28 ms·

Brave launches 1.0

1008 points by etr71115 7y ago

Lordarminius 7y ago
Here are two problems I have noticed with brave-browser : The layout is great on widescreen monitors but breaks on my 15'' laptop. Sites like YouTube render as a garish mess of incongruously placed whitespace. This is a major issue. Also, the brave icons for receiving 'rewards', when activated, are too large obstrusive when displayed on websites. I had to turn them off in settings. On the good side, I like that I don't have to ever watch pesky ads on YouTube. Overall however, brave-browser is great and offers a welcome change from traditional browsers.
- caiocaiocaio 7y ago
  Use an ad blocker.
- jonathansampson 7y ago
  Thank you for the feedback! Would you be able to share a couple screenshots? I'd love to share this information with our design team.
greatjack613 7y ago
Why does this press release feel ike richard hendricks in congress?
Spectrum48k 7y ago
Article here: https://www.cnet.com/news/brave-browser-1-0-arrives-bringing-its-privacy-first-ads-to-iphones-and-ipads/ https://www.cnet.com/news/brave-browser-1-0-arrives-bringing... 8.7M users!
caiocaiocaio 7y ago
Brendan Eich named his browser 'brave' because he thinks that he is "brave" for attacking a minority group. When I was young, in a trashy town, big groups of guys would get together and go 'fag-bashing', which is when a bunch of grown adults beat someone up because they suspect he's gay. Often, the target is a little kid. Since a lot of cops were former fag-bashers, there wasn't much to do about it. Fag bashing stopped for about a year when one 13-year-old had to get multiple surgeries. Even after all the surgeries, his face is deformed to this day, about 25 years later. The fag bashers were still much more brave than Brendan Eich, because they had the courage to look their victims in the face. Anyone who uses Brave should seriously reconsider what kind of person they've become, and what kind of person they want to be.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  I'm sorry- I'm extremely confused about what this has to do with this web browser.
  - triangleman 7y ago
    I figured it out. This guy is a SJW who is offended that Brendan Eich donated $1000 to Prop 8 in California.
    - _bxg1 7y ago
      I mean, that was a pretty terrible thing to do and learning it does color my perception of Brave. I just wish the OP had provided that context (and they probably wouldn't have gotten so downvoted by others if they had).
      - triangleman 7y ago
        How is donating money to a campaign that passed with 7 million votes a "terrible thing to do"? Are we not allowed to have an opinion that is different from the intelligentsia? This sort of thing does color my perception of Brave in the other direction. The fact that Eich refused to "confess and recant" in the face of internet lynch mobs and getting fired as CEO of Mozilla makes him rather brave in my estimation.
        _bxg1 7y ago
        Donating money (or voting) towards restricting others' individual liberties is a terrible thing to do, period. But that's all I'll say on the matter, so as to avoid a flame-war.
  - zht 7y ago
    Brave was founded by Brandon Eich who donated $1000 to Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California.
83insfnadsjfn 7y ago
Can you login to the StackDriver metrics console with Brave yet? I had to disable everything, literally all protections, to get this to non-endless redirect, its difficult to whitelist as there is dozens of domains from (gcloud to accounts.google.com, to some sd/stackdrivers one) at this point it I gave up
- throwaway-9320 7y ago
  I had this issue, but on Firefox and with Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin enabled. Some cookie seems to get blocked, leading to the infinite redirect loop. At least in this case I could just disable two addons temporarily and was good to go.
donatj 7y ago
My personal site which has never had ads made a couple bucks last year of BAT. Pretty easy to get set up. Can't complain.
simon_weber 7y ago
I used Brave for a while on Android and found it to work well. However, in the last month or so something changed and it started freezing constantly. I've since switched to Firefox, which is much better on Android than when I last tried it.
- mattlondon 7y ago
  I've been using Brave on android for a while now and it has been really good - it is basically the same as chrome, except with a built-in ad blocker. Highly recommend it as your daily driver. I use firefox on desktop, but found firefox on android to be a bit clunky the last time I tried it (years ago)
  - Crisco 7y ago
    Firefox on Android is a bit clunky, but Mozilla is currently working on a new version that will (hopefully) be much cleaner and faster. You can try it now as "Firefox Preview" on the Google Play Store. I use it pretty much exclusively now, and though it doesn't block all ads and doesn't have addon support yet, it seems to prevent the intrusive ones from being a problem. I do keep Firefox for Android around with uBlock Origin just in case, but I rarely have to use it.
mk89 7y ago
I don't know if I understood it right, but BATs are only given when users see the ads, right? If this is the case, it seems that Brave fosters the use of ads, not reduce it. Is my understanding right?
- notyourwork 7y ago
  Did Brave ever claim to reduce the use of ads? As I understand, they want to shift the revenue model and put control back in hands of users. You can use their browser and ignore ads (also not receive Bats) or you can see ads and receive compensation for it.
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    > Did Brave ever claim to reduce the use of ads? Are you serious? Ad-blocking by default is a core part of the marketing and self-description. I'm actually amazed they replace ads instead of just "uBlock"-ing them. Sounds like a joke. Look at the copy on https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/ and https://brave.com/download/ https://brave.com/download/ Are you telling me the average person reads "blocks ads" and expects it to mean "we replace ads with our own"?
    - nvrspyx 7y ago
      Viewing Brave ads is opt-in, not opt-out. However, they do nag you a bit about it. There's an icon for Brave Rewards in the address bar with a "1" badge asking if you'd like to opt-in (Toggle in Settings to hide this icon). It also asks you during setup and then if you skip (no Deny, Disagree, etc.; just skip), it shows a pop-up on the new tab page immediately after asking for the same thing.
      - mk89 7y ago
        Brave's business reminds me of Adblock+. They started all "we are cool, we make the web a better place" (which they did by the way), then they didn't know how to monetize, so they introduced "non invasive ads". Which is still ads, except this time, it's up to them to choose how ads should look like. It's the first time I read more about Brave, and despite the fact I like that they try with a new model, I think I'll keep using Firefox and the usual add-ons, as I have been doing for years.
aloisdg 7y ago
I am all for fighting capitalism, but I wont tolerate any form of ads. Ads are a threat for free thinking. They are pollution, poison, for the mind. I dont want to face any form of manipulation. Beside, Brave is chromium based. If you want to fight the chrome monopoly, go somewhere else. I could be fine with a fork of Firefox with a preinstall uBlockOrigin, Privacy Possum, facebook container, etc.
- octocop 7y ago
  If not Ads, how would a 'free service' generate money?
  - aloisdg 7y ago
    Donation, premium support, hosting, specific feature, etc.
- Vaslo 7y ago
  Your first comment doesn’t make sense or maybe I am misreading. Do you mean you are fighting for capitalism or fighting against it? You are implying you are against capitalism by banning advertising which is a very capitalist thing. I’m confused
  - aloisdg 7y ago
    I am against capitalism. Sorry if it is not clear. English is not my mother-tongue. I am listening for any input about my writing btw. :)
- topspin 7y ago
  > I wont tolerate any form of ads. Ads are a threat for free thinking. Then turn off the ad feed in Brave and enjoy the built in ad blocking. If you would still like to fund participating sites through Brave you can fund your BAT account with your own money.
  - aloisdg 7y ago
judah 7y ago
I've been using Brave rewards, both as a user and a content maker. It's really great, and I feel this may be a reasonable alternative to the invasive trackers+ads we have today. For the uninitiated, Brave lets users opt-in to Brave rewards: - You set your browser to reward content creators with Basic Attention Token (BAT). You set a budget (e.g. 10 BAT/month), and Brave distributes it the sites you use most, e.g. if you watch a particular YouTube channel 30% of your browsing time, it will send 30% of 10 BAT each month to that content creator. - As a user, you can get paid in BAT. You tell Brave if you're willing to see ads, and how often. If so, you get paid in BAT, which you can then distribute to content creators. Brave ads are different: rather than intrusive in-page ads, Brave ads show up as a notification in your operating system outside of the page. This prevents slow downs of the page, keeping your browsing focused, while still allowing support of content creators. And of course, Brave ads are optional and opt-in.
- bvda 7y ago
  I wonder why they chose to use (yet another) crypto currency for this.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - triclops200 7y ago
    I'd assume to limit how much transaction costs for microtransactions from many users. Credit cards are awful for small transactions, so you buy a bulk of BAT every month to reduce transactional overhead and then let creators cash out when they have some threshould of BAT. They could have done it way simpler than a cryptocurrency, though, by just using a floating point number in a database somewhere, but I'm assuming they assume a distributed ledger is more secure somehow.
    - PKop 7y ago
      >so you buy a bulk of BAT every month Why is nobody considering the exchange rate volatility here? Endless comments about saving a few pennies, while massive depreciation from holding large quantities in volatile crypto blow away any benefit of not using dollars.
LessDmesg 7y ago
Having switched recently from Firefox to Brave, I must say it's a pretty nice browser but with some unwanted quirks. 1) It tries to also be a bit-torrent client but the downoad doesn't even survive a tab closing. Pretty frustrating to lose a big long download that way. 2) new tabs have a weird eye-bleeding background and there's no way to change it
dkhenry 7y ago
edit2: Nevermind all this, Brave did in fact implement protected content this earlier this year https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/413 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/413 I still can't use brave to watch netflix on Linux. Its a great product and I love shifting the incentive of advertising away from intrusive data harvesting, but treating Linux like its a second class citizen means I won't use your product. Whats worse is that Firefox is 100% open source and Chromium is 100% open source and they both manage to get this working out of the box. There is no reason for Brave to not have working Netflix edit: Also I know the library that decodes the DRM is proprietary, my point is the integration with it is open and available, no reason it can't be duplicated.
- colordrops 7y ago
  Are you referring to Widevine? Brave asks you if you want to install it rather than just assuming you want DRM out of the box.
  - dkhenry 7y ago
    I am, and you are indeed correct. https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/413 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/413 The notification if very discreet, but it did have a button in the toolbar to promp me to install it.
_bxg1 7y ago
I tried out Brave ~3 years ago when it was still Electron-based, and it was unfortunately too laggy to be a daily driver. Then I tried it out again ~6 months ago after they'd switched it to being a Chromium fork. The speed was much-improved, but it suddenly started spamming me with push notifications about various features, Brave rewards, etc. I felt like I was blocking web ads just to get native ads instead. You can turn them off deep in the settings, but I got sketched out and stopped using it. I think Brave's payment model concept is a very interesting idea for freeing the open web from the need for advertising, but I haven't been impressed with the way the project has been executed so far.
- etr71115 7y ago
  You can turn off ads in your browser settings under "Brave Rewards". You won't earn any tokens though.
- BrendanEich 7y ago
  You turned on Brave Rewards at some point, it seems. If you want to tip and contribute anonymously but not get ads, just turn off ads (upper left of rewards settings).
  - sneak 7y ago
    Did you fix that issue yet where you were fraudulently claiming that you could receive tips for any content creator on the web but those sent to creators that hadn’t signed up went to Brave instead?
    - mthoms 7y ago
      Unclaimed funds go back to the user's wallet after 90 days. This has been the case for almost a full year now. https://brave.com/faq/#unclaimed-funds https://brave.com/faq/#unclaimed-funds
      - sneak 7y ago
        “Yes” would have also worked.
abhinavsharma 7y ago
