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I switched to Brave last year after 22 years of Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox. This was purely for Chromium performance reasons (although it seems Firefox has made

I switched to Brave last year after 22 years of Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox. This was purely for Chromium performance reasons (although it seems Firefox has made some major improvements recently). I didn't like leaving behind a unique browser engine, which needs to remain a significant player. I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave. If you don't like the crypto integration, the ads, etc you can just disable them. I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one. It may not have played out as intended, but it wasn't a scam. One year in, I've had no issues I can think of. And now they have their own search engine, another net plus to the ecosystem. Outside of things like Tor Browser, the privacy is about as good as you're going to get from a client. In fact, you can open a new window using Tor directly in the browser. I don't use their VPN but that's available also (Mullvad?). I spend enough daily time in it that I would notice UI/UX/perf. problems ... I really haven't seen any. YMMV

JohnFen 3y ago
> I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave. I certainly don't hate Brave. I use it. I also don't like Brave, I put up with it. It's just that there aren't any great browsers out there, and Brave sucks less than most.
- BowBun 3y ago
  I agree with you, but it sometimes feels like a 'great browser' is supposed to be free, bleeding-edge while also backwards compatible, tracking-free, ad-free, and somehow altruistic and for the good of the open web. Where are we getting these absolutely unattainable ideals from? Who can possibly support and fund such a project besides an enterprise?
  - jollyllama 3y ago
    Can I get a decent bookmark manager and more than X months of history? What's so unattainable about that?
    - markstos 3y ago
      I like Pinboard as a bookmark manager. Browser and platform independent!
      - mattl 3y ago
        Raindrop.io seems to be better these days, plus Pinboard posts stuff like this... https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1628462667559239680 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1628462667559239680
    - Fabricio20 3y ago
      You should check out History Trends Unlimited! I also wanted an unlimited history and since no browser supports it, someone made an extension. It even automatically backs up your history for you in a neat litte zip file!
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    > Who can possibly support and fund such a project besides an enterprise? KHTML was doing fine before Microsoft, Google and Apple forked their codebase.
    - markstos 3y ago
      The definition of “what is a browser” was much simpler then.
- superhumanuser 3y ago
  What don't you like about it?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    The UI, mostly. But the point isn't that I'm not in love with Brave. The point is that I use it because it's the least bad option, and I wish there were an option that I would actively like.
  - guestbest 3y ago
    Personally, I don’t like the inability to turn off the update mechanism, which is annoying on my macos 10.13 computer that has a warning bar every time I run the brave browser application. I suppose this means there is telemetry built in that can’t be removed
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Yeah, that's actually been irritating me a lot lately. Brave has taken to constantly nagging me about not being able to update itself. I know! That's on purpose! Stop bugging me.
  - bsdetector 3y ago
    The text input spelling checker is really terrible; late 80s spell checks were better. Forgot which, but had a 12 letter word that I misspelled one letter of, Brave underlined it in red with no replacements in right-click menu, I fixed it by googling the spelling and underline went away. In often happens that it has no or even very wrong suggestions.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
NikkiA 3y ago
[flagged]
- chartpath 3y ago
  Thank you for saying it!
  - soundnote 3y ago
    Thank you for blatant lies?
- joshstrange 3y ago
  Yeah, even if I could stomach the crypto BS (I can't) I don't want anything to do with the owner/CEO/whatever his title is.
- hiatus 3y ago
  You use Javascript though, right?
  - NikkiA 3y ago
    not willingly And I certainly don't use it as a programmer.
  - jccalhoun 3y ago
    He doesn't get a paycheck based on how many people use javascript.
- metalspot 3y ago
  > thinks I shouldn't be allowed to exist any evidence to support that claim?
  - hwbehrens 3y ago
    This must be in regards to his donating $1,000 to Proposition 8, which sought to ban same-sex marriage in California [0]. This was the genesis event that led to his resignation from Mozilla back in 2014. I'm unclear if his views have changed either positively or negatively in the intervening decade. [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/gay-firefox-developers-boycott-mozilla-to-protest-ceo-hire/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/gay-f...
greenthrow 3y ago
The hate for Brave is well earned. They launched with a totally scummy scheme of hiding ads on people's sites and collecting money "on their behalf" but they needed to then know to reach out to Brave to get it. They have done some not great stuff since then as well.
- soundnote 3y ago
  PSA: They held the tips for a while to see if the creator signed up, and if not sent the crypto back to the user. If it even was the user's, they put up a pool of the stuff out of their own pocket to jumpstart the tipping service and the whole thing might just be over the allocation of that pool, I don't remember the specifics. In any case no one lost their stuff, bad UX was critiqued and bad UX was fixed.
pentagrama 3y ago
> I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave. If you don't like the crypto integration, the ads, etc you can just disable them. If you buy fruits from a shop that also sells scummy lottery tickets, you at least should accept that other people will bring criticism and skepticism to that shop.
- doylio 3y ago
  Do you think the shop should not sell something that some people want because other people don't like it? AFAIK the BAT token hasn't done any material harm to anyone besides maybe some speculators that bought at the peak
