13 ms·

Brave layoffs

152 points by theoldlove 3y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Meanwhile, the US added 336,000 jobs in September, more than double the estimates. https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-job-growth-beats-expectations-september-unemployment-rate-unchanged-38-2023-10-06/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-job-growth-beats-expec...
- DragonStrength 3y ago
  The article discusses the sectors for most of those jobs, which is hospitality. The sorts of jobs most people who visit this site are seeking remain in decline. IT unemployment is about double the rate of overall unemployment currently.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    > IT unemployment is about double the rate of overall unemployment currently. Really? Sounds bad. Is that official stats?
    - gboone 3y ago
      This suggests the range is much tighter than double, while also showing hospitality as the industry with the highest rate of unemployment. As of Sep 7. https://www.statista.com/statistics/217787/unemployment-rate-in-the-united-states-by-industry-and-class-of-worker/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/217787/unemployment-rate...
  - mberning 3y ago
    The top line numbers are so cooked. We are losing full time jobs in well paying sectors and adding part time jobs in hospitality. That’s not the big win that it seems. Just yesterday El-Erian wrote a column casting doubt on the soft landing which people have been desperately trying to manifest. What a joke.
  - kasey_junk 3y ago
    That’s not at all what the report shows. You can just look it up https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm The IT sector has a slightly higher unemployment rate 4.3 than the headline rate 3.9. And there is a special note about the IT rate being specifically impacted by the tv industry strikes as the sector covering sound and film engineers makes up most of the IT unemployment number. The industry that actually has a significantly higher rate is leisure and hospitality at 5.4.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
  This is great news.
- thallium205 3y ago
  Full time jobs decreased, part time jobs increased. They added those together and declared a net positive job growth.
  - kasey_junk 3y ago
    No: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t08.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t08.htm Full time jobs not only didn’t decrease, they increased more than part time jobs in actual terms. Part time jobs for economic reasons decreased while part time jobs for non economic reasons went up slightly.
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      You can calculate full/part time stuff from that page but it'd require a lot of number fidgeting. Keep in mind those values do not show grouped sums. Table 9 [1] is much more straight forward. Full time workers (in thousands) went from 134,189 to 134,167, part time workers went from 27,185 to 27,336. So a total of -22k full time jobs, and +151k part time jobs. The big reported increase came from the establishment/business survey. That survey results in overcounting people working multiple jobs. And multiple job holders (also in table 9) jumped from 8,028 to 8,151, for 123k more people now working at least 2 jobs. So we saw a loss of full time jobs, a gain of part time jobs, and a gain of people working more than one job. [1] - https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t09.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t09.htm
- VancouverMan 3y ago
  > Government employment increased by 73,000 jobs, driven by state government education and local government, excluding education. That part should raise serious questions about the validity of this metric. Any taxpayer-funded or debt-funded government "job" is not a creator of real (in the economic sense) wealth. Rather, such government "jobs" merely siphon off and consume real wealth generated by actually-productive market participants, and then permanently destroy that wealth. Even worse, the process of destroying of that real wealth is often done in a way that then impedes the productivity of the real wealth creators, introducing a secondary and longer-lasting real economic loss. Each government "job" added should be seen as a significant net loss to the overall economy. Those government "jobs" are in effect just destroying the real output of some number of private sector jobs.
  - malfist 3y ago
    Tell me about your plan to run and maintain a national network of highways without government "jobs"
    - VancouverMan 3y ago
      Why do you mistakenly believe that government needs to be involved with something like that? There's nothing overly special about an interstate-style highway network. It's essentially just a large number of roads covering a long distance that are connected together, with emphasis on driving speed. The private sector is more than capable of planning, building, connecting, maintaining, and operating roads of all types, widths, and lengths. I don't know where you are, but in Canada the various governments end up having to resort to the private sector anyway for highway-related projects. It's government interference that prevents there from being more privately-build and operated highways. That's exactly the problem I was talking about in my earlier comment. Government "jobs" are dead weight on the real economy, only inhibiting those who are actually productive.
      - mthoms 3y ago
        Private sector highways here in Canada are a disaster and an embarrassment. They have near zero public support (aside from libertarians).
omneity 3y ago
This doesn’t bode well for Brave’s self professed mission [0]. Maintaining a Chrome fork is already difficult enough on its own, especially with the number of directions where Brave wants to diverge. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36893654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36893654
