer to support Firefox by using it, I have still stuck with Google's Chrome due to a speed/sleekness factor which I can't quite put my finger on, that Firefox has never been able to overcome in my mind since fully switching over to Chrome several years ago. It's little touches like how you can't re-order extension buttons with a basic mouse drag - no, you have to go into 'Customize...', and that's so clunky and 2004. They have some more work to do to really make it competitive with the mighty Chrome. So after all that time, Brave is the first browser registering my interest due to these regular news stories. I still use Google services, but I don't like their current dominant position in shaping how the web works. That's too much power.
- rsj_hn 7y ago
  Recently I've had terrible performance issues with chrome. Freezes, crashes, and really long delays, as well as significant memory usage. I switched to Brave, but it was worse. Safari, by contrast, has been amazingly fast and responsive.
  - ahalam 7y ago
    If only my corp allowed me to upgrade the macOS on my laptop, I would be using the latest Safari too instead of messing with Chrome / Brave.
    - nindalf 7y ago
      I hear the opposite sentiment at my workplace. "If only they didn't force us to update OS X ASAP"
  - rjf72 7y ago
    I've had quite the opposite experience there. I eventually settled on Brave because of my browsing habits. In particular I tend to have several windows of a browser open with dozens of tabs a piece and tend to rarely reboot my machine. Capping all this off is that I enjoy playing chess, which relies on millisecond responsivity. This [1] is a screen cap of the current performance usage of Brave. It's completely negligible, and hasn't been restarted for days. The higher memory processes are exclusively from pages I am currently using with extensive content loaded on them. No clue about Safari but Firefox dies under these conditions, and I'm not interested in Chrome given not only Google but their 'vision' for the future of that browser including native anti-ad blocking. Opera was okay, but I enjoy the privacy features of Brave. Native ad-block, tracker blocking, etc that can all be customized per site in literally two clicks. Lion->Third Party Trackers for instance would allow me to enable third party trackers exclusively on Hacker News if, for some reason, I wanted to. Pretty cool stuff. [1] - https://i.postimg.cc/Xq9fjFsc/Capture.png https://i.postimg.cc/Xq9fjFsc/Capture.png
elznebelyk 7y ago
I am loving the use of Brave browser. I came and went with it a few times but am not happy to be done with Chrome and away from Google a little more.
jerrygoyal 7y ago
kiwi browser is worth a shot and made me switch from brave.
gingabriska 7y ago
Will his be on android too?
glangdale 7y ago
It's interesting to see block list creators more or less reinventing all the tricks that network-security regex implementation people invented 10-20 years ago. One wonders whether they might do better picking up an off-the-shelf regex implementation (e.g. our own Hyperscan, or for those who must must must have something in Rust, the engine from ripgrep, which I believe is just called "regex" :-) ).
- pythux 7y ago
  As far as I know the « regex » crate is used in some places. But interpreting block rules has a lot to do with specific options and behaviors which are pretty tailored to the task and it would not be easy to use off the shelf regex implementations for this. Although I myself looked at Hyperscan in the past for the purpose of blocking ads (the performance looks amazing!).
- pgl 7y ago
  Hey, some of those block list creators are also network-security people from 10-20 years ago. :)
- hokkos 7y ago
  Here the specificity is it tries to match against multiple regex, in rust there is RegexSet from the regex engine, it performs a single pass, but I'm not sure it optimize a lot graph for matching. It seems HyperScan can do a lot of optimization by extracting commonalities between regexes. https://docs.rs/regex/1.1.7/regex/struct.RegexSet.html https://docs.rs/regex/1.1.7/regex/struct.RegexSet.html http://intel.github.io/hyperscan/dev-reference/intro.html#compilation http://intel.github.io/hyperscan/dev-reference/intro.html#co...
wtdata 7y ago
Well, when are they going to remove the ad placeholders on pages? It's great we don't have to see ads, but they still take valuable screen space this way. With uBlock origin, I don't have to see te placeholders.
elcomet 7y ago
Brave mobile started letting ads go through a few months ago for me. I switched to Firefox mobile, which is not as fast / usable but at least supports ublock.
paulcarroty 7y ago
Brave isn't a choice for me 'cause Google can easily kill all Chrome clones in one funny day. Also Brave monetization looks very tricky.
- earenndil 7y ago
  Second point I agree on, first point--how? Chromium is opensource. What can google do?
  - justinrlle 7y ago
    People need to stop with this argument. Chromium might be open source, but it's still Google who decides what get merged. And yes, people can fork, do their own patches, fixes, but if it deviates too much from Google, you'll end up with a new browser to maintain on your end without a team the size of Google. If all theses teams choose to not implement their own browser, it's for a reason: a web browser is a complex piece of software. And the best example of this is the Edge team who forfeited implementing their own and just went with Chromium.
    - fluffything 7y ago
      I think Edge is good for Chromium. That puts Microsoft as a stakeholder there too, which takes power away from Google. If Apple were to move to a chromium-backed Safari, that would mean that three major players would be stakeholders in Chromium having a sane future. This means that if you send a meaningful patch, Google doesn't like it, but Microsoft and Apple do, it might get merged.