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    I think that the people who don't like it might not shop at that store, and the business should take that into account. That "should" shit, however, is inviting other people to make a value judgement just so you can attack them for not being libertarian or something, nobody cares. They should do what is best for their business if they want to be successful. They thought that was crypto, and who am I to second guess? As long as they're doing it, or strange advertising shell games, I'm not even their customer, so I don't get a say. I don't think they did anything remotely fraudulent...
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      How dare someone expect more from their fellow citizens than "shamelessly and with zero morals make as much money as I can through any means". What's with HNs wants so bad to be free from judgement for doing business that can hurt people.
- minsc_and_boo 3y ago
  Agreed, but it's more like the store is aggressively slipping you gambling chips for their questionable casino every time you buy.
- tick_tock_tick 3y ago
mattl 3y ago
> If you don't like the crypto integration, the ads, etc you can just disable them. You're still using Brave which can be seen as endorsement of those things by others, including by website operators looking at user agent traffic.
- skotobaza 3y ago
  By using a software you don't automatically endorse every feature it has.
  - mattl 3y ago
    Sometimes that's true, but in the case of a fork especially when the original is still around, I think that's not always true. Some people use very specialized versions of Linux as a political choice, for example.
    - skotobaza 3y ago
      > Some people use very specialized versions of Linux as a political choice, for example My point is that if other people use other variants (non-specialized) it doesn't necessarily mean that they support opposite "political views".
- LightHugger 3y ago
  Using base chrome is worse then though right? Google causes infinitely more damage..
  - mattl 3y ago
    Right, which is why I'm using Vivaldi as my Chromium-based browser.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Using any chromium based browser is explicitly giving google more power over the free and open web.
barbariangrunge 3y ago
They have a new api where they’re happy to sell copyrighted website data (like mine) to third parties to train ai with (without copyright holders permission). This sort of soured me on the company. I was a fan until then
doylio 3y ago
I agree, it's a great browser and the BAT was at least an attempt to change some of the bad incentives of the modern web. Doesn't seem like it worked, but kudos for trying something new!
GoofballJones 3y ago
>I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave. If you don't like the crypto integration, the ads, etc... ...and the redirection of the URLs of other cryptocurrency exchange websites...and the time it inserted affiliate referral codes when users navigate to Binance. Yes, you can turn off the crypto BS, and they stopped doing the redirects. But I can't trust a browser company that _may_ do such shenanigans again in the future. They "fixed" or removed that stuff, but that doesn't mean they won't do it again. I just don't trust them, at all. That right there is enough to not use the browser. Not to mention Brendan Eich and his views. If you still don't understand, then I don't know what to tell you.
- eganist 3y ago
  I don't know much about the first one, but the affiliate codes I'm fine with. A browser company that tries to monetize in ways that doesn't weaponize my info against me is much preferred. That said, I can't personally separate his politics from his product, which is why I use Firefox.
  - Rudism 3y ago
    > the affiliate codes I'm fine with I would be fine with it if it were opt-in for users who want to support the browser in that way, but silently injecting them across the board is just a scummy thing to do and also likely a violation of any sane affiliate program's terms. A company that's willing to do that loses an unrecoverable amount of credibility and trust in my eyes.
    - voakbasda 3y ago
      I am with you. Their past actions irreversibly tainted their reputation, and they are no longer worthy of our trust. I think society has largely adopted a victim mentality with abusive software these days. We are so used to being betrayed and hurt that we now accept it as normal. It started off innocuously enough, but now we are effectively being hurt on the regular. We have learned helplessness, and that will not end well.
matrixxxboT 3y ago
>I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave. Let me help you understand why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CEO_and_resignation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE... That's the one and only real reason why they hate brave, all the other reasons are just excuses they like to tell to themselves and to others.
- jccalhoun 3y ago
  That's not the only reason. He's also a covid conspiracy guy.
- notPlancha 3y ago
  If I had a dollar for every product I use with a piece of shit CEOs I'd be a millionare
- tick_tock_tick 3y ago
  > That's the one and only real reason why they hate brave Cause Mozilla did him dirty? When Obama ran in 2008 he opposed gay marriage. Hell proposition 8 passed. California's constitution still has text banning gay marriage in it.
  - p_j_w 3y ago
    Obama publicly changed his mind over 10 years ago. Has Eich?
soundnote 3y ago
A lot of people are leery about crypto and have read a FUD article or two about the browser and put it in the hate bucket. Next to none of the common complaints are modern missteps. One of the most common complaints was a bug that got fixed within a day of being reported, in a feature that Firefox is doing TODAY yet people aren't demanding Firefox devs' heads on a plate.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  >read a FUD article Really? It's FUD that the Brave browser and team worked with and on a crypto project to integrate crypto into the browser?
  - soundnote 3y ago