- icegreentea2 3y ago
  No, it doesn't bode well =(. To be honest, I wonder if the webbrowser 'market' has been fundamentally broken ever since the Netscape days. Effectively ever since IE broke Netscape's back, every single major web browser has been funded either off the back of other business units (IE, Chrome, Safari), or funded by search engine deals. No customer has actually had to really contemplate 'what is the value of a browser' in like 25 years. No one actually has a sense of how valuable a browser actually is (except through the perverse metric of how many ads can you serve to the user via default search...). I think it's telling that all of Brave's new revenue streams aren't actually -from- their self-professed mission.
  - atdrummond 3y ago
    Opera did have a business model that worked monetizing the browser itself through sales - until smartphones fully supplanted feature phones.
    - Timon3 3y ago
      That's not quite the full story. Since 2000 Opera showed ads if you didn't pay for it, and they removed those in 2005, a good bit before smartphones really started. In a way they were ahead of the curve, considering how popular ad-based models with optional removal purchases are these days.
      - inemesitaffia 3y ago
        The ads were still there as of last year in mini.
  - 3y ago
nologic01 3y ago
"Resistance is futile"
ulfw 3y ago
Of course they do. Who doesn't. I've still not been able to find a new job. The market, especially outside of the US is dead for experienced Product leads.
xrd 3y ago
Interesting to see they are offering services that can either be in house or offloaded to another service provider. They are oscillating between building their own search engine versus using Bing. And offering their own internal AI named Leo versus passing information to one of the many cloud provider APIs. For Brave, difficult to claim privacy if they don't do all that in house. But it forces them out of their lane from building a browser to building all these services. Kind of seems like they are becoming Google, which has always been the foil Brave has claimed to be fighting against.
- zolbrek 3y ago
  Brave has a long, long way to go before they even get close to becoming Google.
  - dartos 3y ago
    Yeah. OPs take is a little weird.
  - izacus 3y ago
    They're repackaging Googles software, they've always been already there. Building a business who's feature is "We're independent from Google" on top of codebase that is dependant on Googles development effort was always a hypocritical thesis.
MelatoninGreat 3y ago
Feh. Of course this is happening. Who's hiring experienced product leads outside the US anyway? The job market, especially outside of the US, is dead for experienced product leads, and the culture and other factors outside the US can't be changed so easily. I know at least five people now, from the EU, who are struggling hard landing product leadership roles internationally. With all these tech companies tightening budgets and laying off staff, hiring has slowed across the board. I mean I guess for sure there's still desire for senior PM talent, but the roles are 100% more scattered. I only know a bunch of people in the EU and don't really have a global picture so how's the product job landscape globally? What regions or companies still have healthy hiring pipelines? Is it mainly US-based companies recruiting abroad or are there other non-US tech scenes continuing to grow? I mean, there must be, but nothing compared to the US. Maybe the AI takeover should come as soon as possible after all.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
I'm going to treat this like a product engineering discussion User Story: As a Private Citizen and Engineer, I want a graphical multi-input interface to load, view, interact with and post documents to remote and local HTTP servers ("web-browsing") on any personal computing device. I want web-browsing to have out of the box default security and privacy guardrails that are well documented can be disabled or modified by me the user and only me the user. I want this software to be fully modifiable by any person using tools that are easily, freely available and accessible (aka FOSS). I want this capability to be free at the time of use with no restrictions on amount scope or scale of use. I think the above describes the product that everyone wants It sure sounds a lot like Firefox to me Why aren't we collectively putting our time/effort etc.. into making Firefox the singular and best FOSS browser ever? edit: Oh I didn't realize that Brave totally abandoned their model and started taking Venture from RGA and Page One in 2019. Game has been over since then at least: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/brave-software/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/brave-software/compa...
- BrendanEich 3y ago
  That seed stage investment is a tiny slice of the cap table and has no control, just ride-along preferred shares. Your aversion to VC is something I share, but not to this IQ-lowering degree.
- ushakov 3y ago
  There is SerenityOS and their Ladybird browser
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    God bless Andreas Kling but I don't think they have the community support to stand up to the Chromes and IE/Edge of the world unfortunately
- sirwhinesalot 3y ago
  > Why aren't we collectively putting our time/effort etc.. into making Firefox the singular and best FOSS browser ever? Because the leadership is hellbent on copying Chrome but worse and investing in utterly pointless endeavors instead of making a good browser. It's a shame. Giving money to the Mozilla Foundation is the same as throwing it to a black hole. I hope a new truly FOSS browser shows up and catches on that does not use Blink and isn't owned by a group of human-shaped leeches.