What is Brave doing under the hood to get these claimed performance improvements over Chrome, Firefox and Safari?
- etr71115 7y ago
  Not rendering ad networks and trackers.
- Sargos 7y ago
  Probably the built-in ad and tracker blocking. All of those scripts and content add up.
- nissimk 7y ago
  Blocking ads?
- adambyrtek 7y ago
  I guess just blocking ads and trackers gives a significant performance boost they leverage in their marketing. I bet benchmark against any of the other browsers with ad-blockers installed would give a different result.
- bityard 7y ago
  I would guess they block the ads
- 300bps 7y ago
  By default, they fail to load stuff like trackers, ads, etc.
ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
Did they fix their sync issue yet? I couldn't get my laptop and desktop to work together so I switched over to Firefox.
- jonathansampson 7y ago
  Happy to help investigate Sync issues. Able to share more details?
  - ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
    It gives you a password chain you can input into another browser to link it. It worked on my mobile, but not on another Windows 10 machine. https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/dhqvyz/sync_issues/ https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/dhqvyz/sync_...
Hamcha 7y ago
I've used Brave since March, and I'm really not impressed. For a browser that tries to be different, it's incredible how little consideration has been given to things that annoy users and that could probably be trivial to remove. To be more specific, my issues with Brave are: - Still uses the Chrome Web Store as main store - Does not have an easy way to load packaged extensions from 3rd party sources - Even after adding them as unpacked, you still get the same annoying popup every time you open the browser. - I received notices that "My account was waiting for a deposit" the entire time, even though I never allocated any money to anyone - Tipping amounts are fixed I always saw Brave as "not chrome, and not as much of a change as Firefox", but their approach seem lazy, features halfassed at best and the sneaky anti-features that Chrome has been adding to push users to lock into Google stuff (see all my remarks about extensions) not addressed at all. I'm using Firefox as main browser now, and I haven't been missing brave once.
- colordrops 7y ago
  It's perfect for my use case: Chrome but with all the google bits removed and built-in ad-blocking. Can't say any of those things you listed have bothered me. I don't use BAT. Edit: Why do so many new accounts (green text) post to any thread about Brave?
  - grzte 7y ago
    I was thinking the same. I considered Vivaldi for some time but it was just buggy. That's a shame because now that Chrome is going to release manifest v3, many users will look for alternatives. Vivaldi has had years to polish their UI but they have missed the train. Eventually I'll settle with Brave, I think.
    - colordrops 7y ago
      I tried both Vivaldi and Brave and ended up with Brave because it is open source.
    - larntz 7y ago
      I used Vivaldi for a long time and never encountered many UI bugs. About a year ago I switched to Firefox mainly because I don't want Chromium to take over the world. What I miss most using Firefox is the ability to customize almost everything.
techntoke 7y ago
Offers 3-6x faster browsing than what exactly, browsing with IE or Edge without any ad blocking?
- etr71115 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgl7FLh7QsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgl7FLh7QsA
  - techntoke 7y ago
    Weird to watch how long it takes to load a single site using their demo video. Makes me think that they are using some type of preloading, which would mean that your web requests are actually being sent to Brave. It appears after some brief research that they are infact precaching, and the other browsers they are testing against we don't have any details on their configuration but can clearly see that they do not have uBlock Origin enabled. I wouldn't consider this a fair test.
    - csharp 7y ago
      We don't collect your browsing data, and it isn't proxied through Brave. I am unsure what preloading information you found. All of our configurations are open source, so if there is something particular you are looking for, it is visible. We are also comparing browser defaults here. However, our adblocking approach is built directly into the browser using a Rust library and can function faster than a Chrome extension.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
have_faith 7y ago
If people like Brave's ad model, all the power to them. I would personally never touch it. I'm not philosophically on board with the idea that paying people to look at ads is a pragmatic way forward. It doesn't matter if it's opt-in, free-to-play games with loot crates are opt-in, but the decision to go down that road will effect their decision making process when designing new features and I don't want to be part of it even indirectly.
- NelsonMinar 7y ago
  Brave is unethical. The key problem is they insert themselves into the revenue stream without the consent of the web publishers. It's fine to block ads entirely, but substituting your own ads and collecting money from that is wrong.
  - fastball 7y ago
    I'm not sure I see the clear cut ethical dilemma you do. Option 1. block all ads, publishers receive no revenue. Option 2. block all ads, user opts in to unrelated ads, user can choose to give some of the proceeds of seeing those ads to publishers they utilize. How can (2) possibly be worse than (1)?
    - lern_too_spel 7y ago
      Because it inserts a middleman who takes a cut that the publisher did not enter into an agreement with. If it was just users giving to publishers, that would be fine. Having a middleman hold the publisher's monetization hostage is ethically dubious for the middleman. Consider that I could pirate a movie, or I could pirate it and pay the creators directly, leaving out the distributors the creators contracted with. I fully agree that the second is slightly more ethical than the first, even though the creator agreed to neither. The problem occurs when some Tube site distributes the videos without the creators' consent, collects money from the viewers, takes a cut, and passes the rest to the creator. The Tube site is ethically wrong.
      - 7y ago
FpUser 7y ago
https://brave.com/malvertising-homeland-security/ https://brave.com/malvertising-homeland-security/ "Brave warns US Senate & Congress: foreign state actors can use targeted ads to run code on US government computers, exploiting conventional browsers" Oh, my. I am so scared. And Brave is of course a knight in shining armor ready to protect our shaken foundations.
- 300bps 7y ago
  I got a virus from an ad on reddit in 2008. It actually does happen, and I've used ad blocking software consistently ever since.
  - FpUser 7y ago
    I am not arguing about possibility of getting virus through ad on browser. My point is that they are using scaremongering in a hope to advance their product. They have no real proof that it is more secure. As for ads I am using adblock for ages. Not that I got a virus from internet, just do not like seeing ads when not asked.
chilighost 7y ago
Initially I liked the concept of brave, but they destroyed themselves by bloating it with this coin/payment stuff that is not possible to remove 100%. Back to Firefox now.
- ulzeraj 7y ago
  It’s opt in. You never really tried brave didn’t you?
- Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
  Curious why you created an account just to make two comments, both of which are entirely incorrect. What's your agenda? Who's paying you to slander Brave?
olalonde 7y ago
Getting a 504 error on https://brave.com/download/ https://brave.com/download/
- jonathansampson 7y ago
  Apologies for that; server is getting a little more attention than we had expected. Should be working now, though perhaps a bit sluggish at times.
chilighost 7y ago
Brave was initially an interesting browser, but without any options to disable the credits/money add-ons the browser have no future.
- colordrops 7y ago
  They are opt-in and you can disable them. It seems you never tried the browser. Odd that you'd need a new account to post this.
- jonathansampson 7y ago
  Brave Rewards is off-by-default. It's up to you to opt-in. And, once you do, you can set the number of ads to be shown each hour (upper-limit). The user is always in control.
dub 7y ago
When the Brave folks make their speed claim, it makes me curious if they genuinely don't understand the difference between above-the-fold page render time vs how long it takes for the spinner to stop spinning. Maybe they understand the difference but prefer to point people at the spinner because it's easier for them to make changes to stop the spinner sooner. Last time I watched one of their speed comparison videos a few months back, it had several examples where their browser was actually never the first to render the useful page content, but was usually the first to stop spinning the spinner in the top of the UI (which, naturally, is what they choose to measure and report).
astuyvenberg 7y ago
I've been using Brave for several months. It's exactly what I wanted - A faster, chromium-based browser with sensible, privacy-conscious defaults. I don't personally mind the Chrome Web Store default.
Aaronstotle 7y ago
I don't understand why they didn't use a stable coin/transition BAT to a stable coin, the volatility of BAT probably keeps creators uneasy. Why sign up for a service where contributions can lose half their value overnight.
- jonathansampson 7y ago
  When did you see that type of volatility? Advertiser dollars go into the system through purchases of BAT by the team. This helps to maintain steady value. You can see previous transactions (and more) at brave.com/transparency.
Angeo34 7y ago
Whoever uses Brave for "privacy" reasons should understand that Chrome offers more privacy due to fingerprintability. I see the downvotes coming yet it is true check it for yourself. Brave is so easy to fingerprint compared to Chrome it defeats any purpose ever to use Brave in the first place if privacy is your main goal. Removing all the Google bits from the Chromium base doesn't help since you are so fingerprintable.
- songshuu 7y ago
  If you're talking about the canvas id fingerprint which is identical across all instances of the browser, that lets Brave users hide in the crowd, so it's literally more private. Panopticlick needs to update their docs to make that clearer.
  - Angeo34 7y ago
    There are billion of vectors that are still fingerprintable. Best examples are fonts and window decorations. And these cannot be fixed by Brave without increasing entropy. And brave should know this.
- blacksmith_tb 7y ago
  Hmm, I get identical results from Chrome and Brave on my Ubuntu desktop in Panopticlick, which doesn't disprove your argument, but it looks like Chrome is fingerprintable-enough that the difference may not matter.
omi2therescue 7y ago
another option - https://www.optmein.online/ https://www.optmein.online/
jcmontx 7y ago
I've been using Brave since October 2018 and haven't checked once for updates. It seems that I've been using v0.7 lol
Angeo34 7y ago
>Removed Google bits >Use Google Chrome store so Google still gets every info it ever wanted and even more than before because your fingerprinting is more unique than with Chrome i.e. you give away your entire browsing history for free to Google Whoever uses Brave shouldn't be surprised why advertisers and trackers now have an even easier time following you
telesilla 7y ago
How does this compare to Opera? I prefer to use a Chromium browser and Opera has been fantastic for months as my main browser.
buboard 7y ago
Ha , it seems i ve made a few bucks (rather, bats) and didn't even know. I didn't know you can monetize twitter and reddit, but it makes a lot of sense! I kinda like the idea of users controlling sites indirectly by rewarding and punishing them for ads, kind of a direct-to-webmaster upvote button. Not sure about the way they implement their ad replacement, but if the basic model works there will probably be more companies that will enter the BAT ecosystem.
asah 7y ago
Not sure about the politics... but it's noticeably faster than Chrome or Firefox.
xyst 7y ago
Front end developers: “yet another browser to support”
- cheald 7y ago
  It's just Chromium, so it's not particularly anything new to support.
johnpowell 7y ago
They still aren't brave enough to use a unique user agent string. Brave on left, Chrome on right. https://i.imgur.com/aPI776u.png https://i.imgur.com/aPI776u.png
- aembleton 7y ago
  Reduces fingerprinting.
dsincl12 7y ago
Sorry I've tried to give Brave a shot for a couple of months and the 3-6x faster browsing is nonsense. It's really slow compared to Chrome or Firefox. Just do a quick comparison yourself, you can probably count seconds on a couple of sites you visit regularly whereas Chrome loads instantly.
- Wheaties466 7y ago
  I run a high spec machine with 3 browsers(Brave and Google Chrome, Firefox) 8-10 hours a day every work day. I respectfully completely disagree. I do not find it slow in comparison to the others, I do find it much much quicker on 90%+ sites. I do not work for brave, mozilla, google or apple. I also have no stake in any of those companies nor do I know anyone that works for those companies. I really wonder how so many people in this thread can have a negative response when I personally have felt the complete opposite. I do suspect it has something to do with employer bias.