    No, not FUD in terms of Brave implementing crypto things within the browser. That much is obvious and they take pride in it. What I mean is that year in, year out you'll see the same things about a bug in their Firefox Suggest-esque feature that got fixed within one day of being reported, the bad Rewards UI which got fixed without anyone losing their cryptocurrency in response to eg. Tom Scott's feedback being treated as a scam where Brave stole it from people and so on. They're basically criticisms of first iterations of new things and assume maximum malice on part of the Brave team. The integrating crypto into the browser side is mostly unrelated, nobody denies it and few think it's unequivocally good.
polrb 3y ago
[dead]
outsidetheparty 3y ago
> I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one. It may not have played out as intended, but it wasn't a scam. The original intent was absolutely a scam. They wanted to hide the ads that were already on websites, replace them with their own, then give a fraction of the revenue they just effectively stole from those websites back to them (but only if they knew to ask for it). Also they were going to take over all the third-party tracking data for their own, while branding it as “privacy” — so much hand waving about "we don't run a MiTM proxy" (while hoping we didn’t notice it’s because they don’t need to be in the middle when they control the browser itself). Absolutely brazen, and they kept changing their story in real time whenever people started to notice hey wtf is this. Happened to be able to find this in my posting history for example; in hindsight I wish I hadn't been so cowed by the fact that I was arguing with Brendan Eich Himself, because man what a load of horsepuckey he and his guy were delivering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14464518#14465271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14464518#14465271
- LightHugger 3y ago
  None of that is a scam? The user and their browser decides what ads they see. Websites are not entitled to showing ads.
  - outsidetheparty 3y ago
    The parts that could most safely be described as "scam", to my point of view, are * lying to users about protecting their privacy, while gathering and reselling more information than was possible with existing 3rd party trackers * lying about "giving back to publishers", while actually coopting those publishers' revenue streams Your "Websites are not entitled to showing ads" statement gave me a moment of thought, I have to admit: I don't see anything wrong with ad blockers, but I do think the ethics of ad replacers is pretty problematic. At best it makes Brave a parasitic entity feeding off revenue that would have otherwise gone to the content creators. I'll reluctantly agree that that part on its own doesn't rise to the level of "scam" but I certainly don't think it's admirable.
JeremyNT 3y ago
> I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave. If you don't like the crypto integration, the ads, etc you can just disable them. I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one. It may not have played out as intended, but it wasn't a scam. The presence of ads and/or crypto is a strong signal that you're working with an untrustworthy entity, whose objectives will not be aligned with your own. Maybe Brave the browser isn't outright a "scam," but the willingness of the company to dip into scam-enabling technologies like crypto makes the brand toxic, and anything by the company is immediately suspect. The same is true for Signal, for what it's worth, as it still supports Moxie's pet shitcoin. It's easy enough to opt out of Brave because Firefox exists, but there's still sadly no better alternative to Signal.
- entrepy123 3y ago
  > ...there's still sadly no better alternative to Signal. Isn't the Matrix protocol the better alternative to Signal?
  - JeremyNT 3y ago
    Unlike browsers, which can (for now) still be swapped out solely on individual preference, the network effects are real for messaging platforms. This means that currently Signal is more broadly useful than Matrix clients. Hopefully this can change some day, and Matrix (or something like it) will become ubiquitous. But it was a slog for Signal to gain even its small market share, despite its better usability and lower barriers to entry. For lack of a better alternative, we "standardized" on Signal as the de-facto secure messaging system that is outside of the control of ad companies, and it will take time to rectify that.
    - Arathorn 3y ago
      on the Matrix side we are slogging away at https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-element https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-e... to provide good (excellent?) UX as well as interoperability via Matrix.
Barrin92 3y ago
> I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one The intent is to circumvent how authors have themselves chosen to monetize their own content, insert themselves as the man in the middle, display their own ads and "pay" people in a currency they print. They're actually replacing the direct compensation the author would receive with an indirect one. Traditionally this kind of scheme is known as a protection racket. Also of course this means that Brave is simply an advertisement company, like the ones they are supposed to protect you from. When someone visits your page through Brave the ads you would have been compensated for are being blocked, Brave earns actual money for the ads they put in their place, and then users get the chance to tip you in 'attention tokens', which they wisely pre-mined. That's not noble, it's like the mafia combined with a Nigerian prince currency scam.
asadotzler 3y ago
As the guy who released all those Phoenix and Firebird and Firefox versions, I can tell you with some certainty that it hasn't been 22 years yet. First builds were spring of 2002 and you probably didn't have those because they were still called "browser" or "m/b" back then and not made terribly discoverable. You probably mean you got with it in 2003, summer or fall, which would be 20 years ago, not 22.
- EMM_386 3y ago
  > As the guy who released all those Phoenix and Firebird and Firefox versions, I can tell you with some certainty that it hasn't been 22 years yet. Yes, I was off by a year or so, I'm not making anything up. Two decades is a long time to remember details. All I know is I'd FTP to grab the latest and unzip it into a folder. By this point I was running a couple major websites and had a "5-star CNET Award" for an internet-centered software product so I was on top of anything in that sphere. Glory days.

