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Kudos to Brave - they're a sometimes weird actor, but some of their initiatives are commendable, and they often do what Mozilla should have, but didn't. I rare

Kudos to Brave - they're a sometimes weird actor, but some of their initiatives are commendable, and they often do what Mozilla should have, but didn't. I rarely end up in AMP pages on my mobile, but when it happens I immediately feel like I stepped on a turd, and promptly backtrack / close the tab before it hijacks my back button, half the screen, standard controls (including doing something weird to scrolling) and other unpleasantries like banners whose "x" somehow overlaps my browser's bars, and are therefore out of reach (and said browser bars somehow do NOT autohide when scrolling, unlike on normal pages) Getting AMP results from Google search has been one of the drivers leading me to switch to DDG, so congrats Google, one less customer.

agilob 5y ago
Brave is doing for us all the things Mozilla promised
- dralley 5y ago
  And a lot of other shaddy things that Mozilla has never done, like the affiliate link hijacking (which yes, was supposedly a "bug" but you have to admit that it's an awfully convenient "bug"), and setting up crypto wallets for content creators without solicitation and then collecting money on their behalf.
  - jonathansampson 5y ago
    Heads up: I work at Brave. As such, I encourage you to check my claims, verify my sources, and don't take anything I say for granted. Always happy to provide more context as needed :) Firefox literally sends your keystrokes to Google, right out of the box. Brave, however, was found to be the most private popular browser by reputable researchers: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf. Brave [never] hijacked links either. Affiliate Links were offered among suggested sites for relevant search input. So if you searched "Binance," the browser would offer (among other suggestions), an affiliate link for the site. Users could then choose to browse to the property with the affiliate link, and in so doing support the development of Brave. No impact to privacy or security at all. The mistake here was with input handling. Built to handle search input, this feature also mistakenly handled fully-qualified domains. While we intended the app to offer affiliate links (when relevant) to something like "what is binance?", it was also offering them for "binance.us". The latter case was corrected quickly (and the feature itself was disabled out of the box). More about that on our blog: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/. To your second point, about setting up crypto wallets and soliciting donations on behalf of non-participating publishers, you're mistaken there as well. To prime the support-system in Brave (called Brave Payments at the time), we staked Brave users with tokens, inviting them to direct those tokens to creators they would like to support. More clearly, Brave gave Brave users say over where Brave ought to direct its own tokens. Unfortunately, our UI/UX wasn't very clear about which creators were verified, and which were not (we followed the Twitter approach, marking verified creators with a checkmark, but doing nothing for others). This resulted in some confusion at the end of 2018, where users were directing Brave's tokens to non-participating creators (most notably Tom Scott). We received considerably helpful feedback about how the system could be improved (both from a UI/UX side, and operationally). Frankly, I don't think I've ever seen our team work so hard, and churn out such a monumental update in so little time. We had made massive changes within 48 hours IIRC. Creators were explicitly marked as verified or unverified in all cases, the BAT that Brave stakes with users would remain in the local wallet until it could be received by a verified creator. And BAT that sat pending for 90 days would be unlocked again for the user to direct elsewhere. Tom Scott was kind enough to review our changes, and explicitly gave us his approval soon-thereafter. What is now 'Brave Rewards' wouldn't be doing so well today were it not for Tom and so many other incredible users helping us find the best path forward. More about that on our blog: https://brave.com/rewards-update/ https://brave.com/rewards-update/
    - agilob 5y ago
      Not that I'm downplaying your points, but please next time start a comment saying you're working for Brave ;)
      - jonathansampson 5y ago
        Good point. On Twitter my name is "BraveSampson," and I often forget that isn't the case here as well. FWIW, I'm Sampson, and I work in Developer Relations at Brave. I have that in my bio here, to help a bit.
        dave5104 5y ago
        > On Twitter my name is "BraveSampson," It doesn't look like this is the case, fwiw. (Unless your HN profile lists an outdated handle?)
        jonathansampson 5y ago
