5 ms·

I'm really impressed to see this, Mozilla should've led here on implementing something like this years ago. This is a pretty big nudge for me to consider Brave

I'm really impressed to see this, Mozilla should've led here on implementing something like this years ago. This is a pretty big nudge for me to consider Brave as a future browser.

speeder 5y ago
Mozilla kicked one of its main creators years ago too, and that guy is the one making Brave... so no surprise ;) Features that should come out on Mozilla will instead come out of Brave...
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  - mikem170 5y ago
    Did his resigning have something to do with him personally donating $1000 in 2008 in support of California's Proposition 8 referendum? (opposing gay marriage) Just checking, you really didn't mention why he resigned.
    - RedComet 5y ago
      To be more clear, it was to do with media frenzy once they found out about it.
- smoldesu 5y ago
cphoover 5y ago
I agree 100%. There are still things about brave that confuse me... like the browser feature that allows giving crypto to content providers... but as someone who loathes AMP... I support this feature.
- d0gbread 5y ago
  Do you have specific questions about how the crypto features work? They're optional by the way, but I've found them an amazing way to regularly donate to a couple key blogs I follow.
  - cphoover 5y ago
    Yea I guess... How would I set this up? Do I need some sort of wallet? How would a random website author know what to do with this specific cryptocurrency?
- soundnote 5y ago
  As far as I understand it: Brave sells ads. They get $X normal money from it. The ads are delivered from a local catalog downloaded in bulk (the same way safe browsing blocklists are, for example) and matched on device. If you opt in to see Brave's ad popups, you get a cut from the revenue those popups generate. Brave gives this cut as BAT - they buy the coins from the open market. Brave has a built-in tipping service where you can tip people with BAT. If you do, Brave transfers BAT from your wallet to the tippee (and Brave takes a cut from the transaction). Tippee has BAT that they can sell because there's at least one buyer of BAT on the market: Brave. It seems like a sensible system overall, but my specifics may be wrong.
  - cphoover 5y ago
    This is interesting though I doubt I would ever enable this because I loathe popup advertisements probably more than AMP
webmobdev 5y ago
Mozilla is a joke now. They've now converted Firefox into an ad-ware / spyware ( https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/7/22715179/firefox-suggest-search-ads-browser https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/7/22715179/firefox-suggest-... ) because the current geniuses leading Mozilla have decided that apart from the 5+ million users of uBlock Origin, every other Firefox users loves ads and wants them! They've earned 100's of millions of dollars from Firefox, and still claim that they don't have the resources to refactor the browser, modularise it and innovate it. I have always suspected that the current Brave CEO Brendan Eich was a victim of a malicious campaign intended to get him removed from Mozilla (which he co-founded, and later become a CEO of), because he would have been more vocal against Google in Mozilla, and wouldn't have been happy to let the Firefox codebase stagnate while everyone in Mozilla was content with the millions of dollars they were getting from Google. (His religious beliefs / political ideology was just an excuse and just made him an easy target). Edit: I am not endorsing Brave browser either, as there are some questionable privacy issues with it.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  What's a joke is claiming that paid suggestion search results "have converted Firefox into an ad-ware / spyware [sic]" I'm not a fan of them adding this and switching it on, but it's easily disabled... > Click on the hamburger menu and then select Settings > Click on Privacy and Security in the sidebar and scroll to Address Bar — Firefox Suggest > Select or deselect the checkbox for contextual suggestions to turn the feature on or off > Select or deselect the checkbox for “occasional sponsored suggestions”
  - kreeben 5y ago
    >> I'm not a fan of them adding this Excuse me sir but you definitely sound like a fan. The really real joke is claiming that proclaiming that Mozilla is a joke is some sort of a joke. Out-of-the-box I would definitely classify Firefox as ad-ware/spy-ware.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      Does that make Brave adware as well, since it ships with a suite of features fundamentally designed to serve you ads of their own creation?
KennyBlanken 5y ago
I'm not sure why you would be impressed by something that has been possible in Firefox and Chrome for many years with a de-amp extension (though I would recommend a more general-purpose URL-de-cruftifier, such as ClearURLs, which will also remove most tracking bits from URLs.) Google removed ClearURLs from the chrome add-ons store because (I wish I were making it up) the extension's description was too detailed: https://www.ghacks.net/2021/03/25/the-curious-case-of-clearurls-removal-from-the-google-chrome-webstore/ https://www.ghacks.net/2021/03/25/the-curious-case-of-clearu... Brave implementing this, while nice, is basically a nothingburger.
- jonathansampson 5y ago
  I think you demonstrated in your own post why this is such a big deal. Extensions can certainly deliver this type of functionality in large part, but you have to [run an extension]. You need to ran an extension process (with its additional overhead). You need to make sure Google doesn't swoop-in with breaking changes between manifest versions. Then you have to make sure the extension is permitted in the Web Store, and not removed over something as silly as a detailed description. By delivering this functionality natively, Brave offers a more reliable and efficient solution to the problem of AMP.
  - richardwhiuk 5y ago
    You have to run Brave, which is a considerable overhead.
    - jonathansampson 5y ago
      Running a browser is better than running a browser in addition to several extensions for functionality that could be integrated natively, resulting in less overhead. But yes, you will need to use a browser to browse the Web
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        I don't trust Brave's implementation in the first place. You have a direct conflict of interest with protecting user privacy since you also make money off of the ads you serve users (because of how you skim BAT revenue). Furthermore, your scummy behavior of holding site operators ad revenue hostage is pretty disgusting, and doesn't provide much of a moral compass for us to base your actions off of. I'd trust stock Chromium before I'd install Brave on any of my machines.