atombender 7y ago
I've been using Brave for a few months, and I'm basically using it as an un-Googled Chrome. Not using the ad rewards system. It's pretty good, though I sometimes miss Safari with its amazing location bar autocompletion and ease of syncing with the iOS version. (Brave supports syncs, but it's not great, and the iOS app is nowhere as good as Safari on iOS.) Brave does have some bugs. Since July or so, several sites (including my bank) don't work because Brave incorrectly [1] blocks their cookies, even with the "shield" turned off. [1] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/6099 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/6099 and several others.
- csharp 7y ago
  What do you like about Safari that iOS Brave is missing? We are quite a bit faster than Safari, and our private mode is more aggressive against things like cookies and writing data to disk.
  - atombender 7y ago
    Honestly, I've not found any speed difference. Things I don't like: * Autocompletion is much worse than Safari. See screenshot comparison [1]. The results are dinky and hard to read, and rarely include history or bookmarks. For example, in the screenshot, if I type "p", it matches bookmarks and history, but the suggestions disappear if I type anything more, despite the fact that "photothera" is a substring. * Brave's tabs (though the tab overview is nice). Mobile is just too small to show tabs. * The fact that the location bar is filled with widgets that give only about 30% of the space to the URL. * Syncing of bookmarks, history, etc. seems to randomly stop working. It's never really worked for me. Syncing should just work seamlessly with iCloud, and not require the manual step that it currently does. * "Find in page" doesn't work for PDFs. Plus, the privacy bugs (see my previous comment) that never get solved. Being aggressive about cookies is one thing; breaking non-abusive sites without any workaround isn't acceptable. I don't really use private mode, so that's not relevant for me. I also don't use Brave Rewards, so the big icon in the address bar is annoying. [1] https://imgur.com/a/nygTJ9f https://imgur.com/a/nygTJ9f
    - 7y ago
bobowzki 7y ago
I wonder how much brave.com was?
- bsclifton 7y ago
  I don't think it says a price, but it was previously used by a "nuclear polka" band :) https://brave.com/the-road-to-brave-one-dot-zero/ https://brave.com/the-road-to-brave-one-dot-zero/
deleted 7y ago
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mikelward 7y ago
Just tried it. Still no Android Autofill support. Don't want to enable less secure legacy accessibility support. https://community.brave.com/t/android-autofill-api-enabled-in-brave/64238/11 https://community.brave.com/t/android-autofill-api-enabled-i...
mediaserf 7y ago
Why does the BAT mining extension continue to run even if I opt-out of the rewards system?
egdod 7y ago
No thanks. Sticking with Firefox.
The_rationalist 7y ago
Source for the performance claims? Are they not upstreaming performance change for chromium?
sergiotapia 7y ago
Already using Brave on my work computer for the past year ish. Infinitely better than _anything_ out there. Once they offer browser sync of saved passwords and history, I'm gone for good chrome/firefox on every other device I own.
heimatau 7y ago
I keep trying to use Brave but I feel that it drops the ball. I think Hamcha encapsulates most of my grievances. I'd like to add that if your Browser is trying to add a new dynamic of economics but your UX is terrible dealing with tips (fixed) and you're annoying users about needing a deposit. You're doing it wrong. It's almost like Brave doesn't even believe in it's mission. There should be an intense focus on their product. That they are relentless at it. Because right now, it all seems half-baked.
kylebenzle 7y ago
I bought $20,000 worth of BAT a few years ago, havent had to work a day since.
nicpottier 7y ago
I'm going to give this a try again. I REALLY want the model of micropayments vs ads to work. I realize content creators need to get paid, I just refuse to be subtly influenced by ads in my day to day life. I currently use an ad blocker in Chrome to get around that but I'm perfectly fine paying $5 a month to creators I use. The problem is that I think ads may be worth even more than that to creators, which if you have any doubt about their efficacy should make you rethink.
MentallyRetired 7y ago
As a Firefox user, is there a reason to convert? Seems like a step backwards to me, even though I applaud what they're doing.
- gnicholas 7y ago
  In my experience (2017 MBP running Mojave), it is much, much faster than Firefox. I have lots of tabs open, and my fan almost never kicks on anymore. With FF, even using ublock and even a pihole, the fan was constantly at full throttle. Maybe I was doing other things wrong, but switching to Brave has made a huge difference for me. I say this as someone who stood by FF for a decade and a half.
  - Lev1a 7y ago
    > With FF, even using ublock and even a pihole, the fan was constantly at full throttle. Is that still the case even with FFs recent update to version 70[1]? [1]: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-reduced-power-usage-in-firefox-70-on-macos-with-core-animation/ https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-red...
    - gnicholas 7y ago
      70, yes. Haven’t tried 71.
- etr71115 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgl7FLh7QsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgl7FLh7QsA
arilotter 7y ago
They also flipped on their built-in Web3 Ethereum wallet by default, breaking all Web3-compatible sites for people who had another wallet (e.g. MetaMask) installed.
Karunamon 7y ago
I put Brave on the backburner a while ago because of some random display glitches, mostly on YouTube, and the built-in adblocker not really being up to par with something like uBO. but this sounds like a good an excuse as any to try it again.
companyhen 7y ago
I love Brave, keep it going :)
lacker 7y ago
Is Brave making any amount of money from their advertising system? I can't find any public communications about it, and I would expect them to be touting if the numbers are good. The weird thing about Brave is that they raised $35 million from their crypto ICO, but that isn't like normal fundraising because you can only do it once. So they really need their real business to kick in and start working before they run out of that money, more than most venture-backed startups need to start making money. Getting paid money to watch ads reminds me of AllAdvantage in the first dotcom boom. It seems cool at first when the system is juiced by investor money, but once advertisers realize the ROI is low, the money dries up.
- BrendanEich 7y ago
  https://brave.com/transparency https://brave.com/transparency shows revenue share BAT buys to pay users their 70% from invoices paid in fiat. Some ad buyers use BAT, and we do some barters.
fuu_dev 7y ago
Criticism: #1 Brave advertise with privacy and speed while all they do is adding adblock. #2 Brave replaces adds with their own adds. This basically means you get the same experience but cut off the income of the content creator entirely. #3 Brave allows you to reward 3rd party sites. This system is so nice they even got legal issues as it was assumed as fraud. #4 BAT. Brave advertise with consumer first. The best choice for the consumer would be Paypal. If there is an incent to stay with crypto currency Bitcoin or Ethereum. Given Brave created their own crypto currency and base every model around that they can profit from Transactions/services with the currency too on top of the share they take when you use their add platform/feature. Given the criticism its very hard for me to understand users sympathizing with the browser.
- fastball 7y ago
  #1 Their ad-blocker is also a tracking blocker and a pretty strict one at that. They also spend a lot of time optimizing the performance[0] of this ad-blocking. This improves the browsing experience. #2 Brave Ads are opt-in. You can alternatively fund the sites you visit on the web by putting BAT into your wallet directly and having the browser automatically distribute funds based on which content you spend time on per month. The entire idea of Brave is that people were already using ad-blockers, so I'm not sure how this is worse for content creators. #3 ??? #4 BAT is an ERC-20 token - it exists on the Ethereum blockchain. Not sure why you think BTC would be better than that. Honestly not sure why you think Paypal would be better than that. At this point, anyone can transact the currency easily and quickly without any intervention from Brave. I can convert BAT to DAI right now on a decentralized exchange in less than a minute and have a virtual currency pegged to USD even if I don't bank with USD. At the moment this process is somewhat technical, but it overall seems very pro-consumer to me. [0] https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/ https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/
  - fuu_dev 7y ago
    ad 2: Brave takes a 30% cut of the add income. The adds you block are targeted adds, thus they yield a higher income. Besides that there are usually service fees for converting your BAT to other currencies. The entire service is opt in making it also not guaranteed for the content creator to receive the reward. This should lead even in the best case to a notably worse outcome. ad 3: https://outline.com/fJm5C3 https://outline.com/fJm5C3 ad 4: i explained the issue in my other response.
viach 7y ago
> You set a budget (e.g. 10 BAT/month), and Brave distributes it the sites you use most, e.g. if you watch a particular YouTube channel 30% of your browsing time, it will send 30% of 10 BAT each month to that content creator. If you would own a video streaming service (a startup!) and some company started to pay your users for viewing ads on your platform in some MagicMoneyCoins putting your pocket outside the cash flow, what would you do? If you would want to receive organic traffic from your ads and instead start to experience crazy stream of incentivized ad clickers with near zero conversion rate, what would you do? Imo the answers to these questions are not that pleasant for Brave. Maybe I'm wrong of course, like the most of times.
- fastball 7y ago
  Yeah, having seen all the useless previous attempts at paying users to watch/click ads, I'm not particularly hopeful for the long-term prospects of that system. Seems like it might be better to just force the user to disburse those funds to the sites they visit.
iseeyou 7y ago
I use Brave on iOS with javascript blocked as it is the only* iOS browser which gives me the ability to easily use the Web without JS while giving me the ability to quickly enable it for the site where it makes sense, and still retain the ad blocking feature. A surprisingly big part of the Internet works as well or better and faster with javascript disabled, but sometimes it is actually needed and useful so I find this whitelisting method works well. I tried playing around with the script blocking ability of native content blockers but never got it working properly, for one I think it can't block script tags only externa scripts. But my recommendation, if you are giving Brave a try is to change the default to disallow scripts, and enable them as needed, it's refreshing to browse the Web without Popups 2.0 and all the other not so nice uses of JS. (* only I've found with my limited searching)
- DHPersonal 7y ago
  SnowHaze seems to have a quick toggle available. https://snowhaze.com/en/index.html https://snowhaze.com/en/index.html
  - iseeyou 7y ago
    It does, thanks for the tip. It does seem to allow even finer grained configuration of what to block or allow so I will definitely take a look.
- pcnix 7y ago
  You might also like umatrix for this, it gives unmatched control over blocking resources.
  - iseeyou 7y ago
    Yes, there are multiple solutions available for Chrome/Firefox on other platforms, but on iOS there is only native/apple content blockers and browsers with built in ad blocking.
snek 7y ago
Regardless of Brave's intent, they operate in the advertising industry, and eventually, if not already, it will become a conflict of interest.
radikalus 7y ago
Great mission, product and vision. Very excited to see more functionality in browser away from the traditional rails
woodandsteel 7y ago
There are a lot of negative comments here about Brave. They fall into two classes. One group thinks the present state of affairs with the web is ok, so there is no need for Brave. That view is so cracked that I am not going to bother responding to it. The other group agrees the web is broken, but then claims that Brave won't fix things and will even make them worse. I don't think that is true, but the thing is, we need to have something new here, and Brave is the only solution out there at present that is developed, is trying to address all the problems, and is reasonably usable by non-techies, and so I am using it and I urge everyone else to do so too. To those people who claim Brave is awful, I say they should be working on something they think would better. I suspect they aren't doing that because they are just negative people, or they are trollers who are being paid by the present internet powers-that-be. On the latter idea, its not just paranoia. If someone came up with a good alternative, people like the advertising networks would feel mortally threatened, and I think it is absolutely certain they would strike back with a massive disinformation campaign.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