JohnFen 3y ago

> I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave. I certainly don't hate Brave. I use it. I also don't like Brave, I put up with it. It's just that there aren't any great browsers out there, and Brave sucks less than most.

BowBun 3y ago
I agree with you, but it sometimes feels like a 'great browser' is supposed to be free, bleeding-edge while also backwards compatible, tracking-free, ad-free, and somehow altruistic and for the good of the open web. Where are we getting these absolutely unattainable ideals from? Who can possibly support and fund such a project besides an enterprise?
- jollyllama 3y ago
  Can I get a decent bookmark manager and more than X months of history? What's so unattainable about that?
  - markstos 3y ago
    I like Pinboard as a bookmark manager. Browser and platform independent!
    - mattl 3y ago
      Raindrop.io seems to be better these days, plus Pinboard posts stuff like this... https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1628462667559239680 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1628462667559239680
  - Fabricio20 3y ago
    You should check out History Trends Unlimited! I also wanted an unlimited history and since no browser supports it, someone made an extension. It even automatically backs up your history for you in a neat litte zip file!
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > Who can possibly support and fund such a project besides an enterprise? KHTML was doing fine before Microsoft, Google and Apple forked their codebase.
  - markstos 3y ago
    The definition of “what is a browser” was much simpler then.
superhumanuser 3y ago
What don't you like about it?
- JohnFen 3y ago
  The UI, mostly. But the point isn't that I'm not in love with Brave. The point is that I use it because it's the least bad option, and I wish there were an option that I would actively like.
- guestbest 3y ago
  Personally, I don’t like the inability to turn off the update mechanism, which is annoying on my macos 10.13 computer that has a warning bar every time I run the brave browser application. I suppose this means there is telemetry built in that can’t be removed
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Yeah, that's actually been irritating me a lot lately. Brave has taken to constantly nagging me about not being able to update itself. I know! That's on purpose! Stop bugging me.
- bsdetector 3y ago
  The text input spelling checker is really terrible; late 80s spell checks were better. Forgot which, but had a 12 letter word that I misspelled one letter of, Brave underlined it in red with no replacements in right-click menu, I fixed it by googling the spelling and underline went away. In often happens that it has no or even very wrong suggestions.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

