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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 t

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.
  - bubblethink 7y ago
    Firefox has an LTS release, but chromium doesn't. So distros just ship the update every month whenever chromium is tagged. In practice, it follows chrome's release cycle very closely. Since brave is based on chromium, I don't see why this model can't work for brave given that distos are able to build and ship chromium already. (Android is a more complicated story )
  - pkulak 7y ago
    Then make a Flatpak.
- alexnewman 7y ago
  Hi, in my sparetime I help some of the linux packaging for Brave. We are looking for people to help us do this very thing. We provide packaged for deb, rpm, and snap. I maintain the snaps for brave but have been disappointed with the performance. If you are willing to test an maintain distros we'd be more than happy to get you involved.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    What is required in terms of testing?
  - traek 7y ago
    Brave is a private, for-profit company that has raised $42 million in venture funding—out of curiosity why do you bother doing free work for them in your spare time?
    - ppseafield 7y ago
      Maybe the effort isn't for the company, but for the distros and their users. Is nvidia packaging its proprietary drivers for Ubuntu?
      - alexnewman 7y ago
        No it's for the project.
    - rjf72 7y ago
      This same argument is true of nearly all companies, including "not for profit." For instance the chair at Mozilla/FireFox pays himself $1.1 million a year, the treasurer $1 million. [1] And those numbers are probably higher now. That's from 2016, the most recent published data on their site. Since 2013 [2] their CEO has increased his yearly compensation by more than $300k, and the treasurer increased his pay by more than $400k a year. And now with Mozilla planning to release a pay-per-month browser (because their half a billion dollars in revenue just isn't enough!), we can expect to see that executive compensation skyrocket even further. What people like to imagine "not for profit" means is not what it means in practice. [1] - https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Foundation_Forms_990_Public_Disclosure.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Fo... [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101637
- _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
  Nix packages it: https://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html#brave https://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html#brave , which means you could use the Nix stand-alone package manager to install it on top of any distro. (I just tried this and am typing this from Brave, installed via the Nix stand-alone package manager running in Void Linux.)
  - bubblethink 7y ago
    It's fetching brave's binary. That's not what I meant by packaging. src = fetchurl { url = "https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/download/v${version}/brave-browser_${version}_amd64.deb"; https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/download/v${... sha256 = "1lbajxnxqkd422rckfjm65pwwzl66v7anq4jrzxi29d5x7abl3c1"; }; Also, bad look for nixos. I was curious about nixos too, but it'll have to be debian and fedora for now.
    - _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
      Fair point, though I don't know what would go into properly packaging Brave. They certainly don't package Brave in any fashion, but if you were curious about NixOS, you might look at Guix System.
magicalist 7y ago
> and it has all the best of Chrome without the worst I mean, what is the "worst" stuff it doesn't have? Account sign in? It seems like there are plenty of other Chromium embedders to get that without the sketchy stuff.
ousta 7y ago
literally a copy paste of a comment from few months ago....
boringuser1 7y ago
Edge is better.
justsee 7y ago
Switched from Firefox to Brave in the last year across devices and not looking back (though I do miss containers!). Blocking ads and trackers by default is pretty much essential in 2019. The myth about ad replacement doesn't seem to want to die though! There is no ad replacement, though the roadmap says at some time in the future publishers who opt-in will have the option to have their ad-slots filled by Brave's privacy-respecting approach. For now I think the only ad trials running are pop-up notifications if users opt-in, and that's only in a few markets at this stage. Not something I plan to opt-in to, but looking forward to the Github / Reddit / Twitter tipping and integrated crypto wallet. That's all rolling through in the next few months.
- smt88 7y ago
  I just use Firefox with uBlock Origin on all my devices. Better blocking than Brave and no concerns about future monetization.
  - justsee 7y ago
    That was my setup, and much prefer integrated blocking and the additional polish and features. The yubikey integration coming is particularly interesting: https://brave.com/ios-yubikey-support/ https://brave.com/ios-yubikey-support/. Future monetization: that was actually an incentive for me. Having been in the belly of the beast on ad-tech I'm cheering the new ad model Brave proposes for the industry. If you're not aware how messed up the industry currently is, keep an eye on Ad Fraud Historian on Twitter: https://twitter.com/acfou https://twitter.com/acfou. On the crypto front, proposing ideas like staking / slashing on their extension store for extension authors is also very interesting: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1143630584310202369 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1143630584310202369 The new browser wars are certainly spurring innovation again: good for everyone regardless of personal browser preferences.
  - Fat_Thor 7y ago
    After finding out Firefox monetized its new tab page with sponsored Pocket ads[1], I'm not too thrilled about it. Firefox collects plenty of telemetry data too and it's unclear whether or not they use it for their pockets ads. With past scandals from Firefox, I'm would not be surprised if they do. [1] https://getpocket.com/sponsor https://getpocket.com/sponsor
InafuSabi 7y ago
Can you give Brave your own dir of install in win64? Thats the only thing from stopping me to use it on my streaming #DAW since it has a small SSD, which I refuse to install non-critical software on. Over here brave just dumps itself on c: in win64
russdill 7y ago
As soon as an ad-blocker starts trying to monetize with ads, it's like the death knell.
- boomlinde 7y ago
  This is what AdBlock Plus did with the "Acceptable ads" program, which is their main source of revenue. Arguably with some reasonable criteria for what an "acceptable ad" is, but to me entirely unreasonable because the software doesn't by default do what it says on the tin. That's years ago, I believe, and there are still ad blockers that don't seem to accept compromise.
jjwhitaker 7y ago
I wonder how that might work in combo with PiHole or similar on my network. Like, if they are replacing ads are those ads then blocked anyway or slip streamed through?