mind_half_full 7y ago
Great job Brave! Privacy protecting ads and you get paid to browse. Simply amazing!!
- Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
  A brand new account praising a business. This reeks of being an astroturfing account.
  - trpc 7y ago
    Almost every post that links to brave.com makes it to the frontpage withing minutes. And all criticism is buried with lots of shilling. This company has been compromising HN for years now, as well as other influential online communites like Reddit and 4chan.
jobseeker990 7y ago
It's so weird, I had this exact idea when bitcoin came out. But it seemed like you'd need a money transmitter license to be able to do it? So I gave up.
annoyingnoob 7y ago
Fuck ads. Fuck tracking. Fuck making me part of your 'audience'. There has to be a better way. I'm going with blocking until there is a better answer. Brave may be a step in the right direction but its not the solution.
- foob4r 7y ago
  I understand "fuck trackers". Why "fuck ads"?
  - mrlala 7y ago
    >Why "fuck ads"? Because ads are basically useless? I can remember MAYBE a handful of times in my entire life where an "ad" has actually prompted me to look into/buy something.
  - maelito 7y ago
    Because I want to buy what's useful to me, not what companies suggest to me (mostly through obvious or less obvious lies).
- degenerate 7y ago
  The main reason I block ads is because ad networks make so many requests (and the ads load so slow) that it always affects my browsing. I am either waiting for the page to load because of poorly engineered synchronous ad network code, or I'm having my content fumbled around at the tail end of pageload. Both situations are obtrusive, aggravating, and slow me down. In the early 2000s ads were simple images that loaded just as fast as everything else, and I didn't mind them much, even the cheesy animated ones. It's the delivery, not the content, that I abhor.
- AgentME 7y ago
  If you don't opt into seeing ads, then Brave is a browser with ad-blocking built in (and a donate-to-sites-you-use button).
paulcarroty 7y ago
I like their "Shield", looks very well. 128k blocked ads/trackers for ~month when uBlock/uMatrix are enabled too. About their Ad program - money are very small yet, for both: site owners & users.
emptysongglass 7y ago
Two big issues for me that have kept me on Firefox despite being a huge cryptocurrency nerd: 1. The decision to base on Chromium is a bigger negative for me than any feature. We're all going to regret contributing to the One True Engine someday and it's going to be so painful to fix. 2. BAT is a pure money play. There's no inherent utility outside buying and spending. And Ethereum is nothing if not the biggest utility crypto out there. This is always one of those things in the Ethereum ecosystem where I point out that you didn't have to make yet another ERC-20 if your only play is money. It's too late now, of course. But man, it would have been terrific to recommend a browser that blocked ads out of the box and wasn't part of the engine hegemony.
- eigenvalue 7y ago
  What would you have the Brave team do? Create a new html rendering engine from scratch? That is an incredibly challenging engineering project that would probably require years and many tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to do well, and what would be the benefit to Brave's users and investors? It would just lead to loads of performance and compatibility issues, and it is fundamentally irrelevant to the core value proposition of Brave, which is to monetize ads on behalf of users and content creators.
  - emptysongglass 7y ago
    No, of course not. I would have had them base on Gecko.
    - 1_player 7y ago
      Don't quote me on that, but Gecko must not be the easiest engine to build upon. How many browsers out there are based on Gecko, apart from Firefox? AFAIK the only choice nowadays is between Chromium and WebKit. I honestly would like to see more WebKit based browsers instead.
      - judge2020 7y ago
        I wonder if Webkit still have any resources behind using it on Windows since the documentation for building it[0] still says "Windows 8.1" (and I can't find links to the documentation or website SVN repo). 0: https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/ https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/
pergadad 7y ago
I used brace for a while on mobile but stopped once brave started to out ads in the notification bar. I don't remember exactly what they were for - probably BAT and the browser itself - but I definitely don't need another pathway to get slammed. Back to Firefox and happy as can be.
maelito 7y ago
What if I really don't want to see ads at all ? Can I pay Brave in € and let it distribute this money to the content creators ?
- AgentME 7y ago
  Yes-ish. You can put your own BAT (or Bitcoin or ETH) into your Brave wallet. You can buy BAT from Coinbase/Uphold/other exchanges.
  - maelito 7y ago
    That's cool. I'd use it if I can : - charge my account by credit card in 1 click - get the same ad blocking level as mublock
fareesh 7y ago
I've been using Brave as a replacement for Chrome for about 3 months now. The switch has been quite enjoyable. Lighthouse doesn't seem to work properly, which I use Chrome for.
ganitarashid 7y ago
I stopped reading once I saw it has a way to show advertisements
russellbeattie 7y ago
The other day I tried to look up a recipe for beef stew on my phone. Normally my web reading experience tends to be limited to big news sites and tech on a Desktop or Tablet - the ads there are bad, but not terrible. But recipe sites are a whole different category of horrible. I was shocked. They are all absolutely PACKED with ads. Try it yourself. It's ridiculous. Every other paragraph is separated by ads, overlays, click-spam news, auto-playing videos, etc. I tried easily 7 or 8 different sites before giving up and installing Brave. This is just anecdotal, but I think the categories that are targeted at the broadest category of users, probably scewing towards older and female, are just being straight up abusive. And mobile seems to be particularly bad. This situation is untenable. I guess sites and advertisers are just relying on a continuing influx of newbies to line their pockets, but really it's a scorched Earth policy that can't possibly continue as is.
neilobremski 7y ago
Brave is awesome and I'm happy to see them reaching this point. I've been using this as my primary browser for the past 2 years and my absolute favorite thing about it is the simple profiles switching. HOWEVER that's also the thing that's irritated me the most as this software has changed: it started with person-specific tabs (awesome!) then moved to person-specific windows (okay ...), and now for the third time they've changed the icons available without letting me specify custom pictures (ugh!). Where is my ability to sync these PROFILES AS A GROUP? Setting up half a dozen "people" on each new computer becomes a tiresome exercise. I tried the rewards/BAT thing for a while but after a few computer changes and losing my wallet through the process, I gave up and just block everything and contribute nothing. I'd like to get back into it but all of those transitions just killed it for me. All that said, there's a lot of good stuff in here and I'm happy to be using it as my primary browser. Now that they're hitting 1.0 I may actually be able to recommend it to non-tech people.
marvindanig 7y ago
Awesome work, Brave! We use Brave internally for all our development work and are also a Brave Certified book publisher for the web [1][2]. Please tip us to support the books we publish if you are a Brave user too! I can vouch for the quality of browsing experience and speed that we have had in the past two years. One of the best features of Brave, which led me to set the browser as our default, is on a shortcut `Command + Option + N`. This shortcut opens a private window using Tor which is super useful, handy, fast and most importantly private. :-) [1] https://bubblin.io https://bubblin.io [2] https://creators.brave.com/ https://creators.brave.com/
dhosek 7y ago
BLOCKCHAIN! Let's throw money at it!
bytematic 7y ago
Is this the browser that blocks ads unless the website allows brave ads and get brave crypto. Essentially the same model the mafia uses. I'm sure this will go great.
trpc 7y ago
Brave is a scam just like most "privacy centered" parasite products like DDG and VPN providers. All these companies are run by shameless and aggressive useless parasites who actually offer nothing but a rebranded product made by others. It's sad that a community supposedly filled by software engineers fall for and promote such scams
pushcx 7y ago
Please return "Brave" to your User-Agent[0] so we can return to opting out of your cryptocurrency.[1] (Yes, I'm aware of the changes since the scandal broke[2].) [0] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/1052#issuecomment-549667310 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/1052#issuecomm... [1] https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/761 https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/761 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
daveheq 7y ago
1.0 Chrome B
emiliovesprini 7y ago
Eternal reminder by @paulskallas (Twitter): > there's never been a good ad in the history of advertising. 120 years and there's never been an ad that has stood the test of time and was fondly remembered like literature or a song. It is a profoundly anti lindy medium that exists in the now, forever
- toxicFork 7y ago
  There was a Turkish tv channel that highlighted funny or cool advertisements.
Kye 7y ago
A privacy-focused browser that took money from the Palantir guy. Hard pass. That's before considering the CEO's past, unexplained donation to a hate campaign spearheaded by the Mormon church.
tomaszs 7y ago
Brave gives life back to the internet, like Daft Punk gave life back to music.
dxhdr 7y ago
So if I operate a website, Brave can remove my monetization and replace it with their own, without my consent? How does that work?
JohnTHaller 7y ago
We've still got BAT enabled on PortableApps.com with the standard custom Brave browser header and donation ask you setup via their program. We got 31.35 BAT (about $8.08) for around 2.7 million page views in the last month. We also got a single 0.95 BAT (about 24 cent) donation. It seems that - right now at least - the only way a site will make enough money to be worth it is via Brave referrals (advertising Brave to your users to get them to switch).
thekyle 7y ago
I would be more inclined to try BAT if it were just an extension that I could add to any browser of my choice. Also, having tried Brave it doesn't seem like you actually have the private keys to your own wallet since I wasn't able to withdraw any funds without an Uphold account.
vini 7y ago
I'm unable to download, the server is returning 502 - bad gateway http://updates.bravesoftware.com/service/update2 http://updates.bravesoftware.com/service/update2
miguelmota 7y ago
Brave: we disable all ads Brave: hey you want rewards? here's some notification ads
piyush_soni 7y ago
Still no extensions sync?
alwillis 7y ago
Brave has a series of ads about different aspects of what Brave offers: Creators: https://vimeo.com/372813874 https://vimeo.com/372813874 Speed: https://vimeo.com/372813765 https://vimeo.com/372813765 Privacy: https://vimeo.com/372736442 https://vimeo.com/372736442 This one isn’t an ad; it’s a video of a speed test of Brave vs. Chrome and Firefox loading sites that millions of users access every day and doing much faster: Brave Browser Speed Comparison 2019: https://vimeo.com/371512354 https://vimeo.com/371512354
sivalingam 7y ago
I don't trust anything build on top of chromium web browser developed by Google. Definitely google will have some way to track user. I prefer Firefox for trust in privacy.
wheresvic3 7y ago
This is a pretty cool idea - I'm not sure how intrusive the OS notification are going to be but I'm willing to give it a shot as long as they don't collect any personal info on me. I just signed up as a content creator and added my website as a channel - interestingly my website already had some bat associated with it. Does this mean that some people have already donated some BAT to it?
teknopaul 7y ago
Downloaded 1.0, first thing I entered in to the address bar got sent to Google, doh! uninstalled, back to FireFox and DDG.
scoutt 7y ago
> “Either we all accept the $330 billion ad-tech industry treating us as their products, exploiting our data, piling on more data breaches and privacy scandals, and starving publishers of revenue; or ... Give Brave a piece of that moist and delicious $330B cake, because... > That’s the inspiration behind Brave,” he added.
martindale 7y ago
General reminder that Brave is a scam; they forcefully converted user funds that were held in BTC to their own competitive token, BAT, which seeks to monetize your attention. Not to mention the massive privacy leak that is a public network of transactions, revealing browsing habits by way of advertising payments.