        Nice catch! I was referring to https://twitter.com/BraveSampson/ https://twitter.com/BraveSampson/. Profile updated.
    - benatkin 5y ago
      > Firefox literally sends your keystrokes to Google, right out of the box. Keystrokes in the URL bar.
      - freeplay 5y ago
        It can also be disabled in preferences if you don't like that functionality.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        taneq 5y ago
  - tempest_ 5y ago
    People around here love to pile on Mozilla for every perceived slight or misstep but they rarely have any ideas on how Mozilla is supposed to fund itself. Some of the ire is earned but I have yet to see how Mozilla is supposed to fund Firefox development without that google search bar.
    - devmunchies 5y ago
      > they rarely have any ideas on how Mozilla is supposed to fund itself If we’re talking about the Mozilla foundation, they should seek donations and grants and focus on being the best user web tooling. If we’re talking about the corp, they could’ve kept rust under the umbrella and pioneered the WASI runtime and built an alternative to k8s that runs webassemblies and built out a paid cloud infra. It doesn’t make sense to have a foundation that is user aligned and a corp that is user hostile. There should be aligned incentives.
    - agilob 5y ago
      In 2013/2014 when Snowden started whiste-blowing we were hoping for Mozilla to monetize privacy, but they never did. They only recently made some very poor attempts at private email, VPN and integrated some DoH. They were very hesitant for any cryptocurrencies integration. I would be happy to pay for a serious VPN and email service (remember Mozilla owns Thuderbird) with promises like Tutanota or Proton have. They could have acquired them, but instead they acquired pocket. Mozilla had the perfect brand and enough userbase to do it. Mozilla started doing that work 5-7 years too late and did too little to be meaningful. I feel they are doomed now and their space is shrinking and there's no future for Firefox in the long term. There's a lot that can be added here: Mozilla promised to opensource pocket server and never did. They promised to hire someone full-time for Thunderbird, but never did. afair there is a German company that has full-time developer working on Thuderbird. They promised a VPN... yes, delivered something. They promised anonymous email, I know they were giving access by invites, but nothing more about it. They promised to unfork Tor browser and integrate Tor into Firefox, they were even running a few Tor nodes. Remember how hyped everyone here was for Servo in Firefox and electron competitor? MDN could have integration with GH or GL and educational content for web development, they literally had resources, brand and ability to join an online university and give degrees or at least serious bootcamps. Mozilla was a meaningful brand to do it. They had a lot of opportunities to sell privacy, we literally demanded it from them, but they weren't interested in listening. Instead they delivered 6 rebrands each breaking my muscle memory. Do you remember how they advised EU to regulate monopoly on the webbrowser market? There was time when they had all ability, but 0 will to keep it this way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu
  - pmurt7 5y ago
    Mozilla faces blowback after slipping Mr Robot plugin into Firefox: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...
  - celsoazevedo 5y ago
    Maybe it's because I use Brave (as a "Chrome with less Google" and with all the crypto stuff disabled), but when I look at the "shady things" they've done, it doesn't look that shady: - The affiliate link "hijacking" was - if I remember correctly - to sites of crypto companies that partner with them. I'd prefer if this didn't happen, but most seem to be fine when other browsers (Safari, Firefox, etc) add something like "?client=safari" when searching or when their search engine (eg: DDG) use affiliate links to sites like Amazon or Ebay. It's not a new thing. - The money collection (brave rewards)... if one doesn't understand how the system works, it looks like they are stealing money... but the money is returned to the sender after a while if the website/creator doesn't claim it. Is this that bad? And then there's them not blocking some trackers (Google, Facebook, etc) by default, but if they did, they would break logins on many websites. Maybe all this is bad, but I'm not sure if there's any browser out there without a history of shady behaviour. Even Mozilla has messed up a few times.
    - dralley 5y ago
