8 ms·

Brave is the new Mozilla. Mozilla is a husk. Brave launched a new search engine (which works great. try it!), have built-in Tor support, Wayback Machine support

Brave is the new Mozilla. Mozilla is a husk. Brave launched a new search engine (which works great. try it!), have built-in Tor support, Wayback Machine support, experiment with new revenue models and unlike Mitchell "we need more than deplatforming" Baker, Eich actually seems to have the visceral inclination for the things that Mozilla claims to stand for.

pl0x 5y ago
- henriquez 5y ago
  You can turn off the Brave Rewards if you don't want them. If you want to cut off your access to technologies because the man who invented them doesn't meet your puritanical world-view then you should also disable JavaScript since Brendan Eich invented JavaScript. As a gay man I could give two shits about his opinion on gay marriage. In my opinion marriage is inherently a religious institution and the state has no business regulating it whatsoever. From the state's standpoint any combination of genders should be considered a civil union for taxation purposes and if you want to have your union blessed by the religion of your choice, go ahead. They can call it marriage, they can call it a ham sandwich. "Gay marriage" shouldn't legally exist because neither should "marriage." But nuance doesn't exist in a world of anger-driven online lynch mobs.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    You're calling equal rights for gay people puritanical? You're playing a lot of mental gymnastics here. Eich isn't anti-marriage, he specifically supported excluding gay people from marriage. He gave money to one of the most vocal prop 8 supporters and a group that fund-raised on prop 8 specifically. Where's the nuance?
    - soundnote 5y ago
      No. What he's calling puritanical is an attitude where you won't touch things made by people who disagree with you on something. What your position on gay marriage is is largely irrelevant.
      - henriquez 5y ago
        Exactly.
      - micromacrofoot 5y ago
        I'm sorry, am I not supposed to be able to "vote with my wallet"? If someone says "hey the guy that runs this company doesn't think you should be treated the same as others because of your sexual preference" I should ignore that because "who cares"? I'm just not sure what the counter-argument is here... it sounds like "everything and everyone sucks, and you suck too, so stop paying attention and trying to improve anything"
        soundnote 5y ago
        > I'm sorry, am I not supposed to be able to "vote with my wallet"? Well, yes. But there's another angle as to what you vote for with it. Voting for the creator's politics is one angle, but there's another one. Whether the creator puts politics into their product. One of the main reasons I use Brave is because it doesn't do politics outside what matters for a browser. Eich may think whatever the fuck he wants, his team the same. But they seem very focused on building a privacy-respecting browser and standalone Internet services. I don't get politics outside privacy, user control and independent web services pushed to me by Brave. The politics that are there matter to a browser, and the stuff that's outside that scope is left as the people's own prerogative. The team at Vivaldi definitely has people who disagree with Eich. I like them too, why? Because they also keep browser-making and their politics separate, and "politics" in their context mostly translates to user control and privacy, as it does at Brave. Both teams understand that they're there to make a tool, and that's it. I know I'll disagree on weighty matters by people making both products, but as far the browser matters, we all agree. Mozilla is just the reverse: It's about activism first, a browser second, and they are not shy about inserting their extraneous politics into the browser. We're more and more into a culture where everything under the Sun has to preach some sort of politics, and it usually detracts from making an actually good product, in my experience. I like to support organizations that focus on making good hammers and leave the politics to the parts of life where they belong. Life is far more civil that way.
  - PascLeRasc 5y ago
    Thanks for the tip. Firefox is running a lot faster with Javascript disabled.
  - deleted 5y ago
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    - deleted 5y ago
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  - Karunamon 5y ago
    >You can turn off the Brave Rewards if you don't want them. You've got that precisely backwards. You have to explicitly enable that feature if you want it.
    - henriquez 5y ago
      lol even better. I've just had it on so long I forgot. The BAT coins just automatically go out to the sites I spend time on.
  - timeon 5y ago
    > COVID conspiracy theorist vs > your puritanical world-view
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sleepingadmin 5y ago
  >Brave also collects your data and sells it back to advertisers but they'll give you their fake coins to do it. I was reading this page earlier today. https://www.unixsheikh.com/articles/choose-your-browser-carefully.html#brave https://www.unixsheikh.com/articles/choose-your-browser-care... The criticism against brave seems pretty hollow without really any remaining criticism. Brave does have this: https://brave.com/privacy/browser/ https://brave.com/privacy/browser/ Would be interesting to see a link showing Brave collecting data. My understanding is that they don't collect data. I must admit I am rather ignorant about the fake coins. >Let's also not forget Brendan Eich is anti-gay marriage. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26868536 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26868536 ~2014. I am curious if his opinion has changed. Sometimes you find yourself on the wrong side of history and re-evaluate positions such as these. Given your link is getting old... maybe he has? If his opinion hasn't changed, I wonder if this political/religious stance really affects my decision of browser? I suspect it doesn't. People are allowed to have political opinions. >He is also a COVID conspiracy theorist. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/brave-brendan-ei https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/brave-brendan-ei... I suppose this is more recent. The problem here is that how many 'conspiracy theories' are now not conspiracy theories. https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1339367981084672000 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1339367981084672000 I suppose in dec 2020 Fauci had admitted that he lied about masks being ineffective. Overall though I really didnt see the content in this nytimes article to justify the title. I suppose the bigger question for me, does this dude matter at all? Let's say he's literal reincarnation of hitler. Does that really change the browser? Flipside, this guy's wiki page says he invented Javascript. Clearly he is hitler.