1008 points by etr71115 7y ago

Here are two problems I have noticed with brave-browser : The layout is great on widescreen monitors but breaks on my 15'' laptop. Sites like YouTube render as a garish mess of incongruously placed whitespace. This is a major issue. Also, the brave icons for receiving 'rewards', when activated, are too large obstrusive when displayed on websites. I had to turn them off in settings. On the good side, I like that I don't have to ever watch pesky ads on YouTube. Overall however, brave-browser is great and offers a welcome change from traditional browsers.

caiocaiocaio 7y ago
Use an ad blocker.
jonathansampson 7y ago
Thank you for the feedback! Would you be able to share a couple screenshots? I'd love to share this information with our design team.

greatjack613 7y ago

Why does this press release feel ike richard hendricks in congress?

Spectrum48k 7y ago

Article here: https://www.cnet.com/news/brave-browser-1-0-arrives-bringing-its-privacy-first-ads-to-iphones-and-ipads/ https://www.cnet.com/news/brave-browser-1-0-arrives-bringing... 8.7M users!

caiocaiocaio 7y ago

Brendan Eich named his browser 'brave' because he thinks that he is "brave" for attacking a minority group. When I was young, in a trashy town, big groups of guys would get together and go 'fag-bashing', which is when a bunch of grown adults beat someone up because they suspect he's gay. Often, the target is a little kid. Since a lot of cops were former fag-bashers, there wasn't much to do about it. Fag bashing stopped for about a year when one 13-year-old had to get multiple surgeries. Even after all the surgeries, his face is deformed to this day, about 25 years later. The fag bashers were still much more brave than Brendan Eich, because they had the courage to look their victims in the face. Anyone who uses Brave should seriously reconsider what kind of person they've become, and what kind of person they want to be.

_bxg1 7y ago
I'm sorry- I'm extremely confused about what this has to do with this web browser.
- triangleman 7y ago
  I figured it out. This guy is a SJW who is offended that Brendan Eich donated $1000 to Prop 8 in California.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    I mean, that was a pretty terrible thing to do and learning it does color my perception of Brave. I just wish the OP had provided that context (and they probably wouldn't have gotten so downvoted by others if they had).
    - triangleman 7y ago
      How is donating money to a campaign that passed with 7 million votes a "terrible thing to do"? Are we not allowed to have an opinion that is different from the intelligentsia? This sort of thing does color my perception of Brave in the other direction. The fact that Eich refused to "confess and recant" in the face of internet lynch mobs and getting fired as CEO of Mozilla makes him rather brave in my estimation.
      - _bxg1 7y ago
        Donating money (or voting) towards restricting others' individual liberties is a terrible thing to do, period. But that's all I'll say on the matter, so as to avoid a flame-war.
- zht 7y ago
  Brave was founded by Brandon Eich who donated $1000 to Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California.

83insfnadsjfn 7y ago

Can you login to the StackDriver metrics console with Brave yet? I had to disable everything, literally all protections, to get this to non-endless redirect, its difficult to whitelist as there is dozens of domains from (gcloud to accounts.google.com, to some sd/stackdrivers one) at this point it I gave up

throwaway-9320 7y ago
I had this issue, but on Firefox and with Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin enabled. Some cookie seems to get blocked, leading to the infinite redirect loop. At least in this case I could just disable two addons temporarily and was good to go.

donatj 7y ago

My personal site which has never had ads made a couple bucks last year of BAT. Pretty easy to get set up. Can't complain.

simon_weber 7y ago

I used Brave for a while on Android and found it to work well. However, in the last month or so something changed and it started freezing constantly. I've since switched to Firefox, which is much better on Android than when I last tried it.

mattlondon 7y ago
I've been using Brave on android for a while now and it has been really good - it is basically the same as chrome, except with a built-in ad blocker. Highly recommend it as your daily driver. I use firefox on desktop, but found firefox on android to be a bit clunky the last time I tried it (years ago)
- Crisco 7y ago
  Firefox on Android is a bit clunky, but Mozilla is currently working on a new version that will (hopefully) be much cleaner and faster. You can try it now as "Firefox Preview" on the Google Play Store. I use it pretty much exclusively now, and though it doesn't block all ads and doesn't have addon support yet, it seems to prevent the intrusive ones from being a problem. I do keep Firefox for Android around with uBlock Origin just in case, but I rarely have to use it.

mk89 7y ago

I don't know if I understood it right, but BATs are only given when users see the ads, right? If this is the case, it seems that Brave fosters the use of ads, not reduce it. Is my understanding right?

notyourwork 7y ago
Did Brave ever claim to reduce the use of ads? As I understand, they want to shift the revenue model and put control back in hands of users. You can use their browser and ignore ads (also not receive Bats) or you can see ads and receive compensation for it.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  > Did Brave ever claim to reduce the use of ads? Are you serious? Ad-blocking by default is a core part of the marketing and self-description. I'm actually amazed they replace ads instead of just "uBlock"-ing them. Sounds like a joke. Look at the copy on https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/ and https://brave.com/download/ https://brave.com/download/ Are you telling me the average person reads "blocks ads" and expects it to mean "we replace ads with our own"?
  - nvrspyx 7y ago
    Viewing Brave ads is opt-in, not opt-out. However, they do nag you a bit about it. There's an icon for Brave Rewards in the address bar with a "1" badge asking if you'd like to opt-in (Toggle in Settings to hide this icon). It also asks you during setup and then if you skip (no Deny, Disagree, etc.; just skip), it shows a pop-up on the new tab page immediately after asking for the same thing.
    - mk89 7y ago
      Brave's business reminds me of Adblock+. They started all "we are cool, we make the web a better place" (which they did by the way), then they didn't know how to monetize, so they introduced "non invasive ads". Which is still ads, except this time, it's up to them to choose how ads should look like. It's the first time I read more about Brave, and despite the fact I like that they try with a new model, I think I'll keep using Firefox and the usual add-ons, as I have been doing for years.

aloisdg 7y ago

I am all for fighting capitalism, but I wont tolerate any form of ads. Ads are a threat for free thinking. They are pollution, poison, for the mind. I dont want to face any form of manipulation. Beside, Brave is chromium based. If you want to fight the chrome monopoly, go somewhere else. I could be fine with a fork of Firefox with a preinstall uBlockOrigin, Privacy Possum, facebook container, etc.

octocop 7y ago
If not Ads, how would a 'free service' generate money?
- aloisdg 7y ago
  Donation, premium support, hosting, specific feature, etc.
Vaslo 7y ago
Your first comment doesn’t make sense or maybe I am misreading. Do you mean you are fighting for capitalism or fighting against it? You are implying you are against capitalism by banning advertising which is a very capitalist thing. I’m confused
- aloisdg 7y ago
  I am against capitalism. Sorry if it is not clear. English is not my mother-tongue. I am listening for any input about my writing btw. :)
topspin 7y ago
> I wont tolerate any form of ads. Ads are a threat for free thinking. Then turn off the ad feed in Brave and enjoy the built in ad blocking. If you would still like to fund participating sites through Brave you can fund your BAT account with your own money.
- aloisdg 7y ago

judah 7y ago

I've been using Brave rewards, both as a user and a content maker. It's really great, and I feel this may be a reasonable alternative to the invasive trackers+ads we have today. For the uninitiated, Brave lets users opt-in to Brave rewards: - You set your browser to reward content creators with Basic Attention Token (BAT). You set a budget (e.g. 10 BAT/month), and Brave distributes it the sites you use most, e.g. if you watch a particular YouTube channel 30% of your browsing time, it will send 30% of 10 BAT each month to that content creator. - As a user, you can get paid in BAT. You tell Brave if you're willing to see ads, and how often. If so, you get paid in BAT, which you can then distribute to content creators. Brave ads are different: rather than intrusive in-page ads, Brave ads show up as a notification in your operating system outside of the page. This prevents slow downs of the page, keeping your browsing focused, while still allowing support of content creators. And of course, Brave ads are optional and opt-in.

bvda 7y ago
I wonder why they chose to use (yet another) crypto currency for this.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- triclops200 7y ago
  I'd assume to limit how much transaction costs for microtransactions from many users. Credit cards are awful for small transactions, so you buy a bulk of BAT every month to reduce transactional overhead and then let creators cash out when they have some threshould of BAT. They could have done it way simpler than a cryptocurrency, though, by just using a floating point number in a database somewhere, but I'm assuming they assume a distributed ledger is more secure somehow.
  - PKop 7y ago
    >so you buy a bulk of BAT every month Why is nobody considering the exchange rate volatility here? Endless comments about saving a few pennies, while massive depreciation from holding large quantities in volatile crypto blow away any benefit of not using dollars.

LessDmesg 7y ago

Having switched recently from Firefox to Brave, I must say it's a pretty nice browser but with some unwanted quirks. 1) It tries to also be a bit-torrent client but the downoad doesn't even survive a tab closing. Pretty frustrating to lose a big long download that way. 2) new tabs have a weird eye-bleeding background and there's no way to change it

dkhenry 7y ago

edit2: Nevermind all this, Brave did in fact implement protected content this earlier this year https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/413 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/413 I still can't use brave to watch netflix on Linux. Its a great product and I love shifting the incentive of advertising away from intrusive data harvesting, but treating Linux like its a second class citizen means I won't use your product. Whats worse is that Firefox is 100% open source and Chromium is 100% open source and they both manage to get this working out of the box. There is no reason for Brave to not have working Netflix edit: Also I know the library that decodes the DRM is proprietary, my point is the integration with it is open and available, no reason it can't be duplicated.

colordrops 7y ago
Are you referring to Widevine? Brave asks you if you want to install it rather than just assuming you want DRM out of the box.
- dkhenry 7y ago
  I am, and you are indeed correct. https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/413 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/413 The notification if very discreet, but it did have a button in the toolbar to promp me to install it.

_bxg1 7y ago

I tried out Brave ~3 years ago when it was still Electron-based, and it was unfortunately too laggy to be a daily driver. Then I tried it out again ~6 months ago after they'd switched it to being a Chromium fork. The speed was much-improved, but it suddenly started spamming me with push notifications about various features, Brave rewards, etc. I felt like I was blocking web ads just to get native ads instead. You can turn them off deep in the settings, but I got sketched out and stopped using it. I think Brave's payment model concept is a very interesting idea for freeing the open web from the need for advertising, but I haven't been impressed with the way the project has been executed so far.

etr71115 7y ago
You can turn off ads in your browser settings under "Brave Rewards". You won't earn any tokens though.
BrendanEich 7y ago
You turned on Brave Rewards at some point, it seems. If you want to tip and contribute anonymously but not get ads, just turn off ads (upper left of rewards settings).
- sneak 7y ago
  Did you fix that issue yet where you were fraudulently claiming that you could receive tips for any content creator on the web but those sent to creators that hadn’t signed up went to Brave instead?
  - mthoms 7y ago
    Unclaimed funds go back to the user's wallet after 90 days. This has been the case for almost a full year now. https://brave.com/faq/#unclaimed-funds https://brave.com/faq/#unclaimed-funds
    - sneak 7y ago
      “Yes” would have also worked.

abhinavsharma 7y ago

What is Brave doing under the hood to get these claimed performance improvements over Chrome, Firefox and Safari?

etr71115 7y ago
Not rendering ad networks and trackers.
Sargos 7y ago
Probably the built-in ad and tracker blocking. All of those scripts and content add up.
nissimk 7y ago
Blocking ads?
adambyrtek 7y ago
I guess just blocking ads and trackers gives a significant performance boost they leverage in their marketing. I bet benchmark against any of the other browsers with ad-blockers installed would give a different result.
bityard 7y ago
I would guess they block the ads
300bps 7y ago
By default, they fail to load stuff like trackers, ads, etc.

ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago

Did they fix their sync issue yet? I couldn't get my laptop and desktop to work together so I switched over to Firefox.

jonathansampson 7y ago
Happy to help investigate Sync issues. Able to share more details?
- ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
  It gives you a password chain you can input into another browser to link it. It worked on my mobile, but not on another Windows 10 machine. https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/dhqvyz/sync_issues/ https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/dhqvyz/sync_...

Hamcha 7y ago

I've used Brave since March, and I'm really not impressed. For a browser that tries to be different, it's incredible how little consideration has been given to things that annoy users and that could probably be trivial to remove. To be more specific, my issues with Brave are: - Still uses the Chrome Web Store as main store - Does not have an easy way to load packaged extensions from 3rd party sources - Even after adding them as unpacked, you still get the same annoying popup every time you open the browser. - I received notices that "My account was waiting for a deposit" the entire time, even though I never allocated any money to anyone - Tipping amounts are fixed I always saw Brave as "not chrome, and not as much of a change as Firefox", but their approach seem lazy, features halfassed at best and the sneaky anti-features that Chrome has been adding to push users to lock into Google stuff (see all my remarks about extensions) not addressed at all. I'm using Firefox as main browser now, and I haven't been missing brave once.

colordrops 7y ago
It's perfect for my use case: Chrome but with all the google bits removed and built-in ad-blocking. Can't say any of those things you listed have bothered me. I don't use BAT. Edit: Why do so many new accounts (green text) post to any thread about Brave?
- grzte 7y ago
  I was thinking the same. I considered Vivaldi for some time but it was just buggy. That's a shame because now that Chrome is going to release manifest v3, many users will look for alternatives. Vivaldi has had years to polish their UI but they have missed the train. Eventually I'll settle with Brave, I think.
  - colordrops 7y ago
    I tried both Vivaldi and Brave and ended up with Brave because it is open source.
  - larntz 7y ago
    I used Vivaldi for a long time and never encountered many UI bugs. About a year ago I switched to Firefox mainly because I don't want Chromium to take over the world. What I miss most using Firefox is the ability to customize almost everything.

techntoke 7y ago

Offers 3-6x faster browsing than what exactly, browsing with IE or Edge without any ad blocking?

etr71115 7y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgl7FLh7QsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgl7FLh7QsA
- techntoke 7y ago
  Weird to watch how long it takes to load a single site using their demo video. Makes me think that they are using some type of preloading, which would mean that your web requests are actually being sent to Brave. It appears after some brief research that they are infact precaching, and the other browsers they are testing against we don't have any details on their configuration but can clearly see that they do not have uBlock Origin enabled. I wouldn't consider this a fair test.
  - csharp 7y ago
    We don't collect your browsing data, and it isn't proxied through Brave. I am unsure what preloading information you found. All of our configurations are open source, so if there is something particular you are looking for, it is visible. We are also comparing browser defaults here. However, our adblocking approach is built directly into the browser using a Rust library and can function faster than a Chrome extension.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

have_faith 7y ago

If people like Brave's ad model, all the power to them. I would personally never touch it. I'm not philosophically on board with the idea that paying people to look at ads is a pragmatic way forward. It doesn't matter if it's opt-in, free-to-play games with loot crates are opt-in, but the decision to go down that road will effect their decision making process when designing new features and I don't want to be part of it even indirectly.

NelsonMinar 7y ago
Brave is unethical. The key problem is they insert themselves into the revenue stream without the consent of the web publishers. It's fine to block ads entirely, but substituting your own ads and collecting money from that is wrong.
- fastball 7y ago
  I'm not sure I see the clear cut ethical dilemma you do. Option 1. block all ads, publishers receive no revenue. Option 2. block all ads, user opts in to unrelated ads, user can choose to give some of the proceeds of seeing those ads to publishers they utilize. How can (2) possibly be worse than (1)?
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    Because it inserts a middleman who takes a cut that the publisher did not enter into an agreement with. If it was just users giving to publishers, that would be fine. Having a middleman hold the publisher's monetization hostage is ethically dubious for the middleman. Consider that I could pirate a movie, or I could pirate it and pay the creators directly, leaving out the distributors the creators contracted with. I fully agree that the second is slightly more ethical than the first, even though the creator agreed to neither. The problem occurs when some Tube site distributes the videos without the creators' consent, collects money from the viewers, takes a cut, and passes the rest to the creator. The Tube site is ethically wrong.
    - 7y ago

FpUser 7y ago

https://brave.com/malvertising-homeland-security/ https://brave.com/malvertising-homeland-security/ "Brave warns US Senate & Congress: foreign state actors can use targeted ads to run code on US government computers, exploiting conventional browsers" Oh, my. I am so scared. And Brave is of course a knight in shining armor ready to protect our shaken foundations.

300bps 7y ago
I got a virus from an ad on reddit in 2008. It actually does happen, and I've used ad blocking software consistently ever since.
- FpUser 7y ago
  I am not arguing about possibility of getting virus through ad on browser. My point is that they are using scaremongering in a hope to advance their product. They have no real proof that it is more secure. As for ads I am using adblock for ages. Not that I got a virus from internet, just do not like seeing ads when not asked.

chilighost 7y ago

Initially I liked the concept of brave, but they destroyed themselves by bloating it with this coin/payment stuff that is not possible to remove 100%. Back to Firefox now.

ulzeraj 7y ago
It’s opt in. You never really tried brave didn’t you?
Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
Curious why you created an account just to make two comments, both of which are entirely incorrect. What's your agenda? Who's paying you to slander Brave?

olalonde 7y ago

Getting a 504 error on https://brave.com/download/ https://brave.com/download/

jonathansampson 7y ago
Apologies for that; server is getting a little more attention than we had expected. Should be working now, though perhaps a bit sluggish at times.

chilighost 7y ago

Brave was initially an interesting browser, but without any options to disable the credits/money add-ons the browser have no future.

colordrops 7y ago
They are opt-in and you can disable them. It seems you never tried the browser. Odd that you'd need a new account to post this.
jonathansampson 7y ago
Brave Rewards is off-by-default. It's up to you to opt-in. And, once you do, you can set the number of ads to be shown each hour (upper-limit). The user is always in control.

dub 7y ago

When the Brave folks make their speed claim, it makes me curious if they genuinely don't understand the difference between above-the-fold page render time vs how long it takes for the spinner to stop spinning. Maybe they understand the difference but prefer to point people at the spinner because it's easier for them to make changes to stop the spinner sooner. Last time I watched one of their speed comparison videos a few months back, it had several examples where their browser was actually never the first to render the useful page content, but was usually the first to stop spinning the spinner in the top of the UI (which, naturally, is what they choose to measure and report).

astuyvenberg 7y ago

I've been using Brave for several months. It's exactly what I wanted - A faster, chromium-based browser with sensible, privacy-conscious defaults. I don't personally mind the Chrome Web Store default.

Aaronstotle 7y ago

I don't understand why they didn't use a stable coin/transition BAT to a stable coin, the volatility of BAT probably keeps creators uneasy. Why sign up for a service where contributions can lose half their value overnight.

jonathansampson 7y ago
When did you see that type of volatility? Advertiser dollars go into the system through purchases of BAT by the team. This helps to maintain steady value. You can see previous transactions (and more) at brave.com/transparency.

Angeo34 7y ago

Whoever uses Brave for "privacy" reasons should understand that Chrome offers more privacy due to fingerprintability. I see the downvotes coming yet it is true check it for yourself. Brave is so easy to fingerprint compared to Chrome it defeats any purpose ever to use Brave in the first place if privacy is your main goal. Removing all the Google bits from the Chromium base doesn't help since you are so fingerprintable.

songshuu 7y ago
If you're talking about the canvas id fingerprint which is identical across all instances of the browser, that lets Brave users hide in the crowd, so it's literally more private. Panopticlick needs to update their docs to make that clearer.
- Angeo34 7y ago
  There are billion of vectors that are still fingerprintable. Best examples are fonts and window decorations. And these cannot be fixed by Brave without increasing entropy. And brave should know this.
blacksmith_tb 7y ago
Hmm, I get identical results from Chrome and Brave on my Ubuntu desktop in Panopticlick, which doesn't disprove your argument, but it looks like Chrome is fingerprintable-enough that the difference may not matter.

omi2therescue 7y ago

another option - https://www.optmein.online/ https://www.optmein.online/

jcmontx 7y ago

I've been using Brave since October 2018 and haven't checked once for updates. It seems that I've been using v0.7 lol

Angeo34 7y ago

>Removed Google bits >Use Google Chrome store so Google still gets every info it ever wanted and even more than before because your fingerprinting is more unique than with Chrome i.e. you give away your entire browsing history for free to Google Whoever uses Brave shouldn't be surprised why advertisers and trackers now have an even easier time following you

telesilla 7y ago

How does this compare to Opera? I prefer to use a Chromium browser and Opera has been fantastic for months as my main browser.

buboard 7y ago

Ha , it seems i ve made a few bucks (rather, bats) and didn't even know. I didn't know you can monetize twitter and reddit, but it makes a lot of sense! I kinda like the idea of users controlling sites indirectly by rewarding and punishing them for ads, kind of a direct-to-webmaster upvote button. Not sure about the way they implement their ad replacement, but if the basic model works there will probably be more companies that will enter the BAT ecosystem.

asah 7y ago

Not sure about the politics... but it's noticeably faster than Chrome or Firefox.

xyst 7y ago

Front end developers: “yet another browser to support”

cheald 7y ago
It's just Chromium, so it's not particularly anything new to support.

johnpowell 7y ago

They still aren't brave enough to use a unique user agent string. Brave on left, Chrome on right. https://i.imgur.com/aPI776u.png https://i.imgur.com/aPI776u.png

aembleton 7y ago
Reduces fingerprinting.

dsincl12 7y ago

Sorry I've tried to give Brave a shot for a couple of months and the 3-6x faster browsing is nonsense. It's really slow compared to Chrome or Firefox. Just do a quick comparison yourself, you can probably count seconds on a couple of sites you visit regularly whereas Chrome loads instantly.