flagrant_taco 3y ago
We aren't going to see browser competition unless and until we fundamentally rethink what the internet should be. The specifications are simply too complex to foster any meaningful competition. There's too much ground to cover playing catchup and Google has such a large market share that, combined with their data and ad monopoly, allows them to create new specs and features that focus entirely on growing their business model. Web sepcifications should be simple enough that it's pheasible for small teams to actually maintain a quality open source browser with modest funding. We've ended up falling into the same trap as many other big systems, we lost sight of what the goals and limitations for the web were and instead chased convenience and shiny new features above all else.
- fidotron 3y ago
  The AI wave is doing this, by which I mean it is finally separating the content and presentation of information and allowing the collation and reformatting of substance across multiple entities which today each have their own interfaces. For example, the entire idea that we visit specific websites and manually compare prices when buying things is ridiculous and misses huge parts of the benefits of using computers in the first place.
  - cbm-vic-20 3y ago
    That's because the pendulum hasn't swung back in that direction yet. By this time next year, it's likely that many of the popular LLM sites will slip in advertisements, pushing the agenda of whoever trained the models.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
      And the arms race starts all over again.
  - flagrant_taco 3y ago
    I think this is actually a modern misunderstanding of the original benefits of computers. Computers were originally designed as a tool, they allowed us to work more efficiently but weren't directly taking over doing the actual work. A spreadsheet doid the calculations for me, but I had to provide both the data and the actual formulas to run. AI, or more accurately machine learning, attempts to take us out of the process. It isn't separating content and presentation, it's separating content and understanding. The algorithm will read in data, compress it, and save only the patterns it learned. By the time the content is presented there is little connection to the original source and what I'm seeing isn't just a separated presentation layer, it's something entirely different like playing a game of telephone.
pluc 3y ago
Well the good news is that there are plenty of other companies using the exact same technology to produce the exact same product!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bongwater_OS 3y ago
I've been using Brave (quite happily) for years, I was inspired by their initial mission. Reading this article, hearing that they're implementing "price-tiered AI" (~original~), is so antithetical to what I once thought they stood for that I'm ready to ditch. This might sound crazy, but the primary purpose of a browser isn't to improve search results with a custom API (almost none of which compare to vanilla Google), but to actually improve the browsing experience. Haven't tried Arc, but from what I've seen it seems like they're actually focusing on UX, which is the kind of thing I'm looking for in a browser.
- timeon 3y ago
  > Haven't tried Arc Jumping from Chromium to Chromium?
twism 3y ago
Enough is enough. Y'all need to pack it up and go home. The big boy browsers are making features that make websites seem like native applications while y'all are still struggling making css look right. Maybe this is not a brave thing specifically since last I looked brave was based on chromium so should have feature parity with chrome browsers, but then what's the point? Are we just pointing things to different servers in the source (or removing that part) and claiming FOSS/privacy. I'm honestly confused by these alternative browsers.
- minerva23 3y ago
  Brave has some user-first features you'll never see from Chrome. E.g. ad/tracking blocking by default, cookie consent popup blocking offered, YouTube downloads on iOS. That's in addition to some anti-Google and better privacy features. I want a browser which actively fights the enshitification of the web. Brave is the best I've found so far. I'm hoping to find better.
- kyleee 3y ago
  Having google in control of the only large browser software project is an existential threat to the open web, so it would be great to have many competing browsers all flourishing
kazinator 3y ago
> challenging economic environment The "environment" problem isn't economic, but social. It's not new, and it's not about to change: - Most users don't know that the browser that came with their device can be replaced by something else. - Of those that know, many don't. - Of those who do, they want it free; you cannot monetize it. You can't lock them in; they will switch to something else at the sign of any trouble. The alternative browser user is pretty much the same person who doesn't want to see a single ad anywhere, or pay for anything. You might as well wrap quartz pebbles in cloth and wait for whey to drip out. A possible area for an alternative browser might be the corporate environment; employers who want to prescribe some kind of more locked down, security-fortified browser for use within their intranet. The challenge there is demonstrating value, compared to regular approaches: using regular browsers and securing things elsewhere. Recently there was a HN submission to a story about how scalpers are able to get Ticketmaster tickets before everyone else, which mentioned custom browsers that the use. Someone makes money in that niche.
primax 3y ago
I would have thought a browser's users were sticky enough to not be effected by the economic environment. Or at least as much as most businesses. I suppose their advertising revenues could be impacted.