      - throwaway2048 7y ago
        Google owns and controls the chromium project, if they don't like a patch, its not getting merged.
      - dzhiurgis 7y ago
        I kinda agree that we don't need myriad of browsers. OS and CPU duopoly seems to be kinda ok. But for something that's _supposed to_ be universal it makes no sense to encourage fragmentation... > chromium-backed Safari Double whammy. Chromium runs on fork of WebKit which is Safari's engine.
viach 7y ago
I'm wondering, how Brave is going to fight fraud? The users are anonymous and not tracked, isn't this is why Brave ads are still delayed and TBH I see no practical solution to that?
Amazonerh 7y ago
I use kiwi browser which supports any chrome desktop extensions such as ublock origin or adguard. (it also has its built in ad blocker)
aneutron 7y ago
How does it stack up against uBlock Origin on Chrome ? ABP is a notoriously heavy unoptimized piece of software compared to uBlock. I would be very interested in this comparison.
sajithdilshan 7y ago
I've switched from chrome to Brave (with duckduckgo as default search engine) after seeing this https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity and really satisfied with the result. Unfortunately Firefox is not a good match. I've tried the latest versions of Firefox and the developer edition, before using Brave and it still uses so much CPU in my macbook and the fan of the laptop sounds like an airplane is about to take off.
- bugmen0t 7y ago
  Maybe you want to opt out of Google activity tracking? When I go to that page it says "No Activity".
tomaskafka 7y ago
A simple guide to choosing your browser: Does it make money by showing you ads? Chrome: Yes Brave: Yes Firefox: No If yes, then they need to track your behavior in detail. I'm sure you don't deserve to be tracked.
- _pmf_ 7y ago
  As a user of Brave, I'm consciously making this decision, thank you very much. What's your idea as to how content creators should be supported?
  - amelius 7y ago
    The problem is that if you start paying content creators, then you're giving data to another party, i.e. your bank.
    - Galaxeblaffer 7y ago
      depends.. Brave has actually got it's own token that could be used to pay creators, not sure how the transactions are logged though but i'd imagine that you can privately pay without being tracked
      - amelius 7y ago
        Yes, but there's always a third party that can in theory collect all your data.
        Ajedi32 7y ago
        Who? I'm not really familiar with how Brave does it, but there are plenty of cryptocurrencies where that's definitely _not_ the case.
        amelius 7y ago
        It's still not clear whether untrackable cryptocurrencies will be allowed by regulators.
JoachimS 7y ago
They should have written it in Rust, oh wait...
techrich 7y ago
Coming to Dissenter browser soon :D
whereareyouwow 7y ago
Brave in Tor with YouTube seems to track you and show you recommended videos across sessions. Probably some browser fingerprinting. But always found that weird considering it portrays itself as privacy-focused.
- SahAssar 7y ago
  Brave doesn't block first party cookies by default IIRC, so that's not hard to imagine.
thiagoc 7y ago
Never used Brave, but switched to Opera recently and it's doing great in blocking ads.
andrethegiant 7y ago
Safari + DuckDuckGo + 1Blocker. Fast, private, no ads.
wila 7y ago
Figured to try Brave as it keeps popping up. Installed it and then noticed in my firewall that it is - trying to connect to a number of IPs owned by google, umm OK - sending a multicast SSDP UDP request on port 1900 to 239.255.255.250 So googled that and got this page: https://community.brave.com/t/why-is-brave-issuing-upnp-discovery-requests/46500 https://community.brave.com/t/why-is-brave-issuing-upnp-disc... Which basically tells you that the first thing Brave does is to try and detect what devices are in your local network. ... and that's where my Brave experiment ends. edit: Also note that uninstall is completely silent, no confirmation that it actually completed. The uninstaller also leaves behind the updater utility AND the Windows Task scheduler tasks that run the updater.
- redm 7y ago
  I think your comment is a bit misleading as they aren't doing anything nefarious as you suggest. My guess is this is a carryover from Chrome and not something Brave decided to build; if that's the case your not getting more secure by staying with Chrome. In evaluating Brave, you have to give it apples to apple comparison anyway. Brave vs. Chrome as its directly built on chromium. For compatibility, it shares the chrome app store too. I like to think of Brave as Chrome without most of Google but with all the benefits. Anecdotally, I switched a colleague to Brave about 3 months ago. He decided to switch back to Chrome. Chrome was so much slower than Brave and added battery drain that he came back. I assume it was all the additional requests cut out (Google) or blocked by Brave (Adblocker).
  - wila 7y ago
    I'm not claiming they are doing something nefarious. Trust is something you have to earn. I do not install Chrome as I do not trust google. They have too much of my data already. Brave claims at their main page: "Brave is open source and built by a team of privacy focused, performance oriented pioneers of the web." OK well they failed my 5 minute test. Not having removed the SSDP parts is one thing. Not uninstalling your updater after running uninstall is straight out sloppy.
    - 7y ago
jammygit 7y ago
Not many people talking about fingerprinting. Which browser does a better job of blocking it?
alectivism 7y ago
nice
known 7y ago
I think Firefox should tie-up with Wikipedia for donations