I'm really impressed to see this, Mozilla should've led here on implementing something like this years ago. This is a pretty big nudge for me to consider Brave as a future browser.

speeder 5y ago

Mozilla kicked one of its main creators years ago too, and that guy is the one making Brave... so no surprise ;) Features that should come out on Mozilla will instead come out of Brave...

KennyBlanken 5y ago
- mikem170 5y ago
  Did his resigning have something to do with him personally donating $1000 in 2008 in support of California's Proposition 8 referendum? (opposing gay marriage) Just checking, you really didn't mention why he resigned.
  - RedComet 5y ago
    To be more clear, it was to do with media frenzy once they found out about it.
smoldesu 5y ago

cphoover 5y ago

I agree 100%. There are still things about brave that confuse me... like the browser feature that allows giving crypto to content providers... but as someone who loathes AMP... I support this feature.

d0gbread 5y ago
Do you have specific questions about how the crypto features work? They're optional by the way, but I've found them an amazing way to regularly donate to a couple key blogs I follow.
- cphoover 5y ago
  Yea I guess... How would I set this up? Do I need some sort of wallet? How would a random website author know what to do with this specific cryptocurrency?
soundnote 5y ago
As far as I understand it: Brave sells ads. They get $X normal money from it. The ads are delivered from a local catalog downloaded in bulk (the same way safe browsing blocklists are, for example) and matched on device. If you opt in to see Brave's ad popups, you get a cut from the revenue those popups generate. Brave gives this cut as BAT - they buy the coins from the open market. Brave has a built-in tipping service where you can tip people with BAT. If you do, Brave transfers BAT from your wallet to the tippee (and Brave takes a cut from the transaction). Tippee has BAT that they can sell because there's at least one buyer of BAT on the market: Brave. It seems like a sensible system overall, but my specifics may be wrong.
- cphoover 5y ago
  This is interesting though I doubt I would ever enable this because I loathe popup advertisements probably more than AMP

webmobdev 5y ago

Mozilla is a joke now. They've now converted Firefox into an ad-ware / spyware ( https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/7/22715179/firefox-suggest-search-ads-browser https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/7/22715179/firefox-suggest-... ) because the current geniuses leading Mozilla have decided that apart from the 5+ million users of uBlock Origin, every other Firefox users loves ads and wants them! They've earned 100's of millions of dollars from Firefox, and still claim that they don't have the resources to refactor the browser, modularise it and innovate it. I have always suspected that the current Brave CEO Brendan Eich was a victim of a malicious campaign intended to get him removed from Mozilla (which he co-founded, and later become a CEO of), because he would have been more vocal against Google in Mozilla, and wouldn't have been happy to let the Firefox codebase stagnate while everyone in Mozilla was content with the millions of dollars they were getting from Google. (His religious beliefs / political ideology was just an excuse and just made him an easy target). Edit: I am not endorsing Brave browser either, as there are some questionable privacy issues with it.

KennyBlanken 5y ago
What's a joke is claiming that paid suggestion search results "have converted Firefox into an ad-ware / spyware [sic]" I'm not a fan of them adding this and switching it on, but it's easily disabled... > Click on the hamburger menu and then select Settings > Click on Privacy and Security in the sidebar and scroll to Address Bar — Firefox Suggest > Select or deselect the checkbox for contextual suggestions to turn the feature on or off > Select or deselect the checkbox for “occasional sponsored suggestions”
- kreeben 5y ago
  >> I'm not a fan of them adding this Excuse me sir but you definitely sound like a fan. The really real joke is claiming that proclaiming that Mozilla is a joke is some sort of a joke. Out-of-the-box I would definitely classify Firefox as ad-ware/spy-ware.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Does that make Brave adware as well, since it ships with a suite of features fundamentally designed to serve you ads of their own creation?

KennyBlanken 5y ago

I'm not sure why you would be impressed by something that has been possible in Firefox and Chrome for many years with a de-amp extension (though I would recommend a more general-purpose URL-de-cruftifier, such as ClearURLs, which will also remove most tracking bits from URLs.) Google removed ClearURLs from the chrome add-ons store because (I wish I were making it up) the extension's description was too detailed: https://www.ghacks.net/2021/03/25/the-curious-case-of-clearurls-removal-from-the-google-chrome-webstore/ https://www.ghacks.net/2021/03/25/the-curious-case-of-clearu... Brave implementing this, while nice, is basically a nothingburger.

jonathansampson 5y ago
I think you demonstrated in your own post why this is such a big deal. Extensions can certainly deliver this type of functionality in large part, but you have to [run an extension]. You need to ran an extension process (with its additional overhead). You need to make sure Google doesn't swoop-in with breaking changes between manifest versions. Then you have to make sure the extension is permitted in the Web Store, and not removed over something as silly as a detailed description. By delivering this functionality natively, Brave offers a more reliable and efficient solution to the problem of AMP.
- richardwhiuk 5y ago
  You have to run Brave, which is a considerable overhead.
  - jonathansampson 5y ago
    Running a browser is better than running a browser in addition to several extensions for functionality that could be integrated natively, resulting in less overhead. But yes, you will need to use a browser to browse the Web
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      I don't trust Brave's implementation in the first place. You have a direct conflict of interest with protecting user privacy since you also make money off of the ads you serve users (because of how you skim BAT revenue). Furthermore, your scummy behavior of holding site operators ad revenue hostage is pretty disgusting, and doesn't provide much of a moral compass for us to base your actions off of. I'd trust stock Chromium before I'd install Brave on any of my machines.