152 points by theoldlove 3y ago

Meanwhile, the US added 336,000 jobs in September, more than double the estimates. https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-job-growth-beats-expectations-september-unemployment-rate-unchanged-38-2023-10-06/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-job-growth-beats-expec...

DragonStrength 3y ago
The article discusses the sectors for most of those jobs, which is hospitality. The sorts of jobs most people who visit this site are seeking remain in decline. IT unemployment is about double the rate of overall unemployment currently.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  > IT unemployment is about double the rate of overall unemployment currently. Really? Sounds bad. Is that official stats?
  - gboone 3y ago
    This suggests the range is much tighter than double, while also showing hospitality as the industry with the highest rate of unemployment. As of Sep 7. https://www.statista.com/statistics/217787/unemployment-rate-in-the-united-states-by-industry-and-class-of-worker/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/217787/unemployment-rate...
- mberning 3y ago
  The top line numbers are so cooked. We are losing full time jobs in well paying sectors and adding part time jobs in hospitality. That’s not the big win that it seems. Just yesterday El-Erian wrote a column casting doubt on the soft landing which people have been desperately trying to manifest. What a joke.
- kasey_junk 3y ago
  That’s not at all what the report shows. You can just look it up https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm The IT sector has a slightly higher unemployment rate 4.3 than the headline rate 3.9. And there is a special note about the IT rate being specifically impacted by the tv industry strikes as the sector covering sound and film engineers makes up most of the IT unemployment number. The industry that actually has a significantly higher rate is leisure and hospitality at 5.4.
hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
This is great news.
thallium205 3y ago
Full time jobs decreased, part time jobs increased. They added those together and declared a net positive job growth.
- kasey_junk 3y ago
  No: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t08.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t08.htm Full time jobs not only didn’t decrease, they increased more than part time jobs in actual terms. Part time jobs for economic reasons decreased while part time jobs for non economic reasons went up slightly.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    You can calculate full/part time stuff from that page but it'd require a lot of number fidgeting. Keep in mind those values do not show grouped sums. Table 9 [1] is much more straight forward. Full time workers (in thousands) went from 134,189 to 134,167, part time workers went from 27,185 to 27,336. So a total of -22k full time jobs, and +151k part time jobs. The big reported increase came from the establishment/business survey. That survey results in overcounting people working multiple jobs. And multiple job holders (also in table 9) jumped from 8,028 to 8,151, for 123k more people now working at least 2 jobs. So we saw a loss of full time jobs, a gain of part time jobs, and a gain of people working more than one job. [1] - https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t09.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t09.htm
VancouverMan 3y ago
> Government employment increased by 73,000 jobs, driven by state government education and local government, excluding education. That part should raise serious questions about the validity of this metric. Any taxpayer-funded or debt-funded government "job" is not a creator of real (in the economic sense) wealth. Rather, such government "jobs" merely siphon off and consume real wealth generated by actually-productive market participants, and then permanently destroy that wealth. Even worse, the process of destroying of that real wealth is often done in a way that then impedes the productivity of the real wealth creators, introducing a secondary and longer-lasting real economic loss. Each government "job" added should be seen as a significant net loss to the overall economy. Those government "jobs" are in effect just destroying the real output of some number of private sector jobs.
- malfist 3y ago
  Tell me about your plan to run and maintain a national network of highways without government "jobs"
  - VancouverMan 3y ago
    Why do you mistakenly believe that government needs to be involved with something like that? There's nothing overly special about an interstate-style highway network. It's essentially just a large number of roads covering a long distance that are connected together, with emphasis on driving speed. The private sector is more than capable of planning, building, connecting, maintaining, and operating roads of all types, widths, and lengths. I don't know where you are, but in Canada the various governments end up having to resort to the private sector anyway for highway-related projects. It's government interference that prevents there from being more privately-build and operated highways. That's exactly the problem I was talking about in my earlier comment. Government "jobs" are dead weight on the real economy, only inhibiting those who are actually productive.
    - mthoms 3y ago
      Private sector highways here in Canada are a disaster and an embarrassment. They have near zero public support (aside from libertarians).