  - soundnote 5y ago
    > If his opinion hasn't changed, I wonder if this political/religious stance really affects my decision of browser? I suspect it doesn't. People are allowed to have political opinions. One of the main reasons I use Brave is because it doesn't do politics. Eich may think whatever the fuck he wants, his team the same. But they seem very focused on building a privacy-respecting browser and standalone Internet services. The team at Vivaldi definitely has people who disagree with Eich. I like them too, why? Because they keep browser-making and their politics separate, and "politics" in their context mostly translates to user control and privacy, as it does at Brave. Both teams understand that they're there to make a tool, and that's it. Mozilla is just the reverse: It's about activism first, a browser second. And their "rebellion" is a $400 million Google dollar one. I know one thing: When I see a privacy-friendly organization saying we need more than deplatforming and to tweak feeds to suit political agendas, I bail.
- coolso 5y ago
  Let's also not forget that cancel culture and throwing out incendiary labels like "conspiracy theorist" based on a particular set of personal views you and the establishment deem "incorrect" really belongs on Reddit and Twitter, not on HN. For every two links you give for Brave, any random HNer can give 10x or more that amount for Google/Chrome or any other Big Tech company these days.
  - pl0x 5y ago
    Brave is big tech.
- arein3 5y ago
  I might have to check out Brave then
- throwawayciv651 5y ago
  The slate article is better than the BBC one. https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/brendan-eich-why-mozilla-s-ceo-had-to-resign-over-gay-marriage-views.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/brendan-eich-why-mozill... Brave had technical scams too: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/761 https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/761 https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/issues/45 https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/issues/45 https://web.archive.org/web/20181221180137if_/https://twitter.com/tomscott/status/1076160882873380870 https://web.archive.org/web/20181221180137if_/https://twitte... https://web.archive.org/web/20181221231556if_/https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1076187316748615680 https://web.archive.org/web/20181221231556if_/https://twitte... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
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acomjean 5y ago
Curious, why would someone use brave over Chromium? Brave as I understand it is just the Chromium browser at its core. (Similar to how all browsers on iOS are just safari wrapped in a different application layer) https://www.chromium.org/Home https://www.chromium.org/Home
- cglong 5y ago
  I use it on Android because mobile Chrome doesn't support ad blockers (or other extensions).
- alibert 5y ago
  Brave brings: - Native adblocker based on uBlock Origin algo - Proxy all requests to Google based service in use in Chromium such as Safebrowsing - Added anti fingerprinting stuff on some web techs such as webgl, canvas, plugins - Still open source (to be noted: the ads code, server side, is not) - Everything documented on their wiki - Trusted binaries unlike ungoogled-chromium If you can set aside the crypto part of Brave, I believe this is the best Chromium based browser currently. https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove) https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
  - BrendanEich 5y ago
    We work closely with uBO folks, but as a browser we got a lot farther than Google allows an extension to go (and with Manifest V3 they're getting more restrictive). See the blog series at https://brave.com/privacy-updates/ https://brave.com/privacy-updates/ and see also the work detailed at https://brave.com/research/ https://brave.com/research/. Thanks.
- esalman 5y ago
  DuckDuckGo also has a Chromium-based mobile browser.
0xcde4c3db 5y ago
I don't particularly care for the remnant of Mozilla either, but it's not at all clear to me that Brave is a better option. It seems very much like they're trying to position themselves as a kinder, gentler flavor of adtech. I don't want that; I hate that the modern web has turned into an adtech ouroboros, and I want a browser whose mission is to gut the whole thing, not a browser with a new recipe for a more delicious tail.
- BrendanEich 5y ago
  Brave user-private ads are opt in, so I don't agree on your positioning. Ad-tech is always intermediation between advertisers and publishers. We don't puts ads in page at all, and only in user inventory when the user opts in -- and they get 70% of the gross, to align interests. No data collection at all (ad matching against pushed catalog; confirmed via Privacy Pass like protocol, moving on-chain with Solana). HTH
timeon 5y ago
Brave is chromium with different Ad model. What part of it is 'the new Mozilla'?
- lawl 5y ago
  I pay $3 per month for my search engine now and i don't have any ads, neither in my search engine, nor in my browser. Very happy about that. Mozilla hasn't managed to sell me something yet and in fact relies on money from google which makes money with ads.
nextaccountic 5y ago
If Brave at least used Gecko, it could have been. I don't want to support a Blink + Webkit dominance on the Web.
- BrendanEich 5y ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062636 among others. The fight right now is not over engine layer, and no point dying on that hill. Rather, the fight is one level up at user-first economics, vs. big-tech's "users as sheep to shear or take to slaughterhouse" model.