NikkiA 3y ago

[flagged]

chartpath 3y ago
Thank you for saying it!
- soundnote 3y ago
  Thank you for blatant lies?
joshstrange 3y ago
Yeah, even if I could stomach the crypto BS (I can't) I don't want anything to do with the owner/CEO/whatever his title is.
hiatus 3y ago
You use Javascript though, right?
- NikkiA 3y ago
  not willingly And I certainly don't use it as a programmer.
- jccalhoun 3y ago
  He doesn't get a paycheck based on how many people use javascript.
metalspot 3y ago
> thinks I shouldn't be allowed to exist any evidence to support that claim?
- hwbehrens 3y ago
  This must be in regards to his donating $1,000 to Proposition 8, which sought to ban same-sex marriage in California [0]. This was the genesis event that led to his resignation from Mozilla back in 2014. I'm unclear if his views have changed either positively or negatively in the intervening decade. [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/gay-firefox-developers-boycott-mozilla-to-protest-ceo-hire/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/gay-f...

greenthrow 3y ago

The hate for Brave is well earned. They launched with a totally scummy scheme of hiding ads on people's sites and collecting money "on their behalf" but they needed to then know to reach out to Brave to get it. They have done some not great stuff since then as well.

soundnote 3y ago
PSA: They held the tips for a while to see if the creator signed up, and if not sent the crypto back to the user. If it even was the user's, they put up a pool of the stuff out of their own pocket to jumpstart the tipping service and the whole thing might just be over the allocation of that pool, I don't remember the specifics. In any case no one lost their stuff, bad UX was critiqued and bad UX was fixed.

pentagrama 3y ago

> I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave. If you don't like the crypto integration, the ads, etc you can just disable them. If you buy fruits from a shop that also sells scummy lottery tickets, you at least should accept that other people will bring criticism and skepticism to that shop.

doylio 3y ago
Do you think the shop should not sell something that some people want because other people don't like it? AFAIK the BAT token hasn't done any material harm to anyone besides maybe some speculators that bought at the peak
- pessimizer 3y ago
  I think that the people who don't like it might not shop at that store, and the business should take that into account. That "should" shit, however, is inviting other people to make a value judgement just so you can attack them for not being libertarian or something, nobody cares. They should do what is best for their business if they want to be successful. They thought that was crypto, and who am I to second guess? As long as they're doing it, or strange advertising shell games, I'm not even their customer, so I don't get a say. I don't think they did anything remotely fraudulent...
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    How dare someone expect more from their fellow citizens than "shamelessly and with zero morals make as much money as I can through any means". What's with HNs wants so bad to be free from judgement for doing business that can hurt people.
minsc_and_boo 3y ago
Agreed, but it's more like the store is aggressively slipping you gambling chips for their questionable casino every time you buy.
tick_tock_tick 3y ago

mattl 3y ago

> If you don't like the crypto integration, the ads, etc you can just disable them. You're still using Brave which can be seen as endorsement of those things by others, including by website operators looking at user agent traffic.

skotobaza 3y ago
By using a software you don't automatically endorse every feature it has.
- mattl 3y ago
  Sometimes that's true, but in the case of a fork especially when the original is still around, I think that's not always true. Some people use very specialized versions of Linux as a political choice, for example.
  - skotobaza 3y ago
    > Some people use very specialized versions of Linux as a political choice, for example My point is that if other people use other variants (non-specialized) it doesn't necessarily mean that they support opposite "political views".
LightHugger 3y ago
Using base chrome is worse then though right? Google causes infinitely more damage..
- mattl 3y ago
  Right, which is why I'm using Vivaldi as my Chromium-based browser.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Using any chromium based browser is explicitly giving google more power over the free and open web.

barbariangrunge 3y ago

They have a new api where they’re happy to sell copyrighted website data (like mine) to third parties to train ai with (without copyright holders permission). This sort of soured me on the company. I was a fan until then

doylio 3y ago

I agree, it's a great browser and the BAT was at least an attempt to change some of the bad incentives of the modern web. Doesn't seem like it worked, but kudos for trying something new!