omneity 3y ago

This doesn’t bode well for Brave’s self professed mission [0]. Maintaining a Chrome fork is already difficult enough on its own, especially with the number of directions where Brave wants to diverge. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36893654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36893654

icegreentea2 3y ago
No, it doesn't bode well =(. To be honest, I wonder if the webbrowser 'market' has been fundamentally broken ever since the Netscape days. Effectively ever since IE broke Netscape's back, every single major web browser has been funded either off the back of other business units (IE, Chrome, Safari), or funded by search engine deals. No customer has actually had to really contemplate 'what is the value of a browser' in like 25 years. No one actually has a sense of how valuable a browser actually is (except through the perverse metric of how many ads can you serve to the user via default search...). I think it's telling that all of Brave's new revenue streams aren't actually -from- their self-professed mission.
- atdrummond 3y ago
  Opera did have a business model that worked monetizing the browser itself through sales - until smartphones fully supplanted feature phones.
  - Timon3 3y ago
    That's not quite the full story. Since 2000 Opera showed ads if you didn't pay for it, and they removed those in 2005, a good bit before smartphones really started. In a way they were ahead of the curve, considering how popular ad-based models with optional removal purchases are these days.
    - inemesitaffia 3y ago
      The ads were still there as of last year in mini.
- 3y ago

nologic01 3y ago

"Resistance is futile"

ulfw 3y ago

Of course they do. Who doesn't. I've still not been able to find a new job. The market, especially outside of the US is dead for experienced Product leads.

xrd 3y ago

Interesting to see they are offering services that can either be in house or offloaded to another service provider. They are oscillating between building their own search engine versus using Bing. And offering their own internal AI named Leo versus passing information to one of the many cloud provider APIs. For Brave, difficult to claim privacy if they don't do all that in house. But it forces them out of their lane from building a browser to building all these services. Kind of seems like they are becoming Google, which has always been the foil Brave has claimed to be fighting against.

zolbrek 3y ago
Brave has a long, long way to go before they even get close to becoming Google.
- dartos 3y ago
  Yeah. OPs take is a little weird.
- izacus 3y ago
  They're repackaging Googles software, they've always been already there. Building a business who's feature is "We're independent from Google" on top of codebase that is dependant on Googles development effort was always a hypocritical thesis.

MelatoninGreat 3y ago

Feh. Of course this is happening. Who's hiring experienced product leads outside the US anyway? The job market, especially outside of the US, is dead for experienced product leads, and the culture and other factors outside the US can't be changed so easily. I know at least five people now, from the EU, who are struggling hard landing product leadership roles internationally. With all these tech companies tightening budgets and laying off staff, hiring has slowed across the board. I mean I guess for sure there's still desire for senior PM talent, but the roles are 100% more scattered. I only know a bunch of people in the EU and don't really have a global picture so how's the product job landscape globally? What regions or companies still have healthy hiring pipelines? Is it mainly US-based companies recruiting abroad or are there other non-US tech scenes continuing to grow? I mean, there must be, but nothing compared to the US. Maybe the AI takeover should come as soon as possible after all.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

I'm going to treat this like a product engineering discussion User Story: As a Private Citizen and Engineer, I want a graphical multi-input interface to load, view, interact with and post documents to remote and local HTTP servers ("web-browsing") on any personal computing device. I want web-browsing to have out of the box default security and privacy guardrails that are well documented can be disabled or modified by me the user and only me the user. I want this software to be fully modifiable by any person using tools that are easily, freely available and accessible (aka FOSS). I want this capability to be free at the time of use with no restrictions on amount scope or scale of use. I think the above describes the product that everyone wants It sure sounds a lot like Firefox to me Why aren't we collectively putting our time/effort etc.. into making Firefox the singular and best FOSS browser ever? edit: Oh I didn't realize that Brave totally abandoned their model and started taking Venture from RGA and Page One in 2019. Game has been over since then at least: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/brave-software/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/brave-software/compa...

BrendanEich 3y ago
That seed stage investment is a tiny slice of the cap table and has no control, just ride-along preferred shares. Your aversion to VC is something I share, but not to this IQ-lowering degree.
ushakov 3y ago
There is SerenityOS and their Ladybird browser
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  God bless Andreas Kling but I don't think they have the community support to stand up to the Chromes and IE/Edge of the world unfortunately
sirwhinesalot 3y ago
> Why aren't we collectively putting our time/effort etc.. into making Firefox the singular and best FOSS browser ever? Because the leadership is hellbent on copying Chrome but worse and investing in utterly pointless endeavors instead of making a good browser. It's a shame. Giving money to the Mozilla Foundation is the same as throwing it to a black hole. I hope a new truly FOSS browser shows up and catches on that does not use Blink and isn't owned by a group of human-shaped leeches.