pl0x 5y ago

henriquez 5y ago
You can turn off the Brave Rewards if you don't want them. If you want to cut off your access to technologies because the man who invented them doesn't meet your puritanical world-view then you should also disable JavaScript since Brendan Eich invented JavaScript. As a gay man I could give two shits about his opinion on gay marriage. In my opinion marriage is inherently a religious institution and the state has no business regulating it whatsoever. From the state's standpoint any combination of genders should be considered a civil union for taxation purposes and if you want to have your union blessed by the religion of your choice, go ahead. They can call it marriage, they can call it a ham sandwich. "Gay marriage" shouldn't legally exist because neither should "marriage." But nuance doesn't exist in a world of anger-driven online lynch mobs.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  You're calling equal rights for gay people puritanical? You're playing a lot of mental gymnastics here. Eich isn't anti-marriage, he specifically supported excluding gay people from marriage. He gave money to one of the most vocal prop 8 supporters and a group that fund-raised on prop 8 specifically. Where's the nuance?
  - soundnote 5y ago
    No. What he's calling puritanical is an attitude where you won't touch things made by people who disagree with you on something. What your position on gay marriage is is largely irrelevant.
    - henriquez 5y ago
      Exactly.
    - micromacrofoot 5y ago
      I'm sorry, am I not supposed to be able to "vote with my wallet"? If someone says "hey the guy that runs this company doesn't think you should be treated the same as others because of your sexual preference" I should ignore that because "who cares"? I'm just not sure what the counter-argument is here... it sounds like "everything and everyone sucks, and you suck too, so stop paying attention and trying to improve anything"
      - soundnote 5y ago
        > I'm sorry, am I not supposed to be able to "vote with my wallet"? Well, yes. But there's another angle as to what you vote for with it. Voting for the creator's politics is one angle, but there's another one. Whether the creator puts politics into their product. One of the main reasons I use Brave is because it doesn't do politics outside what matters for a browser. Eich may think whatever the fuck he wants, his team the same. But they seem very focused on building a privacy-respecting browser and standalone Internet services. I don't get politics outside privacy, user control and independent web services pushed to me by Brave. The politics that are there matter to a browser, and the stuff that's outside that scope is left as the people's own prerogative. The team at Vivaldi definitely has people who disagree with Eich. I like them too, why? Because they also keep browser-making and their politics separate, and "politics" in their context mostly translates to user control and privacy, as it does at Brave. Both teams understand that they're there to make a tool, and that's it. I know I'll disagree on weighty matters by people making both products, but as far the browser matters, we all agree. Mozilla is just the reverse: It's about activism first, a browser second, and they are not shy about inserting their extraneous politics into the browser. We're more and more into a culture where everything under the Sun has to preach some sort of politics, and it usually detracts from making an actually good product, in my experience. I like to support organizations that focus on making good hammers and leave the politics to the parts of life where they belong. Life is far more civil that way.
- PascLeRasc 5y ago
  Thanks for the tip. Firefox is running a lot faster with Javascript disabled.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Karunamon 5y ago
  >You can turn off the Brave Rewards if you don't want them. You've got that precisely backwards. You have to explicitly enable that feature if you want it.
  - henriquez 5y ago
    lol even better. I've just had it on so long I forgot. The BAT coins just automatically go out to the sites I spend time on.
- timeon 5y ago
  > COVID conspiracy theorist vs > your puritanical world-view
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sleepingadmin 5y ago