GoofballJones 3y ago

>I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave. If you don't like the crypto integration, the ads, etc... ...and the redirection of the URLs of other cryptocurrency exchange websites...and the time it inserted affiliate referral codes when users navigate to Binance. Yes, you can turn off the crypto BS, and they stopped doing the redirects. But I can't trust a browser company that _may_ do such shenanigans again in the future. They "fixed" or removed that stuff, but that doesn't mean they won't do it again. I just don't trust them, at all. That right there is enough to not use the browser. Not to mention Brendan Eich and his views. If you still don't understand, then I don't know what to tell you.

eganist 3y ago
I don't know much about the first one, but the affiliate codes I'm fine with. A browser company that tries to monetize in ways that doesn't weaponize my info against me is much preferred. That said, I can't personally separate his politics from his product, which is why I use Firefox.
- Rudism 3y ago
  > the affiliate codes I'm fine with I would be fine with it if it were opt-in for users who want to support the browser in that way, but silently injecting them across the board is just a scummy thing to do and also likely a violation of any sane affiliate program's terms. A company that's willing to do that loses an unrecoverable amount of credibility and trust in my eyes.
  - voakbasda 3y ago
    I am with you. Their past actions irreversibly tainted their reputation, and they are no longer worthy of our trust. I think society has largely adopted a victim mentality with abusive software these days. We are so used to being betrayed and hurt that we now accept it as normal. It started off innocuously enough, but now we are effectively being hurt on the regular. We have learned helplessness, and that will not end well.

matrixxxboT 3y ago

>I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave. Let me help you understand why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CEO_and_resignation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE... That's the one and only real reason why they hate brave, all the other reasons are just excuses they like to tell to themselves and to others.

jccalhoun 3y ago
That's not the only reason. He's also a covid conspiracy guy.
notPlancha 3y ago
If I had a dollar for every product I use with a piece of shit CEOs I'd be a millionare
tick_tock_tick 3y ago
> That's the one and only real reason why they hate brave Cause Mozilla did him dirty? When Obama ran in 2008 he opposed gay marriage. Hell proposition 8 passed. California's constitution still has text banning gay marriage in it.
- p_j_w 3y ago
  Obama publicly changed his mind over 10 years ago. Has Eich?

soundnote 3y ago

A lot of people are leery about crypto and have read a FUD article or two about the browser and put it in the hate bucket. Next to none of the common complaints are modern missteps. One of the most common complaints was a bug that got fixed within a day of being reported, in a feature that Firefox is doing TODAY yet people aren't demanding Firefox devs' heads on a plate.

mrguyorama 3y ago
>read a FUD article Really? It's FUD that the Brave browser and team worked with and on a crypto project to integrate crypto into the browser?
- soundnote 3y ago
  No, not FUD in terms of Brave implementing crypto things within the browser. That much is obvious and they take pride in it. What I mean is that year in, year out you'll see the same things about a bug in their Firefox Suggest-esque feature that got fixed within one day of being reported, the bad Rewards UI which got fixed without anyone losing their cryptocurrency in response to eg. Tom Scott's feedback being treated as a scam where Brave stole it from people and so on. They're basically criticisms of first iterations of new things and assume maximum malice on part of the Brave team. The integrating crypto into the browser side is mostly unrelated, nobody denies it and few think it's unequivocally good.