flagrant_taco 3y ago

We aren't going to see browser competition unless and until we fundamentally rethink what the internet should be. The specifications are simply too complex to foster any meaningful competition. There's too much ground to cover playing catchup and Google has such a large market share that, combined with their data and ad monopoly, allows them to create new specs and features that focus entirely on growing their business model. Web sepcifications should be simple enough that it's pheasible for small teams to actually maintain a quality open source browser with modest funding. We've ended up falling into the same trap as many other big systems, we lost sight of what the goals and limitations for the web were and instead chased convenience and shiny new features above all else.

fidotron 3y ago
The AI wave is doing this, by which I mean it is finally separating the content and presentation of information and allowing the collation and reformatting of substance across multiple entities which today each have their own interfaces. For example, the entire idea that we visit specific websites and manually compare prices when buying things is ridiculous and misses huge parts of the benefits of using computers in the first place.
- cbm-vic-20 3y ago
  That's because the pendulum hasn't swung back in that direction yet. By this time next year, it's likely that many of the popular LLM sites will slip in advertisements, pushing the agenda of whoever trained the models.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
    And the arms race starts all over again.
- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  I think this is actually a modern misunderstanding of the original benefits of computers. Computers were originally designed as a tool, they allowed us to work more efficiently but weren't directly taking over doing the actual work. A spreadsheet doid the calculations for me, but I had to provide both the data and the actual formulas to run. AI, or more accurately machine learning, attempts to take us out of the process. It isn't separating content and presentation, it's separating content and understanding. The algorithm will read in data, compress it, and save only the patterns it learned. By the time the content is presented there is little connection to the original source and what I'm seeing isn't just a separated presentation layer, it's something entirely different like playing a game of telephone.

pluc 3y ago

Well the good news is that there are plenty of other companies using the exact same technology to produce the exact same product!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bongwater_OS 3y ago

I've been using Brave (quite happily) for years, I was inspired by their initial mission. Reading this article, hearing that they're implementing "price-tiered AI" (~original~), is so antithetical to what I once thought they stood for that I'm ready to ditch. This might sound crazy, but the primary purpose of a browser isn't to improve search results with a custom API (almost none of which compare to vanilla Google), but to actually improve the browsing experience. Haven't tried Arc, but from what I've seen it seems like they're actually focusing on UX, which is the kind of thing I'm looking for in a browser.

timeon 3y ago
> Haven't tried Arc Jumping from Chromium to Chromium?

twism 3y ago

Enough is enough. Y'all need to pack it up and go home. The big boy browsers are making features that make websites seem like native applications while y'all are still struggling making css look right. Maybe this is not a brave thing specifically since last I looked brave was based on chromium so should have feature parity with chrome browsers, but then what's the point? Are we just pointing things to different servers in the source (or removing that part) and claiming FOSS/privacy. I'm honestly confused by these alternative browsers.

minerva23 3y ago
Brave has some user-first features you'll never see from Chrome. E.g. ad/tracking blocking by default, cookie consent popup blocking offered, YouTube downloads on iOS. That's in addition to some anti-Google and better privacy features. I want a browser which actively fights the enshitification of the web. Brave is the best I've found so far. I'm hoping to find better.
kyleee 3y ago
Having google in control of the only large browser software project is an existential threat to the open web, so it would be great to have many competing browsers all flourishing

kazinator 3y ago

> challenging economic environment The "environment" problem isn't economic, but social. It's not new, and it's not about to change: - Most users don't know that the browser that came with their device can be replaced by something else. - Of those that know, many don't. - Of those who do, they want it free; you cannot monetize it. You can't lock them in; they will switch to something else at the sign of any trouble. The alternative browser user is pretty much the same person who doesn't want to see a single ad anywhere, or pay for anything. You might as well wrap quartz pebbles in cloth and wait for whey to drip out. A possible area for an alternative browser might be the corporate environment; employers who want to prescribe some kind of more locked down, security-fortified browser for use within their intranet. The challenge there is demonstrating value, compared to regular approaches: using regular browsers and securing things elsewhere. Recently there was a HN submission to a story about how scalpers are able to get Ticketmaster tickets before everyone else, which mentioned custom browsers that the use. Someone makes money in that niche.

primax 3y ago

I would have thought a browser's users were sticky enough to not be effected by the economic environment. Or at least as much as most businesses. I suppose their advertising revenues could be impacted.