669 points by teovoinea 7y ago

Does it automatically block ads that try to access audio? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20288768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20288768

gravypod 7y ago
It uses block lists so it will block the javascript that contains that payload.
DoctorOW 7y ago
Brave actually does. It broke my various VOIP sites at first because you have to manually allow audio access

RyanAF7 7y ago

Been using Brave for a while now... maybe 2 years? Have a lot of unused BAT since few sites recognize the payments yet. Once they do, it'll be pretty amazing.

Scott_Sanderson 7y ago
The nightly build has tipping buttons for twitter and reddit. Hoping this will finally execute the micropayment use case for crypto. The pop up ads have been activated and I have been receiving the token for clicking, about $8 month worth of BAT. I am hoarding the tokens so that USD value might go up if the token moons together with bitcoin.

muckrakerz 7y ago

Brave is doing some of the best anti-Corporatist work in the community right now.

dymk 7y ago
They replace other ad network ads with their own ~ads~ crypto currency. They monetize the content of others and don't tell them. If you have a youtube channel, they will swap out ads and collect the ad revenue without telling the channel that they're doing so. I'm not particularly impressed with their business. In fact I'm pretty disgusted with it.
- saltedshiv 7y ago
  Are you saying that I should be required to execute all code on a web page? That's the eventual point this train of thought will lead you to.
  - woodruffw 7y ago
    This seems like an unreasonable interpretation; it’s much more likely that ‘dymk wants to execute the bare minimum amount of arbitrary code on a web page.
- brandnewlow 7y ago
  Citation please.
  - dymk 7y ago
    https://www.altcoinbuzz.io/crypto-news/spotlight/famous-youtuber-tom-scott-frustrated-with-brave/ https://www.altcoinbuzz.io/crypto-news/spotlight/famous-yout... Tom Scott was not happy with Brave. They were collecting ad revenue for Youtubers who had never opted into their platform. He had to go make a stink to their CEO, and finally after lots of pushing back, the CEO ceded that maybe this is not the best thing to do! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
    - justsee 7y ago
      Actually I followed that whole episode as it unfolded and your comments across this thread are all sorts of wrong. Tom Scott ended up being happy with Brave resolving an early product misstep. You should really be across an issue - and its resolution - before deciding to use it to cast shade on a software project. For more reasonable-minded developer folk Eich addressed this again recently on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1139384765700685824 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1139384765700685824

count 7y ago

nice.

MultusSalus 7y ago
Nice.

gregorygoc 7y ago

So I’m confused about the results. Is the engine faster because of rust or because of improvements to the algorithm?