Wheaties466 7y ago
I run a high spec machine with 3 browsers(Brave and Google Chrome, Firefox) 8-10 hours a day every work day. I respectfully completely disagree. I do not find it slow in comparison to the others, I do find it much much quicker on 90%+ sites. I do not work for brave, mozilla, google or apple. I also have no stake in any of those companies nor do I know anyone that works for those companies. I really wonder how so many people in this thread can have a negative response when I personally have felt the complete opposite. I do suspect it has something to do with employer bias.

atombender 7y ago

I've been using Brave for a few months, and I'm basically using it as an un-Googled Chrome. Not using the ad rewards system. It's pretty good, though I sometimes miss Safari with its amazing location bar autocompletion and ease of syncing with the iOS version. (Brave supports syncs, but it's not great, and the iOS app is nowhere as good as Safari on iOS.) Brave does have some bugs. Since July or so, several sites (including my bank) don't work because Brave incorrectly [1] blocks their cookies, even with the "shield" turned off. [1] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/6099 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/6099 and several others.

csharp 7y ago
What do you like about Safari that iOS Brave is missing? We are quite a bit faster than Safari, and our private mode is more aggressive against things like cookies and writing data to disk.
- atombender 7y ago
  Honestly, I've not found any speed difference. Things I don't like: * Autocompletion is much worse than Safari. See screenshot comparison [1]. The results are dinky and hard to read, and rarely include history or bookmarks. For example, in the screenshot, if I type "p", it matches bookmarks and history, but the suggestions disappear if I type anything more, despite the fact that "photothera" is a substring. * Brave's tabs (though the tab overview is nice). Mobile is just too small to show tabs. * The fact that the location bar is filled with widgets that give only about 30% of the space to the URL. * Syncing of bookmarks, history, etc. seems to randomly stop working. It's never really worked for me. Syncing should just work seamlessly with iCloud, and not require the manual step that it currently does. * "Find in page" doesn't work for PDFs. Plus, the privacy bugs (see my previous comment) that never get solved. Being aggressive about cookies is one thing; breaking non-abusive sites without any workaround isn't acceptable. I don't really use private mode, so that's not relevant for me. I also don't use Brave Rewards, so the big icon in the address bar is annoying. [1] https://imgur.com/a/nygTJ9f https://imgur.com/a/nygTJ9f
  - 7y ago

bobowzki 7y ago

I wonder how much brave.com was?

bsclifton 7y ago
I don't think it says a price, but it was previously used by a "nuclear polka" band :) https://brave.com/the-road-to-brave-one-dot-zero/ https://brave.com/the-road-to-brave-one-dot-zero/

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mikelward 7y ago

Just tried it. Still no Android Autofill support. Don't want to enable less secure legacy accessibility support. https://community.brave.com/t/android-autofill-api-enabled-in-brave/64238/11 https://community.brave.com/t/android-autofill-api-enabled-i...

mediaserf 7y ago

Why does the BAT mining extension continue to run even if I opt-out of the rewards system?

egdod 7y ago

No thanks. Sticking with Firefox.

The_rationalist 7y ago

Source for the performance claims? Are they not upstreaming performance change for chromium?

sergiotapia 7y ago

Already using Brave on my work computer for the past year ish. Infinitely better than _anything_ out there. Once they offer browser sync of saved passwords and history, I'm gone for good chrome/firefox on every other device I own.

heimatau 7y ago

I keep trying to use Brave but I feel that it drops the ball. I think Hamcha encapsulates most of my grievances. I'd like to add that if your Browser is trying to add a new dynamic of economics but your UX is terrible dealing with tips (fixed) and you're annoying users about needing a deposit. You're doing it wrong. It's almost like Brave doesn't even believe in it's mission. There should be an intense focus on their product. That they are relentless at it. Because right now, it all seems half-baked.

kylebenzle 7y ago

I bought $20,000 worth of BAT a few years ago, havent had to work a day since.

nicpottier 7y ago

I'm going to give this a try again. I REALLY want the model of micropayments vs ads to work. I realize content creators need to get paid, I just refuse to be subtly influenced by ads in my day to day life. I currently use an ad blocker in Chrome to get around that but I'm perfectly fine paying $5 a month to creators I use. The problem is that I think ads may be worth even more than that to creators, which if you have any doubt about their efficacy should make you rethink.

MentallyRetired 7y ago

As a Firefox user, is there a reason to convert? Seems like a step backwards to me, even though I applaud what they're doing.

gnicholas 7y ago
In my experience (2017 MBP running Mojave), it is much, much faster than Firefox. I have lots of tabs open, and my fan almost never kicks on anymore. With FF, even using ublock and even a pihole, the fan was constantly at full throttle. Maybe I was doing other things wrong, but switching to Brave has made a huge difference for me. I say this as someone who stood by FF for a decade and a half.
- Lev1a 7y ago
  > With FF, even using ublock and even a pihole, the fan was constantly at full throttle. Is that still the case even with FFs recent update to version 70[1]? [1]: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-reduced-power-usage-in-firefox-70-on-macos-with-core-animation/ https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-red...
  - gnicholas 7y ago
    70, yes. Haven’t tried 71.
etr71115 7y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgl7FLh7QsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgl7FLh7QsA

arilotter 7y ago

They also flipped on their built-in Web3 Ethereum wallet by default, breaking all Web3-compatible sites for people who had another wallet (e.g. MetaMask) installed.

Karunamon 7y ago

I put Brave on the backburner a while ago because of some random display glitches, mostly on YouTube, and the built-in adblocker not really being up to par with something like uBO. but this sounds like a good an excuse as any to try it again.

companyhen 7y ago

I love Brave, keep it going :)

lacker 7y ago

Is Brave making any amount of money from their advertising system? I can't find any public communications about it, and I would expect them to be touting if the numbers are good. The weird thing about Brave is that they raised $35 million from their crypto ICO, but that isn't like normal fundraising because you can only do it once. So they really need their real business to kick in and start working before they run out of that money, more than most venture-backed startups need to start making money. Getting paid money to watch ads reminds me of AllAdvantage in the first dotcom boom. It seems cool at first when the system is juiced by investor money, but once advertisers realize the ROI is low, the money dries up.

BrendanEich 7y ago
https://brave.com/transparency https://brave.com/transparency shows revenue share BAT buys to pay users their 70% from invoices paid in fiat. Some ad buyers use BAT, and we do some barters.

fuu_dev 7y ago

Criticism: #1 Brave advertise with privacy and speed while all they do is adding adblock. #2 Brave replaces adds with their own adds. This basically means you get the same experience but cut off the income of the content creator entirely. #3 Brave allows you to reward 3rd party sites. This system is so nice they even got legal issues as it was assumed as fraud. #4 BAT. Brave advertise with consumer first. The best choice for the consumer would be Paypal. If there is an incent to stay with crypto currency Bitcoin or Ethereum. Given Brave created their own crypto currency and base every model around that they can profit from Transactions/services with the currency too on top of the share they take when you use their add platform/feature. Given the criticism its very hard for me to understand users sympathizing with the browser.

fastball 7y ago
#1 Their ad-blocker is also a tracking blocker and a pretty strict one at that. They also spend a lot of time optimizing the performance[0] of this ad-blocking. This improves the browsing experience. #2 Brave Ads are opt-in. You can alternatively fund the sites you visit on the web by putting BAT into your wallet directly and having the browser automatically distribute funds based on which content you spend time on per month. The entire idea of Brave is that people were already using ad-blockers, so I'm not sure how this is worse for content creators. #3 ??? #4 BAT is an ERC-20 token - it exists on the Ethereum blockchain. Not sure why you think BTC would be better than that. Honestly not sure why you think Paypal would be better than that. At this point, anyone can transact the currency easily and quickly without any intervention from Brave. I can convert BAT to DAI right now on a decentralized exchange in less than a minute and have a virtual currency pegged to USD even if I don't bank with USD. At the moment this process is somewhat technical, but it overall seems very pro-consumer to me. [0] https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/ https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/
- fuu_dev 7y ago
  ad 2: Brave takes a 30% cut of the add income. The adds you block are targeted adds, thus they yield a higher income. Besides that there are usually service fees for converting your BAT to other currencies. The entire service is opt in making it also not guaranteed for the content creator to receive the reward. This should lead even in the best case to a notably worse outcome. ad 3: https://outline.com/fJm5C3 https://outline.com/fJm5C3 ad 4: i explained the issue in my other response.

viach 7y ago

> You set a budget (e.g. 10 BAT/month), and Brave distributes it the sites you use most, e.g. if you watch a particular YouTube channel 30% of your browsing time, it will send 30% of 10 BAT each month to that content creator. If you would own a video streaming service (a startup!) and some company started to pay your users for viewing ads on your platform in some MagicMoneyCoins putting your pocket outside the cash flow, what would you do? If you would want to receive organic traffic from your ads and instead start to experience crazy stream of incentivized ad clickers with near zero conversion rate, what would you do? Imo the answers to these questions are not that pleasant for Brave. Maybe I'm wrong of course, like the most of times.

fastball 7y ago
Yeah, having seen all the useless previous attempts at paying users to watch/click ads, I'm not particularly hopeful for the long-term prospects of that system. Seems like it might be better to just force the user to disburse those funds to the sites they visit.

iseeyou 7y ago

I use Brave on iOS with javascript blocked as it is the only* iOS browser which gives me the ability to easily use the Web without JS while giving me the ability to quickly enable it for the site where it makes sense, and still retain the ad blocking feature. A surprisingly big part of the Internet works as well or better and faster with javascript disabled, but sometimes it is actually needed and useful so I find this whitelisting method works well. I tried playing around with the script blocking ability of native content blockers but never got it working properly, for one I think it can't block script tags only externa scripts. But my recommendation, if you are giving Brave a try is to change the default to disallow scripts, and enable them as needed, it's refreshing to browse the Web without Popups 2.0 and all the other not so nice uses of JS. (* only I've found with my limited searching)

DHPersonal 7y ago
SnowHaze seems to have a quick toggle available. https://snowhaze.com/en/index.html https://snowhaze.com/en/index.html
- iseeyou 7y ago
  It does, thanks for the tip. It does seem to allow even finer grained configuration of what to block or allow so I will definitely take a look.
pcnix 7y ago
You might also like umatrix for this, it gives unmatched control over blocking resources.
- iseeyou 7y ago
  Yes, there are multiple solutions available for Chrome/Firefox on other platforms, but on iOS there is only native/apple content blockers and browsers with built in ad blocking.

snek 7y ago

Regardless of Brave's intent, they operate in the advertising industry, and eventually, if not already, it will become a conflict of interest.

radikalus 7y ago

Great mission, product and vision. Very excited to see more functionality in browser away from the traditional rails

woodandsteel 7y ago

There are a lot of negative comments here about Brave. They fall into two classes. One group thinks the present state of affairs with the web is ok, so there is no need for Brave. That view is so cracked that I am not going to bother responding to it. The other group agrees the web is broken, but then claims that Brave won't fix things and will even make them worse. I don't think that is true, but the thing is, we need to have something new here, and Brave is the only solution out there at present that is developed, is trying to address all the problems, and is reasonably usable by non-techies, and so I am using it and I urge everyone else to do so too. To those people who claim Brave is awful, I say they should be working on something they think would better. I suspect they aren't doing that because they are just negative people, or they are trollers who are being paid by the present internet powers-that-be. On the latter idea, its not just paranoia. If someone came up with a good alternative, people like the advertising networks would feel mortally threatened, and I think it is absolutely certain they would strike back with a massive disinformation campaign.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

mind_half_full 7y ago

Great job Brave! Privacy protecting ads and you get paid to browse. Simply amazing!!

Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
A brand new account praising a business. This reeks of being an astroturfing account.
- trpc 7y ago
  Almost every post that links to brave.com makes it to the frontpage withing minutes. And all criticism is buried with lots of shilling. This company has been compromising HN for years now, as well as other influential online communites like Reddit and 4chan.

jobseeker990 7y ago

It's so weird, I had this exact idea when bitcoin came out. But it seemed like you'd need a money transmitter license to be able to do it? So I gave up.

annoyingnoob 7y ago

Fuck ads. Fuck tracking. Fuck making me part of your 'audience'. There has to be a better way. I'm going with blocking until there is a better answer. Brave may be a step in the right direction but its not the solution.

foob4r 7y ago
I understand "fuck trackers". Why "fuck ads"?
- mrlala 7y ago
  >Why "fuck ads"? Because ads are basically useless? I can remember MAYBE a handful of times in my entire life where an "ad" has actually prompted me to look into/buy something.
- maelito 7y ago
  Because I want to buy what's useful to me, not what companies suggest to me (mostly through obvious or less obvious lies).
degenerate 7y ago
The main reason I block ads is because ad networks make so many requests (and the ads load so slow) that it always affects my browsing. I am either waiting for the page to load because of poorly engineered synchronous ad network code, or I'm having my content fumbled around at the tail end of pageload. Both situations are obtrusive, aggravating, and slow me down. In the early 2000s ads were simple images that loaded just as fast as everything else, and I didn't mind them much, even the cheesy animated ones. It's the delivery, not the content, that I abhor.
AgentME 7y ago
If you don't opt into seeing ads, then Brave is a browser with ad-blocking built in (and a donate-to-sites-you-use button).

paulcarroty 7y ago

I like their "Shield", looks very well. 128k blocked ads/trackers for ~month when uBlock/uMatrix are enabled too. About their Ad program - money are very small yet, for both: site owners & users.

emptysongglass 7y ago

Two big issues for me that have kept me on Firefox despite being a huge cryptocurrency nerd: 1. The decision to base on Chromium is a bigger negative for me than any feature. We're all going to regret contributing to the One True Engine someday and it's going to be so painful to fix. 2. BAT is a pure money play. There's no inherent utility outside buying and spending. And Ethereum is nothing if not the biggest utility crypto out there. This is always one of those things in the Ethereum ecosystem where I point out that you didn't have to make yet another ERC-20 if your only play is money. It's too late now, of course. But man, it would have been terrific to recommend a browser that blocked ads out of the box and wasn't part of the engine hegemony.

eigenvalue 7y ago
What would you have the Brave team do? Create a new html rendering engine from scratch? That is an incredibly challenging engineering project that would probably require years and many tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to do well, and what would be the benefit to Brave's users and investors? It would just lead to loads of performance and compatibility issues, and it is fundamentally irrelevant to the core value proposition of Brave, which is to monetize ads on behalf of users and content creators.
- emptysongglass 7y ago
  No, of course not. I would have had them base on Gecko.
  - 1_player 7y ago
    Don't quote me on that, but Gecko must not be the easiest engine to build upon. How many browsers out there are based on Gecko, apart from Firefox? AFAIK the only choice nowadays is between Chromium and WebKit. I honestly would like to see more WebKit based browsers instead.
    - judge2020 7y ago
      I wonder if Webkit still have any resources behind using it on Windows since the documentation for building it[0] still says "Windows 8.1" (and I can't find links to the documentation or website SVN repo). 0: https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/ https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/

pergadad 7y ago

I used brace for a while on mobile but stopped once brave started to out ads in the notification bar. I don't remember exactly what they were for - probably BAT and the browser itself - but I definitely don't need another pathway to get slammed. Back to Firefox and happy as can be.

maelito 7y ago

What if I really don't want to see ads at all ? Can I pay Brave in € and let it distribute this money to the content creators ?

AgentME 7y ago
Yes-ish. You can put your own BAT (or Bitcoin or ETH) into your Brave wallet. You can buy BAT from Coinbase/Uphold/other exchanges.
- maelito 7y ago
  That's cool. I'd use it if I can : - charge my account by credit card in 1 click - get the same ad blocking level as mublock

fareesh 7y ago

I've been using Brave as a replacement for Chrome for about 3 months now. The switch has been quite enjoyable. Lighthouse doesn't seem to work properly, which I use Chrome for.

ganitarashid 7y ago

I stopped reading once I saw it has a way to show advertisements

russellbeattie 7y ago

The other day I tried to look up a recipe for beef stew on my phone. Normally my web reading experience tends to be limited to big news sites and tech on a Desktop or Tablet - the ads there are bad, but not terrible. But recipe sites are a whole different category of horrible. I was shocked. They are all absolutely PACKED with ads. Try it yourself. It's ridiculous. Every other paragraph is separated by ads, overlays, click-spam news, auto-playing videos, etc. I tried easily 7 or 8 different sites before giving up and installing Brave. This is just anecdotal, but I think the categories that are targeted at the broadest category of users, probably scewing towards older and female, are just being straight up abusive. And mobile seems to be particularly bad. This situation is untenable. I guess sites and advertisers are just relying on a continuing influx of newbies to line their pockets, but really it's a scorched Earth policy that can't possibly continue as is.

neilobremski 7y ago

Brave is awesome and I'm happy to see them reaching this point. I've been using this as my primary browser for the past 2 years and my absolute favorite thing about it is the simple profiles switching. HOWEVER that's also the thing that's irritated me the most as this software has changed: it started with person-specific tabs (awesome!) then moved to person-specific windows (okay ...), and now for the third time they've changed the icons available without letting me specify custom pictures (ugh!). Where is my ability to sync these PROFILES AS A GROUP? Setting up half a dozen "people" on each new computer becomes a tiresome exercise. I tried the rewards/BAT thing for a while but after a few computer changes and losing my wallet through the process, I gave up and just block everything and contribute nothing. I'd like to get back into it but all of those transitions just killed it for me. All that said, there's a lot of good stuff in here and I'm happy to be using it as my primary browser. Now that they're hitting 1.0 I may actually be able to recommend it to non-tech people.

marvindanig 7y ago

Awesome work, Brave! We use Brave internally for all our development work and are also a Brave Certified book publisher for the web [1][2]. Please tip us to support the books we publish if you are a Brave user too! I can vouch for the quality of browsing experience and speed that we have had in the past two years. One of the best features of Brave, which led me to set the browser as our default, is on a shortcut `Command + Option + N`. This shortcut opens a private window using Tor which is super useful, handy, fast and most importantly private. :-) [1] https://bubblin.io https://bubblin.io [2] https://creators.brave.com/ https://creators.brave.com/

dhosek 7y ago

BLOCKCHAIN! Let's throw money at it!

bytematic 7y ago

Is this the browser that blocks ads unless the website allows brave ads and get brave crypto. Essentially the same model the mafia uses. I'm sure this will go great.

trpc 7y ago

Brave is a scam just like most "privacy centered" parasite products like DDG and VPN providers. All these companies are run by shameless and aggressive useless parasites who actually offer nothing but a rebranded product made by others. It's sad that a community supposedly filled by software engineers fall for and promote such scams

pushcx 7y ago

Please return "Brave" to your User-Agent[0] so we can return to opting out of your cryptocurrency.[1] (Yes, I'm aware of the changes since the scandal broke[2].) [0] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/1052#issuecomment-549667310 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/1052#issuecomm... [1] https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/761 https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/761 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999

daveheq 7y ago

1.0 Chrome B

emiliovesprini 7y ago

Eternal reminder by @paulskallas (Twitter): > there's never been a good ad in the history of advertising. 120 years and there's never been an ad that has stood the test of time and was fondly remembered like literature or a song. It is a profoundly anti lindy medium that exists in the now, forever

toxicFork 7y ago
There was a Turkish tv channel that highlighted funny or cool advertisements.

Kye 7y ago

A privacy-focused browser that took money from the Palantir guy. Hard pass. That's before considering the CEO's past, unexplained donation to a hate campaign spearheaded by the Mormon church.

tomaszs 7y ago

Brave gives life back to the internet, like Daft Punk gave life back to music.

dxhdr 7y ago

So if I operate a website, Brave can remove my monetization and replace it with their own, without my consent? How does that work?

JohnTHaller 7y ago

We've still got BAT enabled on PortableApps.com with the standard custom Brave browser header and donation ask you setup via their program. We got 31.35 BAT (about $8.08) for around 2.7 million page views in the last month. We also got a single 0.95 BAT (about 24 cent) donation. It seems that - right now at least - the only way a site will make enough money to be worth it is via Brave referrals (advertising Brave to your users to get them to switch).

thekyle 7y ago

I would be more inclined to try BAT if it were just an extension that I could add to any browser of my choice. Also, having tried Brave it doesn't seem like you actually have the private keys to your own wallet since I wasn't able to withdraw any funds without an Uphold account.

vini 7y ago

I'm unable to download, the server is returning 502 - bad gateway http://updates.bravesoftware.com/service/update2 http://updates.bravesoftware.com/service/update2

miguelmota 7y ago

Brave: we disable all ads Brave: hey you want rewards? here's some notification ads

piyush_soni 7y ago

Still no extensions sync?

alwillis 7y ago

Brave has a series of ads about different aspects of what Brave offers: Creators: https://vimeo.com/372813874 https://vimeo.com/372813874 Speed: https://vimeo.com/372813765 https://vimeo.com/372813765 Privacy: https://vimeo.com/372736442 https://vimeo.com/372736442 This one isn’t an ad; it’s a video of a speed test of Brave vs. Chrome and Firefox loading sites that millions of users access every day and doing much faster: Brave Browser Speed Comparison 2019: https://vimeo.com/371512354 https://vimeo.com/371512354

sivalingam 7y ago

I don't trust anything build on top of chromium web browser developed by Google. Definitely google will have some way to track user. I prefer Firefox for trust in privacy.

wheresvic3 7y ago

This is a pretty cool idea - I'm not sure how intrusive the OS notification are going to be but I'm willing to give it a shot as long as they don't collect any personal info on me. I just signed up as a content creator and added my website as a channel - interestingly my website already had some bat associated with it. Does this mean that some people have already donated some BAT to it?

teknopaul 7y ago

Downloaded 1.0, first thing I entered in to the address bar got sent to Google, doh! uninstalled, back to FireFox and DDG.

scoutt 7y ago

> “Either we all accept the $330 billion ad-tech industry treating us as their products, exploiting our data, piling on more data breaches and privacy scandals, and starving publishers of revenue; or ... Give Brave a piece of that moist and delicious $330B cake, because... > That’s the inspiration behind Brave,” he added.

martindale 7y ago

General reminder that Brave is a scam; they forcefully converted user funds that were held in BTC to their own competitive token, BAT, which seeks to monetize your attention. Not to mention the massive privacy leak that is a public network of transactions, revealing browsing habits by way of advertising payments.