      >The money collection (brave rewards)... if one doesn't understand how the system works, it looks like they are stealing money... but the money is returned to the sender after a while if the website/creator doesn't claim it. Is this that bad? I don't think anyone ever accused them of stealing that money, but yes, hijacking people's personal brands to collect money without their explicit knowledge is a bad thing. Imagine if I saw the icon and gave "them" money via Brave instead of joining their Patreon or some other official channel that they explicitly set up. If they don't collect, then yes, I might get my money back - nothing was "stolen". But that was money I wanted to send to the content creator in that particular moment, and that creator will probably never see it. The creator got screwed out of money that otherwise would have gone to them.
      - w0ts0n 5y ago
        >hijacking people's personal brands to collect money without their explicit knowledge is a bad thing. Brave gave users BAT to tip content creators. They tipped it, if it wasn't claimed in 90d, Brave returned the BAT to the pool. There was no collecting money. It was Brave's promotional BAT and it never actually left Brave's possession unless claimed. The issue was that it wasn't clear if the creator had or hadn't signed up. Which was fixed within 48h.
  - BrendanEich 5y ago
    You wrote "link" which is an element in a page, but we never "hijacked" or rewrote any such URL-bearing element. (We do for De-AMP, now.) Please dont fall for such lies about us couched as "link hijacking". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31088549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31088549
  - xtat 5y ago
    This is the thing everyone always points to when they hand wave "a lot of other shady things" - not sure why folks generally like to FUD Brave. I was working there when this issue happened and it was a very big deal internally and was patched immediately. FWIW I got zero hint that this was some kind of shady thing someone would have been trying to sneak in.
    - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
      Follow the money, there's serious money pitted against Brave. Grassroots users should support it like the godsend it is.
- huhtenberg 5y ago
  There's an irony there somewhere. I can feel it.
- coldpie 5y ago
  I like having more than one browser engine in the world, but I do hope Brave pushes Mozilla to do more.
  - alanh 5y ago
    To be fair, Brave doesn’t really have their own browser engine (it’s Chromium), but it is good to have browser choice, so I agree with the sentiment. (I am a Brave user.)
    - devmunchies 5y ago
      Agree, but at least brave has the expertise and interests ($$) that if chromium goes off the rails, they could fork and maintain an alternative.
- reflexco 5y ago
  Except building the only modern alternative rendering engine on desktop, which is necessary to keep web standards serving the users instead of Google!
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  Everytime I read this kind of hyperbole, I install Brave and try to replicate my Firefox browsing experience and realize that Brave/Chrome extensions suck. Specifically none come close to replicating the functionality of: Multi-Account Containers Temporary Containers Sidebery
  - wussboy 5y ago
    The triple threat that keeps me on Firefox. Can’t live without Sidebery
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  Brave is a Chromium browser. Mozilla is still the only one fighting Google- and Apple with Safari I suppose.
nickysielicki 5y ago
I’m surprised that Apple doesn’t have a desire to play this role. They don’t sell ads so there’s no cannibalism and they have painted themselves (and advertised themselves) publicly as a company that cares about privacy and security. It seems like a natural avenue to win users in a world where the Windows alternative has more analytics and spyware than ever. A man can dream.
- admax88qqq 5y ago
  Apple only nominally cares about the web. They would rather all interactions go through apps and the app store where they get their cut.
  - enos_feedler 5y ago
    Glad you’ve talked with leadership there and can confirm what many suspect but can’t prove
    - nixass 5y ago
      Is it brown in there?
    - admax88qqq 5y ago
      Fine, allow me to rephrase Based upon their actions I don't believe that Apple cares about the web beyond the bare minimum they have to to provide a tolerable browser experience for their users until everything happens via Apps.
      - enos_feedler 5y ago
        What have other browser makers done, beyond the status quo that has demonstrated a browser experience that is beyond tolerable, perhaps even good?
    - pid-1 5y ago
      Understanding how a company makes money will tell you a lot more than talking with any leader That's even more true for publicly traded companies
go_prodev 5y ago
I generally trust the Brave folks, but have reservations about rewriting URLs becoming a new tool in their toolbox. DDG sounds like a promising alternative.
- spicybright 5y ago
  I'm sure it just changes the URL bar so you can see what happens. Regardless, it's already in their tool box because they make the browser. They could be re-writing urls and not showing you, if they wanted to. And as long as no one notices, you can keep doing it.