spooneybarger 7y ago
Sounds like algo.
bin0 7y ago
Algorithm. The title is a bit misleading, and conveys that "it's faster because we re-wrote it in rust". If any thing, the move to rust might cause it to be a little slower (compared to the same thing written in c++ and considering how heavily optimized they said it was; not dinging rust, but you can't just port cpp optimizations to rust with syntax changes due to safety requirements etc).
- outworlder 7y ago
  Conversely, the language semantics make some more aggressive optimizations possible by the compiler, without the programmer having to drop hints.
  - tylerhou 7y ago
    Why is this necessarily true? All Rust gives you is safety -- no data races and better memory safety. But since data races and use-after-free are undefined behavior in C++ anyway, C++ compilers can still aggressively optimize by assuming those two don't happen. It's true that some compilers disable optimizations on certain undefined behavior to prevent unintuitive behavior (https://blog.regehr.org/archives/140 https://blog.regehr.org/archives/140) but that's unlikely to happen for data races or memory safety.
    - damnyou 7y ago
      Rust also gives you strong guarantees around lack of aliasing. Brendan Eich remains a homophobe who abuses his financial power to oppress people he doesn't like.

ubercow13 7y ago

Can you use your own block list in Brave? Last time I checked on mobile I couldn't see how to. If not that seems like a major downside compared to other browsers.

sexy_seedbox 7y ago
I switched to Kiwi Browser recently from Brave (after their bottom tab bar drama). Kiwi allows extensions so you can install uBlock Origin and add your own lists.
colordrops 7y ago
You can install Chrome extensions, including uBlock origin and others.

caiocaiocaio 7y ago

Nothing less brave than a rich, white, heterosexual male using his money to attack a minority group.

robbrown451 7y ago

I'm impressed with Brave. I've started using it as my primary browser (after a couple false starts a year or so ago) and it has all the best of Chrome without the worst. There is controversy about how Brave does stuff, and I agree there is some sketchy stuff they are doing (replacing ads with their own). I'm glad they are giving us a choice, though, and exploring different options for sites being able to makes some money.

WhiteOwlLion 7y ago
I can't tell that I'm seeing "their" ads. The way I see ads is a notification type prompt where I have to click view and navigate to a sponsored page. Do you have a side by side where Brave replaces a site's ad with their own?
- xur17 7y ago
  I don't think that's a thing they do, so I'm curious to hear from GP. And in terms of the notification prompts, that's something you have to enable (disabled by default) if you want to "earn" tokens.
bubblethink 7y ago
>There is controversy about how Brave does stuff, and I agree there is some sketchy stuff they are doing I would be more open to trying/using brave if someone respectable packaged it. As of writing, not a single distro packages it. It would lower my barrier to entry a lot if it were packaged by debian/fedora/f-droid. It doesn't imply anything serious, just that it can be built from source and that it passed the distro's basic diligence and guidelines. This seems like low-hanging fruit from brave's standpoint, and yet multiple issues on their github tracker about packaging downstream have remained open for a while.
- jancsika 7y ago
  If they care about both a fast development cycle and rapid adoption then spending time getting an official package for Debian/etc. makes no sense. > It doesn't imply anything serious, just that it can be built from source and that it passed the distro's basic diligence and guidelines. For a modern web browser it probably doesn't achieve the latter. Both Chromium and Firefox are too complex for Debian's meager backporting resources. So they make an exception to their guidelines and ship the LTS release. I suppose the userbase just hopes that bad things don't if the browser LTS upgrade happens before the OS's LTS upgrade is ready.

wet_grass_sound 7y ago

It is more likely they hired a new rust developer that simply wrote better code.

ElijahLynn 7y ago

I think Brave has the ability to save the web, it has a great model of blocking ads by default, at a lower level than the extensions do so it is much faster. I think Opera had/has this too.

catacombs 7y ago
Sure, Brave can block ads, but isn't the browser exploring injecting its own advertisements?
- ElijahLynn 7y ago
  No, it does not inject its own ads by default. I think there is a feature where you can do this to some benefit to yourself but that is not default. Brave removes as many ads as it can by default.
- codehalo 7y ago
  Brave does not inject ads. This is misinformation.
  - bscphil 7y ago
    Ars Technica seems to disagree with you: > Brave will replace blocked ads with its own ads, taking a 15% cut of revenues. > In practice, Brave just sounds like a cash-grab. Brave isn't just a glorified adblocker: after removing ads from a webpage, Brave then inserts its own programmatic ads. It sounds like these ads will be filled by ad networks that work with Brave directly, and Brave will somehow police these ads to make sure they're less invasive/malevolent than the original ads that were stripped out. In exchange, Brave will take a 15 percent cut of the ad revenue. Instead of using tracking cookies that follow you around the Internet, Brave will use your local browsing history to target ads. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/mozilla-co-founder-unveils-brave-a-web-browser-that-blocks-ads-by-default/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/mozil... From my point of view it's essentially a scam on multiple levels: 1. It doesn't significantly change the Web - users will still look at ads. 2. Without providing anything of value (see 1), Brave gets a cut of publisher's ad revenue. 3. As incentive not to sue them into oblivion, Brave offers publishers a cut of the stolen revenue. 4. The whole thing is built on top of a sketchy cryptocoin system where a significant stake is owned by the developers.