>Brave also collects your data and sells it back to advertisers but they'll give you their fake coins to do it. I was reading this page earlier today. https://www.unixsheikh.com/articles/choose-your-browser-carefully.html#brave https://www.unixsheikh.com/articles/choose-your-browser-care... The criticism against brave seems pretty hollow without really any remaining criticism. Brave does have this: https://brave.com/privacy/browser/ https://brave.com/privacy/browser/ Would be interesting to see a link showing Brave collecting data. My understanding is that they don't collect data. I must admit I am rather ignorant about the fake coins. >Let's also not forget Brendan Eich is anti-gay marriage. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26868536 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26868536 ~2014. I am curious if his opinion has changed. Sometimes you find yourself on the wrong side of history and re-evaluate positions such as these. Given your link is getting old... maybe he has? If his opinion hasn't changed, I wonder if this political/religious stance really affects my decision of browser? I suspect it doesn't. People are allowed to have political opinions. >He is also a COVID conspiracy theorist. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/brave-brendan-ei https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/brave-brendan-ei... I suppose this is more recent. The problem here is that how many 'conspiracy theories' are now not conspiracy theories. https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1339367981084672000 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1339367981084672000 I suppose in dec 2020 Fauci had admitted that he lied about masks being ineffective. Overall though I really didnt see the content in this nytimes article to justify the title. I suppose the bigger question for me, does this dude matter at all? Let's say he's literal reincarnation of hitler. Does that really change the browser? Flipside, this guy's wiki page says he invented Javascript. Clearly he is hitler.
- soundnote 5y ago
  > If his opinion hasn't changed, I wonder if this political/religious stance really affects my decision of browser? I suspect it doesn't. People are allowed to have political opinions. One of the main reasons I use Brave is because it doesn't do politics. Eich may think whatever the fuck he wants, his team the same. But they seem very focused on building a privacy-respecting browser and standalone Internet services. The team at Vivaldi definitely has people who disagree with Eich. I like them too, why? Because they keep browser-making and their politics separate, and "politics" in their context mostly translates to user control and privacy, as it does at Brave. Both teams understand that they're there to make a tool, and that's it. Mozilla is just the reverse: It's about activism first, a browser second. And their "rebellion" is a $400 million Google dollar one. I know one thing: When I see a privacy-friendly organization saying we need more than deplatforming and to tweak feeds to suit political agendas, I bail.
coolso 5y ago
Let's also not forget that cancel culture and throwing out incendiary labels like "conspiracy theorist" based on a particular set of personal views you and the establishment deem "incorrect" really belongs on Reddit and Twitter, not on HN. For every two links you give for Brave, any random HNer can give 10x or more that amount for Google/Chrome or any other Big Tech company these days.
- pl0x 5y ago
  Brave is big tech.
arein3 5y ago
I might have to check out Brave then
throwawayciv651 5y ago
The slate article is better than the BBC one. https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/brendan-eich-why-mozilla-s-ceo-had-to-resign-over-gay-marriage-views.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/brendan-eich-why-mozill... Brave had technical scams too: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/761 https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/761 https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/issues/45 https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/issues/45 https://web.archive.org/web/20181221180137if_/https://twitter.com/tomscott/status/1076160882873380870 https://web.archive.org/web/20181221180137if_/https://twitte... https://web.archive.org/web/20181221231556if_/https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1076187316748615680 https://web.archive.org/web/20181221231556if_/https://twitte... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