  - go_prodev 5y ago
    Good point. It also sounds better to build it in than having a browser extension for it.
- mastazi 5y ago
  > DDG sounds like a promising alternative Unfortunately, switching to a different search engine does not prevent you from ever stepping onto AMP again. For example all links in the mobile version of Twitter used to be AMP until recently: https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/19/22791002/twitter-amp-ios-android https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/19/22791002/twitter-amp-ios...
  - nocman 5y ago
    I suspect go_prodev is referring to the DDG app ( https://duckduckgo.com/app https://duckduckgo.com/app ) and not just the search engine. I only recently became aware that the app existed, so I don't know how/if it deals with all things AMP-based.
dheera 5y ago
AMP sometimes helps me get past paywalls though.
mulmen 5y ago
> Getting AMP results from Google search has been one of the drivers leading me to switch to DDG, so congrats Google, one less customer. It is a cliche but you are not Google’s customer. You are their product. If you don’t find AMP compelling they don’t want to serve you ads anyway.
- b112 5y ago
  Yes, but less product is less profit, and they do want to sell you ads, AMP or not! So yes, it is a loss for Google.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    > but less product is less profit Not all products are profitable.
kingo55 5y ago
> sometimes weird actor Like that time Brave replaced links to a site with their own affiliate links? Yeah, I no longer trust them.
- BrendanEich 5y ago
  That never happened. We never "replaced links". The issue was about address bar input autocomplete for two domains, binance.us and binance.com, along with keywords which all browsers offer several possible autocompletions for, we autocompleted by default not just via dropdown suggestion, with referral code attribute identifying us (not the user) to Binance at end of domain name. We fixed this right away and made nothing off of it. But it was a blunder for sure.
GuB-42 5y ago
I didn't experience anything you described with AMP pages. Generally, I find AMP pages to be among the best by news site standards, which I agree are pretty low. I never understood why AMP gets so much hatred from end-users. I understand why publisher hate it (it takes away control), and I understand the monopoly concerns, but for me, as an end-user, 99% of the times, the AMP version is better: faster, with less of the annoyances you described. As for privacy, these 99% are loaded with Google ads and analytics anyways, so not much of a win there. I don't know what your configuration is, what kind of ad-blockers you are using, but I never met the horrors people make AMP to be. And sure enough, there are sites that are better than any AMP sites, but these almost never have an AMP version. So for me, AMP makes terrible sites a little less terrible, and good sites unchanged.
- kemotep 5y ago
  I do not like AMP sites because it hijacks my back button in the browser and I have to hit back several times to maybe make it back to the page I was on before clicking the link to an AMP site. If it did not do that I could care less.
- gzer0 5y ago
  > I understand why publisher hate it (it takes away control), and I understand the monopoly concerns And here lies the problem. Eventually, these two 'annoyances' will become much bigger than that. The biggest threat, imo, is that these will lead to news organization, journalists, and credible publishers to eventually close up shop as they receive less of the share of revenues. I do agree with your point about AMP sites generally being a much smoother experience. But at what cost?
- stephen_g 5y ago
  The problem I have is that I've never found AMP pages to be any better or particularly faster (I guess the news sites I use were already fairly well optimised, but also I always use ad and tracker blocking so I'm not slowed down by any of that crap). But AMP pages are often worse - things like getting cut-down pages with the normal navigation missing or stuff like that. And it breaks URL sharing - if I want to share a link, I just want the regular link, not one with AMP crap in it, but often cutting out the AMP part to try and reconstruct the original URL just doesn't work... So I've never found it better but only worse, so understandably it just annoys me. If it is just that my tracking and ad blocking is making all the difference, then AMP clearly isn't actually solving the actual issue...
SquirrelOnFire 5y ago
Mozilla's biggest source of revenue? Google. By about a factor of 5.
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  Mozillas real competitive threat to google - 0. Mozillas effectiveness at diverting/absorbing/stopping other community initiatives that could actually impact google - worth the dollars from google's point of view.