shereadsthenews 7y ago

Alternate title: Until recently Brave was orders of magnitude slower than other blockers.

xur17 7y ago
Citation?
woah 7y ago
I've been using brave for a few months and I never noticed any difference in its ad blocking performance vs Chrome with AdBlock. I actually perceived it as faster, since most AdBlocking plugins on chrome actually let some ads through (ads that pay the plugin authors i guess). In what situation would this "orders of magnitude slower" actually manifest itself as a perceptable delay?

kodablah 7y ago

> was already implemented in heavily optimized C++ handling requests with sub-millisecond overhead, we found that we can further optimise it for a 69x average improvement Seems like an unnecessary optimization, though I'm sure it was fun. I wrote one a little while back in C++ also[0]. It's not documented the best, but uses a kind of custom tree to match. 0 - https://github.com/cretz/doogie/blob/master/src/blocker_rules.cc https://github.com/cretz/doogie/blob/master/src/blocker_rule...

tolien 7y ago
They're presumably gaining the other non-performance advantages of Rust over C++ (i.e. the borrow checker etc.) though, so safer and faster is a win. As you say though, they seem to focus on performance but that might just be the audience they see themselves talking to.
- lemagedurage 7y ago
  I think "Chrome but faster" would convince a mainstream audience pretty well, even though they might not be aware that they're not going to notice the milliseconds.
  - vorticalbox 7y ago
    if you're moving from Firefox to brave you do notice the speed increase. FF on my work laptop (i5, 16GB of ram) and my s8 is significantly slower that brave.
    - potlato 7y ago
      It's been a gift to me, since I really just can't help but install extension after extension and FF is just not good at that in my experience (plus the selection is narrower but I don't put that on FF). Another thing is that Brave has the Chrome url search which I've come to realize is actually pretty central to me, I just can't stand the 'prepending a letter' type search. Overall it's the closest I've felt to chrome with the stated goal of addressing the the primary reason I feel uncomfortable with chrome, so I'm happy for now.

microcolonel 7y ago

Anyone familiar with configuring the Brave ad blocker? I find that by default it blocks fewer ads than uBlock origin. I'm not really sure what special sauce is involved in that.

dpacmittal 7y ago
You can just install ublock origin extension on brave and get best of both worlds.
- _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
  Or AdNauseam ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19278936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19278936 )

jevans22 7y ago

As an advertiser, you hate to see things like this :)

cameronbrown 7y ago
Why? Most people using Brave would never have clicked your ads anyway.
- ec109685 7y ago
  Do you have a citation for this? Why would brave users be less likely to click on ads than a normal user if they weren’t using a browser that blocked ads?

Nyashka 7y ago

What's the point? Who would use a browser without tree tabs support?

fouc 7y ago

The discussion in this thread makes me wonder if Brave is a good browser to recommend to friends & family. The widespread usage of Chrome was probably largely in part due to folks like us recommending it to friends & family.

kn0where 7y ago
I think that was a large factor, but I think constantly showing ads for Chrome to anyone who views google.com in a different browser and telling them their browser is bad was a bigger factor.
- cbdumas 7y ago
  I mean also the fact that the browser most people used at that time was bad may have been a factor. Chrome was a noticeable step up from IE.
  - jefftk 7y ago
    For me, Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was a noticeable step up from IE, and Chrome was a noticeable step up from Firefox. Chrome did especially well relative to Firefox when I had a lot of tabs, and for JS-heavy sites. I bounced back and forth several times: * I tried it for a month in January 2010, and went back to Firefox because Chrome was slower and less stable: https://www.jefftk.com/p/google-chrome https://www.jefftk.com/p/google-chrome * I tried it for ~6m in 2011, and switched back to Firefox because I missed side tabs: https://www.jefftk.com/p/side-tabs https://www.jefftk.com/p/side-tabs * In early 2012 I switched back to Chrome, despite the lack of side tabs (which I still miss dearly) because it was enough more performant. (Disclosure: I work for Google)
    - tomaskafka 7y ago
      Try switching once more, and turn on Webrender this time - it's still beta, but I had no issues and it made my FF Chrome-fast.