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.
- bubblethink 7y ago
  Firefox has an LTS release, but chromium doesn't. So distros just ship the update every month whenever chromium is tagged. In practice, it follows chrome's release cycle very closely. Since brave is based on chromium, I don't see why this model can't work for brave given that distos are able to build and ship chromium already. (Android is a more complicated story )
- pkulak 7y ago
  Then make a Flatpak.
alexnewman 7y ago
Hi, in my sparetime I help some of the linux packaging for Brave. We are looking for people to help us do this very thing. We provide packaged for deb, rpm, and snap. I maintain the snaps for brave but have been disappointed with the performance. If you are willing to test an maintain distros we'd be more than happy to get you involved.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  What is required in terms of testing?
- traek 7y ago
  Brave is a private, for-profit company that has raised $42 million in venture funding—out of curiosity why do you bother doing free work for them in your spare time?
  - ppseafield 7y ago
    Maybe the effort isn't for the company, but for the distros and their users. Is nvidia packaging its proprietary drivers for Ubuntu?
    - alexnewman 7y ago
      No it's for the project.
  - rjf72 7y ago
    This same argument is true of nearly all companies, including "not for profit." For instance the chair at Mozilla/FireFox pays himself $1.1 million a year, the treasurer $1 million. [1] And those numbers are probably higher now. That's from 2016, the most recent published data on their site. Since 2013 [2] their CEO has increased his yearly compensation by more than $300k, and the treasurer increased his pay by more than $400k a year. And now with Mozilla planning to release a pay-per-month browser (because their half a billion dollars in revenue just isn't enough!), we can expect to see that executive compensation skyrocket even further. What people like to imagine "not for profit" means is not what it means in practice. [1] - https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Foundation_Forms_990_Public_Disclosure.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Fo... [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101637
_emacsomancer_ 7y ago
Nix packages it: https://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html#brave https://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html#brave , which means you could use the Nix stand-alone package manager to install it on top of any distro. (I just tried this and am typing this from Brave, installed via the Nix stand-alone package manager running in Void Linux.)
- bubblethink 7y ago
  It's fetching brave's binary. That's not what I meant by packaging. src = fetchurl { url = "https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/download/v${version}/brave-browser_${version}_amd64.deb"; https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/download/v${... sha256 = "1lbajxnxqkd422rckfjm65pwwzl66v7anq4jrzxi29d5x7abl3c1"; }; Also, bad look for nixos. I was curious about nixos too, but it'll have to be debian and fedora for now.
  - _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
    Fair point, though I don't know what would go into properly packaging Brave. They certainly don't package Brave in any fashion, but if you were curious about NixOS, you might look at Guix System.

magicalist 7y ago

> and it has all the best of Chrome without the worst I mean, what is the "worst" stuff it doesn't have? Account sign in? It seems like there are plenty of other Chromium embedders to get that without the sketchy stuff.

ousta 7y ago

literally a copy paste of a comment from few months ago....

boringuser1 7y ago

Edge is better.

justsee 7y ago

Switched from Firefox to Brave in the last year across devices and not looking back (though I do miss containers!). Blocking ads and trackers by default is pretty much essential in 2019. The myth about ad replacement doesn't seem to want to die though! There is no ad replacement, though the roadmap says at some time in the future publishers who opt-in will have the option to have their ad-slots filled by Brave's privacy-respecting approach. For now I think the only ad trials running are pop-up notifications if users opt-in, and that's only in a few markets at this stage. Not something I plan to opt-in to, but looking forward to the Github / Reddit / Twitter tipping and integrated crypto wallet. That's all rolling through in the next few months.

smt88 7y ago
I just use Firefox with uBlock Origin on all my devices. Better blocking than Brave and no concerns about future monetization.
- justsee 7y ago
  That was my setup, and much prefer integrated blocking and the additional polish and features. The yubikey integration coming is particularly interesting: https://brave.com/ios-yubikey-support/ https://brave.com/ios-yubikey-support/. Future monetization: that was actually an incentive for me. Having been in the belly of the beast on ad-tech I'm cheering the new ad model Brave proposes for the industry. If you're not aware how messed up the industry currently is, keep an eye on Ad Fraud Historian on Twitter: https://twitter.com/acfou https://twitter.com/acfou. On the crypto front, proposing ideas like staking / slashing on their extension store for extension authors is also very interesting: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1143630584310202369 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1143630584310202369 The new browser wars are certainly spurring innovation again: good for everyone regardless of personal browser preferences.
- Fat_Thor 7y ago
  After finding out Firefox monetized its new tab page with sponsored Pocket ads[1], I'm not too thrilled about it. Firefox collects plenty of telemetry data too and it's unclear whether or not they use it for their pockets ads. With past scandals from Firefox, I'm would not be surprised if they do. [1] https://getpocket.com/sponsor https://getpocket.com/sponsor

InafuSabi 7y ago

Can you give Brave your own dir of install in win64? Thats the only thing from stopping me to use it on my streaming #DAW since it has a small SSD, which I refuse to install non-critical software on. Over here brave just dumps itself on c: in win64

russdill 7y ago

As soon as an ad-blocker starts trying to monetize with ads, it's like the death knell.

boomlinde 7y ago
This is what AdBlock Plus did with the "Acceptable ads" program, which is their main source of revenue. Arguably with some reasonable criteria for what an "acceptable ad" is, but to me entirely unreasonable because the software doesn't by default do what it says on the tin. That's years ago, I believe, and there are still ad blockers that don't seem to accept compromise.

jjwhitaker 7y ago

I wonder how that might work in combo with PiHole or similar on my network. Like, if they are replacing ads are those ads then blocked anyway or slip streamed through?