agilob 5y ago

Brave is doing for us all the things Mozilla promised

dralley 5y ago
And a lot of other shaddy things that Mozilla has never done, like the affiliate link hijacking (which yes, was supposedly a "bug" but you have to admit that it's an awfully convenient "bug"), and setting up crypto wallets for content creators without solicitation and then collecting money on their behalf.
- jonathansampson 5y ago
  Heads up: I work at Brave. As such, I encourage you to check my claims, verify my sources, and don't take anything I say for granted. Always happy to provide more context as needed :) Firefox literally sends your keystrokes to Google, right out of the box. Brave, however, was found to be the most private popular browser by reputable researchers: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf. Brave [never] hijacked links either. Affiliate Links were offered among suggested sites for relevant search input. So if you searched "Binance," the browser would offer (among other suggestions), an affiliate link for the site. Users could then choose to browse to the property with the affiliate link, and in so doing support the development of Brave. No impact to privacy or security at all. The mistake here was with input handling. Built to handle search input, this feature also mistakenly handled fully-qualified domains. While we intended the app to offer affiliate links (when relevant) to something like "what is binance?", it was also offering them for "binance.us". The latter case was corrected quickly (and the feature itself was disabled out of the box). More about that on our blog: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/. To your second point, about setting up crypto wallets and soliciting donations on behalf of non-participating publishers, you're mistaken there as well. To prime the support-system in Brave (called Brave Payments at the time), we staked Brave users with tokens, inviting them to direct those tokens to creators they would like to support. More clearly, Brave gave Brave users say over where Brave ought to direct its own tokens. Unfortunately, our UI/UX wasn't very clear about which creators were verified, and which were not (we followed the Twitter approach, marking verified creators with a checkmark, but doing nothing for others). This resulted in some confusion at the end of 2018, where users were directing Brave's tokens to non-participating creators (most notably Tom Scott). We received considerably helpful feedback about how the system could be improved (both from a UI/UX side, and operationally). Frankly, I don't think I've ever seen our team work so hard, and churn out such a monumental update in so little time. We had made massive changes within 48 hours IIRC. Creators were explicitly marked as verified or unverified in all cases, the BAT that Brave stakes with users would remain in the local wallet until it could be received by a verified creator. And BAT that sat pending for 90 days would be unlocked again for the user to direct elsewhere. Tom Scott was kind enough to review our changes, and explicitly gave us his approval soon-thereafter. What is now 'Brave Rewards' wouldn't be doing so well today were it not for Tom and so many other incredible users helping us find the best path forward. More about that on our blog: https://brave.com/rewards-update/ https://brave.com/rewards-update/
  - agilob 5y ago
    Not that I'm downplaying your points, but please next time start a comment saying you're working for Brave ;)
    - jonathansampson 5y ago
      Good point. On Twitter my name is "BraveSampson," and I often forget that isn't the case here as well. FWIW, I'm Sampson, and I work in Developer Relations at Brave. I have that in my bio here, to help a bit.
      - dave5104 5y ago
        > On Twitter my name is "BraveSampson," It doesn't look like this is the case, fwiw. (Unless your HN profile lists an outdated handle?)
        jonathansampson 5y ago