firecall 7y ago

Ah yes, Brave, the browser founded by the homophobic Brendan Eich. Lets continue to validate this odious individual. https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/04/brendan-eich-homophobic-past-should-we-forgive-him.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/04/brendan-eich-homoph... Why so many links to Brave on HN, is it astroturfing?

oh_sigh 7y ago
Sounds good, will do. I'm gay and I think you're over-reacting. Just my opinion - not trying to pretend like I represent all male male lovers.
adamnemecek 7y ago
You are using semiconductors designed by a eugenist.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  The eugenicist is not profiting from firecall's semiconductor usage.
davesmith1983 7y ago
Brendan Eich is a Catholic that is why he opposed same sex marriage. That doesn't make him a homophobe, that makes him someone that opposes same sex marriage because of his religious beliefs. People seem to constantly conflate opposition to Same Sex marriage with Homophobia. Sure I suspect that many homophobes are opposed to same sex marriage, but many libertarians are opposed to it because they don't believe Government should have anything to do with marriage that doesn't make them homophobes.
- caiocaiocaio 7y ago
  I didn't call him a homophobe. I called him a coward. I was raised Catholic. I went to Catholic schools for twelve years. One thing I noticed is that they only seem to be against homosexuality when it's not a priest raping a child. Using a world-wide institution to protect people who harm children is another act of cowardice.

SopaDeMacaco 7y ago

Stop shilling this garbage, holy shit kys

mlinksva 7y ago

Will this be the first use of Rust in a non-Firefox production release browser? If not, what was the first? https://github.com/brave/brave-core/search?q=rust https://github.com/brave/brave-core/search?q=rust https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust-ffi https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust-ffi https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

ShirsenduK 7y ago

Slightly off topic: Does anyone else have the problem of constantly being logged out of your Google accounts on Brave. I keep getting logged out even without closing the browser. I have tweeted to them but haven't been able to get a response. I am so annoyed with the experience that I stopped recommending it and am planning to switch back to Chrome. Edit: I have multiple Google accounts signed into. And also, it does not block all ads in GMail which uBlock on Chrome is able to.

jchw 7y ago
The way they’re handling cookies may be just be strict enough that it can break security measures on some sites. Unfortunately, lots of websites have come to rely on things that maybe should’ve never been features (like third party cookies, for example.) Just out of curiosity, have you tried Firefox? I know it’s not perfect, but with minimal tweaking I think it’s very competitive.
- ShirsenduK 7y ago
  Yes, Firefox is good for browsing but as a developer who has to work on the frontend, the ecosystem isn't there in Firefox. Many of the framework debugging tools for React, Redux, etc. don't work well in Firefox.
  - jchw 7y ago
    I will agree the devtools are not always as polished, but actually React and Redux debugging tools have worked fine for me. I have these installed: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/react-devtools/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/react-devtool... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reduxdevtools/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reduxdevtools... ...And I don't really recall many issues. Ever since WebExtensions, there's not really a good reason for the devtools to be much worse on Firefox. If you have used these extensions and have issues, I'd love to hear them. I've done React/Redux dev on both and I don't notice things working significantly better in Chrome. (Admittedly, I haven't done any in a few months.) The only real thing that gets me now is the lack of being able to inspect WebSocket frames. :(

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mindfulhack 7y ago

It's sad how, although I personally prefer to support Firefox by using it, I have still stuck with Google's Chrome due to a speed/sleekness factor which I can't quite put my finger on, that Firefox has never been able to overcome in my mind since fully switching over to Chrome several years ago. It's little touches like how you can't re-order extension buttons with a basic mouse drag - no, you have to go into 'Customize...', and that's so clunky and 2004. They have some more work to do to really make it competitive with the mighty Chrome. So after all that time, Brave is the first browser registering my interest due to these regular news stories. I still use Google services, but I don't like their current dominant position in shaping how the web works. That's too much power.