polrb 3y ago

[dead]

outsidetheparty 3y ago

> I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one. It may not have played out as intended, but it wasn't a scam. The original intent was absolutely a scam. They wanted to hide the ads that were already on websites, replace them with their own, then give a fraction of the revenue they just effectively stole from those websites back to them (but only if they knew to ask for it). Also they were going to take over all the third-party tracking data for their own, while branding it as “privacy” — so much hand waving about "we don't run a MiTM proxy" (while hoping we didn’t notice it’s because they don’t need to be in the middle when they control the browser itself). Absolutely brazen, and they kept changing their story in real time whenever people started to notice hey wtf is this. Happened to be able to find this in my posting history for example; in hindsight I wish I hadn't been so cowed by the fact that I was arguing with Brendan Eich Himself, because man what a load of horsepuckey he and his guy were delivering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14464518#14465271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14464518#14465271

LightHugger 3y ago
None of that is a scam? The user and their browser decides what ads they see. Websites are not entitled to showing ads.
- outsidetheparty 3y ago
  The parts that could most safely be described as "scam", to my point of view, are * lying to users about protecting their privacy, while gathering and reselling more information than was possible with existing 3rd party trackers * lying about "giving back to publishers", while actually coopting those publishers' revenue streams Your "Websites are not entitled to showing ads" statement gave me a moment of thought, I have to admit: I don't see anything wrong with ad blockers, but I do think the ethics of ad replacers is pretty problematic. At best it makes Brave a parasitic entity feeding off revenue that would have otherwise gone to the content creators. I'll reluctantly agree that that part on its own doesn't rise to the level of "scam" but I certainly don't think it's admirable.

JeremyNT 3y ago

> I don't understand a lot of the hate for Brave. If you don't like the crypto integration, the ads, etc you can just disable them. I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one. It may not have played out as intended, but it wasn't a scam. The presence of ads and/or crypto is a strong signal that you're working with an untrustworthy entity, whose objectives will not be aligned with your own. Maybe Brave the browser isn't outright a "scam," but the willingness of the company to dip into scam-enabling technologies like crypto makes the brand toxic, and anything by the company is immediately suspect. The same is true for Signal, for what it's worth, as it still supports Moxie's pet shitcoin. It's easy enough to opt out of Brave because Firefox exists, but there's still sadly no better alternative to Signal.

entrepy123 3y ago
> ...there's still sadly no better alternative to Signal. Isn't the Matrix protocol the better alternative to Signal?
- JeremyNT 3y ago
  Unlike browsers, which can (for now) still be swapped out solely on individual preference, the network effects are real for messaging platforms. This means that currently Signal is more broadly useful than Matrix clients. Hopefully this can change some day, and Matrix (or something like it) will become ubiquitous. But it was a slog for Signal to gain even its small market share, despite its better usability and lower barriers to entry. For lack of a better alternative, we "standardized" on Signal as the de-facto secure messaging system that is outside of the control of ad companies, and it will take time to rectify that.
  - Arathorn 3y ago
    on the Matrix side we are slogging away at https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-element https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-e... to provide good (excellent?) UX as well as interoperability via Matrix.

Barrin92 3y ago

> I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one The intent is to circumvent how authors have themselves chosen to monetize their own content, insert themselves as the man in the middle, display their own ads and "pay" people in a currency they print. They're actually replacing the direct compensation the author would receive with an indirect one. Traditionally this kind of scheme is known as a protection racket. Also of course this means that Brave is simply an advertisement company, like the ones they are supposed to protect you from. When someone visits your page through Brave the ads you would have been compensated for are being blocked, Brave earns actual money for the ads they put in their place, and then users get the chance to tip you in 'attention tokens', which they wisely pre-mined. That's not noble, it's like the mafia combined with a Nigerian prince currency scam.

asadotzler 3y ago

As the guy who released all those Phoenix and Firebird and Firefox versions, I can tell you with some certainty that it hasn't been 22 years yet. First builds were spring of 2002 and you probably didn't have those because they were still called "browser" or "m/b" back then and not made terribly discoverable. You probably mean you got with it in 2003, summer or fall, which would be 20 years ago, not 22.

EMM_386 3y ago
> As the guy who released all those Phoenix and Firebird and Firefox versions, I can tell you with some certainty that it hasn't been 22 years yet. Yes, I was off by a year or so, I'm not making anything up. Two decades is a long time to remember details. All I know is I'd FTP to grab the latest and unzip it into a folder. By this point I was running a couple major websites and had a "5-star CNET Award" for an internet-centered software product so I was on top of anything in that sphere. Glory days.