        Nice catch! I was referring to https://twitter.com/BraveSampson/ https://twitter.com/BraveSampson/. Profile updated.
  - benatkin 5y ago
    > Firefox literally sends your keystrokes to Google, right out of the box. Keystrokes in the URL bar.
    - freeplay 5y ago
      It can also be disabled in preferences if you don't like that functionality.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - taneq 5y ago
- tempest_ 5y ago
  People around here love to pile on Mozilla for every perceived slight or misstep but they rarely have any ideas on how Mozilla is supposed to fund itself. Some of the ire is earned but I have yet to see how Mozilla is supposed to fund Firefox development without that google search bar.
  - devmunchies 5y ago
    > they rarely have any ideas on how Mozilla is supposed to fund itself If we’re talking about the Mozilla foundation, they should seek donations and grants and focus on being the best user web tooling. If we’re talking about the corp, they could’ve kept rust under the umbrella and pioneered the WASI runtime and built an alternative to k8s that runs webassemblies and built out a paid cloud infra. It doesn’t make sense to have a foundation that is user aligned and a corp that is user hostile. There should be aligned incentives.
  - agilob 5y ago
    In 2013/2014 when Snowden started whiste-blowing we were hoping for Mozilla to monetize privacy, but they never did. They only recently made some very poor attempts at private email, VPN and integrated some DoH. They were very hesitant for any cryptocurrencies integration. I would be happy to pay for a serious VPN and email service (remember Mozilla owns Thuderbird) with promises like Tutanota or Proton have. They could have acquired them, but instead they acquired pocket. Mozilla had the perfect brand and enough userbase to do it. Mozilla started doing that work 5-7 years too late and did too little to be meaningful. I feel they are doomed now and their space is shrinking and there's no future for Firefox in the long term. There's a lot that can be added here: Mozilla promised to opensource pocket server and never did. They promised to hire someone full-time for Thunderbird, but never did. afair there is a German company that has full-time developer working on Thuderbird. They promised a VPN... yes, delivered something. They promised anonymous email, I know they were giving access by invites, but nothing more about it. They promised to unfork Tor browser and integrate Tor into Firefox, they were even running a few Tor nodes. Remember how hyped everyone here was for Servo in Firefox and electron competitor? MDN could have integration with GH or GL and educational content for web development, they literally had resources, brand and ability to join an online university and give degrees or at least serious bootcamps. Mozilla was a meaningful brand to do it. They had a lot of opportunities to sell privacy, we literally demanded it from them, but they weren't interested in listening. Instead they delivered 6 rebrands each breaking my muscle memory. Do you remember how they advised EU to regulate monopoly on the webbrowser market? There was time when they had all ability, but 0 will to keep it this way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu
- pmurt7 5y ago
  Mozilla faces blowback after slipping Mr Robot plugin into Firefox: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...
- celsoazevedo 5y ago
  Maybe it's because I use Brave (as a "Chrome with less Google" and with all the crypto stuff disabled), but when I look at the "shady things" they've done, it doesn't look that shady: - The affiliate link "hijacking" was - if I remember correctly - to sites of crypto companies that partner with them. I'd prefer if this didn't happen, but most seem to be fine when other browsers (Safari, Firefox, etc) add something like "?client=safari" when searching or when their search engine (eg: DDG) use affiliate links to sites like Amazon or Ebay. It's not a new thing. - The money collection (brave rewards)... if one doesn't understand how the system works, it looks like they are stealing money... but the money is returned to the sender after a while if the website/creator doesn't claim it. Is this that bad? And then there's them not blocking some trackers (Google, Facebook, etc) by default, but if they did, they would break logins on many websites. Maybe all this is bad, but I'm not sure if there's any browser out there without a history of shady behaviour. Even Mozilla has messed up a few times.