rsj_hn 7y ago
Recently I've had terrible performance issues with chrome. Freezes, crashes, and really long delays, as well as significant memory usage. I switched to Brave, but it was worse. Safari, by contrast, has been amazingly fast and responsive.
- ahalam 7y ago
  If only my corp allowed me to upgrade the macOS on my laptop, I would be using the latest Safari too instead of messing with Chrome / Brave.
  - nindalf 7y ago
    I hear the opposite sentiment at my workplace. "If only they didn't force us to update OS X ASAP"
- rjf72 7y ago
  I've had quite the opposite experience there. I eventually settled on Brave because of my browsing habits. In particular I tend to have several windows of a browser open with dozens of tabs a piece and tend to rarely reboot my machine. Capping all this off is that I enjoy playing chess, which relies on millisecond responsivity. This [1] is a screen cap of the current performance usage of Brave. It's completely negligible, and hasn't been restarted for days. The higher memory processes are exclusively from pages I am currently using with extensive content loaded on them. No clue about Safari but Firefox dies under these conditions, and I'm not interested in Chrome given not only Google but their 'vision' for the future of that browser including native anti-ad blocking. Opera was okay, but I enjoy the privacy features of Brave. Native ad-block, tracker blocking, etc that can all be customized per site in literally two clicks. Lion->Third Party Trackers for instance would allow me to enable third party trackers exclusively on Hacker News if, for some reason, I wanted to. Pretty cool stuff. [1] - https://i.postimg.cc/Xq9fjFsc/Capture.png https://i.postimg.cc/Xq9fjFsc/Capture.png

elznebelyk 7y ago

I am loving the use of Brave browser. I came and went with it a few times but am not happy to be done with Chrome and away from Google a little more.

jerrygoyal 7y ago

kiwi browser is worth a shot and made me switch from brave.

gingabriska 7y ago

Will his be on android too?

glangdale 7y ago

It's interesting to see block list creators more or less reinventing all the tricks that network-security regex implementation people invented 10-20 years ago. One wonders whether they might do better picking up an off-the-shelf regex implementation (e.g. our own Hyperscan, or for those who must must must have something in Rust, the engine from ripgrep, which I believe is just called "regex" :-) ).

pythux 7y ago
As far as I know the « regex » crate is used in some places. But interpreting block rules has a lot to do with specific options and behaviors which are pretty tailored to the task and it would not be easy to use off the shelf regex implementations for this. Although I myself looked at Hyperscan in the past for the purpose of blocking ads (the performance looks amazing!).
pgl 7y ago
Hey, some of those block list creators are also network-security people from 10-20 years ago. :)
hokkos 7y ago
Here the specificity is it tries to match against multiple regex, in rust there is RegexSet from the regex engine, it performs a single pass, but I'm not sure it optimize a lot graph for matching. It seems HyperScan can do a lot of optimization by extracting commonalities between regexes. https://docs.rs/regex/1.1.7/regex/struct.RegexSet.html https://docs.rs/regex/1.1.7/regex/struct.RegexSet.html http://intel.github.io/hyperscan/dev-reference/intro.html#compilation http://intel.github.io/hyperscan/dev-reference/intro.html#co...

wtdata 7y ago

Well, when are they going to remove the ad placeholders on pages? It's great we don't have to see ads, but they still take valuable screen space this way. With uBlock origin, I don't have to see te placeholders.

elcomet 7y ago

Brave mobile started letting ads go through a few months ago for me. I switched to Firefox mobile, which is not as fast / usable but at least supports ublock.

paulcarroty 7y ago

Brave isn't a choice for me 'cause Google can easily kill all Chrome clones in one funny day. Also Brave monetization looks very tricky.

earenndil 7y ago
Second point I agree on, first point--how? Chromium is opensource. What can google do?
- justinrlle 7y ago
  People need to stop with this argument. Chromium might be open source, but it's still Google who decides what get merged. And yes, people can fork, do their own patches, fixes, but if it deviates too much from Google, you'll end up with a new browser to maintain on your end without a team the size of Google. If all theses teams choose to not implement their own browser, it's for a reason: a web browser is a complex piece of software. And the best example of this is the Edge team who forfeited implementing their own and just went with Chromium.
  - fluffything 7y ago
    I think Edge is good for Chromium. That puts Microsoft as a stakeholder there too, which takes power away from Google. If Apple were to move to a chromium-backed Safari, that would mean that three major players would be stakeholders in Chromium having a sane future. This means that if you send a meaningful patch, Google doesn't like it, but Microsoft and Apple do, it might get merged.
    - throwaway2048 7y ago
      Google owns and controls the chromium project, if they don't like a patch, its not getting merged.
    - dzhiurgis 7y ago
      I kinda agree that we don't need myriad of browsers. OS and CPU duopoly seems to be kinda ok. But for something that's _supposed to_ be universal it makes no sense to encourage fragmentation... > chromium-backed Safari Double whammy. Chromium runs on fork of WebKit which is Safari's engine.

viach 7y ago

I'm wondering, how Brave is going to fight fraud? The users are anonymous and not tracked, isn't this is why Brave ads are still delayed and TBH I see no practical solution to that?

