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> How many times have Brave pivoted at this point? On one hand, the features are at least somewhat adjacent to their core business of building a web browser. O

by tolien 5y ago

> How many times have Brave pivoted at this point? On one hand, the features are at least somewhat adjacent to their core business of building a web browser. On the other, whenever Mozilla did something like this they were panned for spreading themselves too thin and diverging from their core mission.

sneak 5y ago
Mozilla is a nonprofit. Brave is not.
- jonathansampson 5y ago
  A nonprofit where the people at the top have multi-million dollar salaries (see https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html) Yes, Brave is for profit, but not at the cost of user data and/or trust. Brave doesn't collect or exchange your data. Firefox, on the other hand, transmits your keystrokes to Google right out of the box. Leith did a great side-by-side comparison of various top browsers (including Firefox and Brave), finding the latter to be in a class of its own in terms of privacy out of the box: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf.
- tolien 5y ago
  Good point, Brave's responsibility as a for-profit enterprise is to attempt to go full Paperclip Game and grow to consume the entire universe. More seriously, I don't think for-profit/non-profit really matters here. Mozilla's reasoning was pretty clear (for better or worse) that they saw these adjacent services as helping to break into the lock-in of Apple/Google/MS who used either their own browser-adjacent services to push their own browsers, or to provide privacy-respecting versions of services (in an attempt to displace, say, Zoom).
- soundnote 5y ago
  Mozilla, the foundation, is a nonprofit. The Corporation is a for-profit entity (though it apparently invests all its profits back into the company).
soundnote 5y ago
On the other hand, Mozilla fans are mostly morons who are actively hostile to success and want a pristine FOSS project funded entirely on donations. (I was one of those morons back in the day) I think initiatives like Pocket, Brave Search, Brave Talk, a privacy-respecting ads ecosystem, Vivaldi's Mail/Calendar/RSS setup and integrated barebones Notes module are all pretty much exactly what should happen. There was an article about how using Firefox alone is meaningless: http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.html#adam%27s-rant http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.ht... I'm drawn to agree: The browser alone is a hard sell, a bit like how Steve Jobs said that Dropbox is not a product, but a feature. A browser company needs to provide services for users to stay relevant. Search, notes and communication tools are part and parcel of that. If you're just a window, you're going to die.
- tolien 5y ago
  This post is a fine example of how Mozilla seems intent to shit the bed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28622837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28622837 As soon as Firefox on mobile isn’t a thing people want to use, desktop Firefox suddenly has a “it won’t sync with your mobile” hill to climb.

by tolien 5y ago

sneak 5y ago

Mozilla is a nonprofit. Brave is not.

jonathansampson 5y ago
A nonprofit where the people at the top have multi-million dollar salaries (see https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html) Yes, Brave is for profit, but not at the cost of user data and/or trust. Brave doesn't collect or exchange your data. Firefox, on the other hand, transmits your keystrokes to Google right out of the box. Leith did a great side-by-side comparison of various top browsers (including Firefox and Brave), finding the latter to be in a class of its own in terms of privacy out of the box: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf.
tolien 5y ago
Good point, Brave's responsibility as a for-profit enterprise is to attempt to go full Paperclip Game and grow to consume the entire universe. More seriously, I don't think for-profit/non-profit really matters here. Mozilla's reasoning was pretty clear (for better or worse) that they saw these adjacent services as helping to break into the lock-in of Apple/Google/MS who used either their own browser-adjacent services to push their own browsers, or to provide privacy-respecting versions of services (in an attempt to displace, say, Zoom).
soundnote 5y ago
Mozilla, the foundation, is a nonprofit. The Corporation is a for-profit entity (though it apparently invests all its profits back into the company).

soundnote 5y ago

On the other hand, Mozilla fans are mostly morons who are actively hostile to success and want a pristine FOSS project funded entirely on donations. (I was one of those morons back in the day) I think initiatives like Pocket, Brave Search, Brave Talk, a privacy-respecting ads ecosystem, Vivaldi's Mail/Calendar/RSS setup and integrated barebones Notes module are all pretty much exactly what should happen. There was an article about how using Firefox alone is meaningless: http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.html#adam%27s-rant http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.ht... I'm drawn to agree: The browser alone is a hard sell, a bit like how Steve Jobs said that Dropbox is not a product, but a feature. A browser company needs to provide services for users to stay relevant. Search, notes and communication tools are part and parcel of that. If you're just a window, you're going to die.

tolien 5y ago
This post is a fine example of how Mozilla seems intent to shit the bed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28622837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28622837 As soon as Firefox on mobile isn’t a thing people want to use, desktop Firefox suddenly has a “it won’t sync with your mobile” hill to climb.