acomjean 5y ago

Curious, why would someone use brave over Chromium? Brave as I understand it is just the Chromium browser at its core. (Similar to how all browsers on iOS are just safari wrapped in a different application layer) https://www.chromium.org/Home https://www.chromium.org/Home

cglong 5y ago
I use it on Android because mobile Chrome doesn't support ad blockers (or other extensions).
alibert 5y ago
Brave brings: - Native adblocker based on uBlock Origin algo - Proxy all requests to Google based service in use in Chromium such as Safebrowsing - Added anti fingerprinting stuff on some web techs such as webgl, canvas, plugins - Still open source (to be noted: the ads code, server side, is not) - Everything documented on their wiki - Trusted binaries unlike ungoogled-chromium If you can set aside the crypto part of Brave, I believe this is the best Chromium based browser currently. https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove) https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
- BrendanEich 5y ago
  We work closely with uBO folks, but as a browser we got a lot farther than Google allows an extension to go (and with Manifest V3 they're getting more restrictive). See the blog series at https://brave.com/privacy-updates/ https://brave.com/privacy-updates/ and see also the work detailed at https://brave.com/research/ https://brave.com/research/. Thanks.
esalman 5y ago
DuckDuckGo also has a Chromium-based mobile browser.

0xcde4c3db 5y ago

I don't particularly care for the remnant of Mozilla either, but it's not at all clear to me that Brave is a better option. It seems very much like they're trying to position themselves as a kinder, gentler flavor of adtech. I don't want that; I hate that the modern web has turned into an adtech ouroboros, and I want a browser whose mission is to gut the whole thing, not a browser with a new recipe for a more delicious tail.

BrendanEich 5y ago
Brave user-private ads are opt in, so I don't agree on your positioning. Ad-tech is always intermediation between advertisers and publishers. We don't puts ads in page at all, and only in user inventory when the user opts in -- and they get 70% of the gross, to align interests. No data collection at all (ad matching against pushed catalog; confirmed via Privacy Pass like protocol, moving on-chain with Solana). HTH

timeon 5y ago

Brave is chromium with different Ad model. What part of it is 'the new Mozilla'?

lawl 5y ago
I pay $3 per month for my search engine now and i don't have any ads, neither in my search engine, nor in my browser. Very happy about that. Mozilla hasn't managed to sell me something yet and in fact relies on money from google which makes money with ads.

nextaccountic 5y ago

If Brave at least used Gecko, it could have been. I don't want to support a Blink + Webkit dominance on the Web.

BrendanEich 5y ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062636 among others. The fight right now is not over engine layer, and no point dying on that hill. Rather, the fight is one level up at user-first economics, vs. big-tech's "users as sheep to shear or take to slaughterhouse" model.