Amazonerh 7y ago

I use kiwi browser which supports any chrome desktop extensions such as ublock origin or adguard. (it also has its built in ad blocker)

aneutron 7y ago

How does it stack up against uBlock Origin on Chrome ? ABP is a notoriously heavy unoptimized piece of software compared to uBlock. I would be very interested in this comparison.

sajithdilshan 7y ago

I've switched from chrome to Brave (with duckduckgo as default search engine) after seeing this https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity and really satisfied with the result. Unfortunately Firefox is not a good match. I've tried the latest versions of Firefox and the developer edition, before using Brave and it still uses so much CPU in my macbook and the fan of the laptop sounds like an airplane is about to take off.

bugmen0t 7y ago
Maybe you want to opt out of Google activity tracking? When I go to that page it says "No Activity".

tomaskafka 7y ago

A simple guide to choosing your browser: Does it make money by showing you ads? Chrome: Yes Brave: Yes Firefox: No If yes, then they need to track your behavior in detail. I'm sure you don't deserve to be tracked.

_pmf_ 7y ago
As a user of Brave, I'm consciously making this decision, thank you very much. What's your idea as to how content creators should be supported?
- amelius 7y ago
  The problem is that if you start paying content creators, then you're giving data to another party, i.e. your bank.
  - Galaxeblaffer 7y ago
    depends.. Brave has actually got it's own token that could be used to pay creators, not sure how the transactions are logged though but i'd imagine that you can privately pay without being tracked
    - amelius 7y ago
      Yes, but there's always a third party that can in theory collect all your data.
      - Ajedi32 7y ago
        Who? I'm not really familiar with how Brave does it, but there are plenty of cryptocurrencies where that's definitely _not_ the case.
        amelius 7y ago
        It's still not clear whether untrackable cryptocurrencies will be allowed by regulators.

JoachimS 7y ago

They should have written it in Rust, oh wait...

techrich 7y ago

Coming to Dissenter browser soon :D

whereareyouwow 7y ago

Brave in Tor with YouTube seems to track you and show you recommended videos across sessions. Probably some browser fingerprinting. But always found that weird considering it portrays itself as privacy-focused.

SahAssar 7y ago
Brave doesn't block first party cookies by default IIRC, so that's not hard to imagine.

thiagoc 7y ago

Never used Brave, but switched to Opera recently and it's doing great in blocking ads.

andrethegiant 7y ago

Safari + DuckDuckGo + 1Blocker. Fast, private, no ads.

wila 7y ago

Figured to try Brave as it keeps popping up. Installed it and then noticed in my firewall that it is - trying to connect to a number of IPs owned by google, umm OK - sending a multicast SSDP UDP request on port 1900 to 239.255.255.250 So googled that and got this page: https://community.brave.com/t/why-is-brave-issuing-upnp-discovery-requests/46500 https://community.brave.com/t/why-is-brave-issuing-upnp-disc... Which basically tells you that the first thing Brave does is to try and detect what devices are in your local network. ... and that's where my Brave experiment ends. edit: Also note that uninstall is completely silent, no confirmation that it actually completed. The uninstaller also leaves behind the updater utility AND the Windows Task scheduler tasks that run the updater.

redm 7y ago
I think your comment is a bit misleading as they aren't doing anything nefarious as you suggest. My guess is this is a carryover from Chrome and not something Brave decided to build; if that's the case your not getting more secure by staying with Chrome. In evaluating Brave, you have to give it apples to apple comparison anyway. Brave vs. Chrome as its directly built on chromium. For compatibility, it shares the chrome app store too. I like to think of Brave as Chrome without most of Google but with all the benefits. Anecdotally, I switched a colleague to Brave about 3 months ago. He decided to switch back to Chrome. Chrome was so much slower than Brave and added battery drain that he came back. I assume it was all the additional requests cut out (Google) or blocked by Brave (Adblocker).
- wila 7y ago
  I'm not claiming they are doing something nefarious. Trust is something you have to earn. I do not install Chrome as I do not trust google. They have too much of my data already. Brave claims at their main page: "Brave is open source and built by a team of privacy focused, performance oriented pioneers of the web." OK well they failed my 5 minute test. Not having removed the SSDP parts is one thing. Not uninstalling your updater after running uninstall is straight out sloppy.
  - 7y ago

jammygit 7y ago

Not many people talking about fingerprinting. Which browser does a better job of blocking it?

alectivism 7y ago

nice

known 7y ago

I think Firefox should tie-up with Wikipedia for donations