  - dralley 5y ago
    >The money collection (brave rewards)... if one doesn't understand how the system works, it looks like they are stealing money... but the money is returned to the sender after a while if the website/creator doesn't claim it. Is this that bad? I don't think anyone ever accused them of stealing that money, but yes, hijacking people's personal brands to collect money without their explicit knowledge is a bad thing. Imagine if I saw the icon and gave "them" money via Brave instead of joining their Patreon or some other official channel that they explicitly set up. If they don't collect, then yes, I might get my money back - nothing was "stolen". But that was money I wanted to send to the content creator in that particular moment, and that creator will probably never see it. The creator got screwed out of money that otherwise would have gone to them.
    - w0ts0n 5y ago
      >hijacking people's personal brands to collect money without their explicit knowledge is a bad thing. Brave gave users BAT to tip content creators. They tipped it, if it wasn't claimed in 90d, Brave returned the BAT to the pool. There was no collecting money. It was Brave's promotional BAT and it never actually left Brave's possession unless claimed. The issue was that it wasn't clear if the creator had or hadn't signed up. Which was fixed within 48h.
- BrendanEich 5y ago
  You wrote "link" which is an element in a page, but we never "hijacked" or rewrote any such URL-bearing element. (We do for De-AMP, now.) Please dont fall for such lies about us couched as "link hijacking". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31088549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31088549
- xtat 5y ago
  This is the thing everyone always points to when they hand wave "a lot of other shady things" - not sure why folks generally like to FUD Brave. I was working there when this issue happened and it was a very big deal internally and was patched immediately. FWIW I got zero hint that this was some kind of shady thing someone would have been trying to sneak in.
  - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
    Follow the money, there's serious money pitted against Brave. Grassroots users should support it like the godsend it is.
huhtenberg 5y ago
There's an irony there somewhere. I can feel it.
coldpie 5y ago
I like having more than one browser engine in the world, but I do hope Brave pushes Mozilla to do more.
- alanh 5y ago
  To be fair, Brave doesn’t really have their own browser engine (it’s Chromium), but it is good to have browser choice, so I agree with the sentiment. (I am a Brave user.)
  - devmunchies 5y ago
    Agree, but at least brave has the expertise and interests ($$) that if chromium goes off the rails, they could fork and maintain an alternative.
reflexco 5y ago
Except building the only modern alternative rendering engine on desktop, which is necessary to keep web standards serving the users instead of Google!
wintermutestwin 5y ago
Everytime I read this kind of hyperbole, I install Brave and try to replicate my Firefox browsing experience and realize that Brave/Chrome extensions suck. Specifically none come close to replicating the functionality of: Multi-Account Containers Temporary Containers Sidebery
- wussboy 5y ago
  The triple threat that keeps me on Firefox. Can’t live without Sidebery
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Brave is a Chromium browser. Mozilla is still the only one fighting Google- and Apple with Safari I suppose.

nickysielicki 5y ago

I’m surprised that Apple doesn’t have a desire to play this role. They don’t sell ads so there’s no cannibalism and they have painted themselves (and advertised themselves) publicly as a company that cares about privacy and security. It seems like a natural avenue to win users in a world where the Windows alternative has more analytics and spyware than ever. A man can dream.

admax88qqq 5y ago
Apple only nominally cares about the web. They would rather all interactions go through apps and the app store where they get their cut.
- enos_feedler 5y ago
  Glad you’ve talked with leadership there and can confirm what many suspect but can’t prove
  - nixass 5y ago
    Is it brown in there?
  - admax88qqq 5y ago
    Fine, allow me to rephrase Based upon their actions I don't believe that Apple cares about the web beyond the bare minimum they have to to provide a tolerable browser experience for their users until everything happens via Apps.
    - enos_feedler 5y ago
      What have other browser makers done, beyond the status quo that has demonstrated a browser experience that is beyond tolerable, perhaps even good?
  - pid-1 5y ago
    Understanding how a company makes money will tell you a lot more than talking with any leader That's even more true for publicly traded companies

go_prodev 5y ago

I generally trust the Brave folks, but have reservations about rewriting URLs becoming a new tool in their toolbox. DDG sounds like a promising alternative.

spicybright 5y ago
I'm sure it just changes the URL bar so you can see what happens. Regardless, it's already in their tool box because they make the browser. They could be re-writing urls and not showing you, if they wanted to. And as long as no one notices, you can keep doing it.
- go_prodev 5y ago
  Good point. It also sounds better to build it in than having a browser extension for it.
mastazi 5y ago
> DDG sounds like a promising alternative Unfortunately, switching to a different search engine does not prevent you from ever stepping onto AMP again. For example all links in the mobile version of Twitter used to be AMP until recently: https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/19/22791002/twitter-amp-ios-android https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/19/22791002/twitter-amp-ios...
- nocman 5y ago
  I suspect go_prodev is referring to the DDG app ( https://duckduckgo.com/app https://duckduckgo.com/app ) and not just the search engine. I only recently became aware that the app existed, so I don't know how/if it deals with all things AMP-based.

dheera 5y ago

AMP sometimes helps me get past paywalls though.

mulmen 5y ago

> Getting AMP results from Google search has been one of the drivers leading me to switch to DDG, so congrats Google, one less customer. It is a cliche but you are not Google’s customer. You are their product. If you don’t find AMP compelling they don’t want to serve you ads anyway.

b112 5y ago
Yes, but less product is less profit, and they do want to sell you ads, AMP or not! So yes, it is a loss for Google.
- mulmen 5y ago
  > but less product is less profit Not all products are profitable.

kingo55 5y ago

> sometimes weird actor Like that time Brave replaced links to a site with their own affiliate links? Yeah, I no longer trust them.

BrendanEich 5y ago
That never happened. We never "replaced links". The issue was about address bar input autocomplete for two domains, binance.us and binance.com, along with keywords which all browsers offer several possible autocompletions for, we autocompleted by default not just via dropdown suggestion, with referral code attribute identifying us (not the user) to Binance at end of domain name. We fixed this right away and made nothing off of it. But it was a blunder for sure.

GuB-42 5y ago

I didn't experience anything you described with AMP pages. Generally, I find AMP pages to be among the best by news site standards, which I agree are pretty low. I never understood why AMP gets so much hatred from end-users. I understand why publisher hate it (it takes away control), and I understand the monopoly concerns, but for me, as an end-user, 99% of the times, the AMP version is better: faster, with less of the annoyances you described. As for privacy, these 99% are loaded with Google ads and analytics anyways, so not much of a win there. I don't know what your configuration is, what kind of ad-blockers you are using, but I never met the horrors people make AMP to be. And sure enough, there are sites that are better than any AMP sites, but these almost never have an AMP version. So for me, AMP makes terrible sites a little less terrible, and good sites unchanged.

kemotep 5y ago
I do not like AMP sites because it hijacks my back button in the browser and I have to hit back several times to maybe make it back to the page I was on before clicking the link to an AMP site. If it did not do that I could care less.
gzer0 5y ago
> I understand why publisher hate it (it takes away control), and I understand the monopoly concerns And here lies the problem. Eventually, these two 'annoyances' will become much bigger than that. The biggest threat, imo, is that these will lead to news organization, journalists, and credible publishers to eventually close up shop as they receive less of the share of revenues. I do agree with your point about AMP sites generally being a much smoother experience. But at what cost?
stephen_g 5y ago
The problem I have is that I've never found AMP pages to be any better or particularly faster (I guess the news sites I use were already fairly well optimised, but also I always use ad and tracker blocking so I'm not slowed down by any of that crap). But AMP pages are often worse - things like getting cut-down pages with the normal navigation missing or stuff like that. And it breaks URL sharing - if I want to share a link, I just want the regular link, not one with AMP crap in it, but often cutting out the AMP part to try and reconstruct the original URL just doesn't work... So I've never found it better but only worse, so understandably it just annoys me. If it is just that my tracking and ad blocking is making all the difference, then AMP clearly isn't actually solving the actual issue...

SquirrelOnFire 5y ago

Mozilla's biggest source of revenue? Google. By about a factor of 5.

hackerfromthefu 5y ago
Mozillas real competitive threat to google - 0. Mozillas effectiveness at diverting/absorbing/stopping other community initiatives that could actually impact google - worth the dollars from google's point of view.