Even if half of the things I have heard about Brave are wrong, why even bother when so many other great, free alternatives exist. The first and last time I tried it was the home page ad fiasco… uninstalled and went back to Chrome.
These days I try to use Firefox, but escape hatch to Chrome when things don’t work. I know there are better alternatives to both Firefox and Chrome, I’ll start exploring them… maybe? It’s hard for me to care about them since most of them are just Chrome/Firefox anyway. I’ll definitely give Ladybird a go when it’s ready. On paper, at least, it sounds like the escape from Google/Mozilla that is desperately needed.
Kagi bringing Orion to Linux feels promising. It’s OK on Mac, though after using it for 6 months I switched back to Safari. It looks like they’re using Webkit for that on Linux, not blink, which is a happy surprise IMO. That feels like a good development. (I’m also looking forward to Ladybird, though. Every so often I build myself a binary and kick the tires. Their progress feels simultaneously impossibly fast and excruciatingly slow.
If I understand correctly, Orion is not open source. That feels like a huge step backward and not a solution to a browser being controlled by a company with user-hostile incentives. I think Ladybird is more in line with what we really need: a browser that isn’t a product but rather a public good that may be funded in part by corporations but isn’t strongly influenced by any one commercial entity.
they have stated that open sourcing is in the works
That help page has said Kagi is “working on it” since 2023-09 or earlier. Since Kagi hasn’t finished that work after 1.5 years, I don’t believe Kagi is actually working on open sourcing Orion.
Their business model is, at the minimum, less user hostile than others due to users paying them money directly to keep them alive.
If US DoJ has their way, google won’t be able to fund chrome any more the way it was doing so far. That also means apple and firefox lose money too. So Kagi’s stuff might work out long term if breakup happens.
That’s totally valid, and I’d strongly prefer to use an open source UA as well!
In the context of browsers, though, where almost all traffic comes from either webkit-based browsers (chiefly if not only Safari on Mac/iPad/iPhone), blink-based browsers (chrome/edge/vivaldi/opera/other even smaller ones) or gecko-based browsers (Firefox/LibreWolf/Waterfox/IceCat/Seamonkey/Zen/other even smaller ones) two things stand out to me:
Only the gecko-based ones are mostly FOSS.
One of the 3 engines is practically Apple-exclusive.
I thought that Orion moving Webkit into a Linux browser was a promising development just from an ecosystem diversity perspective. And I thought having a browser that’s not ad-funded on Linux (because even those FOSS ones are, indirectly ad-funded) was also a promising development.
I’d also be happier with a production ready Ladybird. But that doesn’t diminish the notion that, in my eye, a new option that’s not beholden to advertisers feels like a really good step.
Of the blink-based pure FOSS browsers, I use Ungoogled Chromium, which tracks the Chromium project and removes all binary blobs and Google services. There is also Debian Chromium; Iridium; Falkon from KDE; and Qute (keyboard driven UI with vim-style key bindings). Probably many others.
The best Webkit based browser I’m aware of on Linux is Epiphany, aka Gnome Web. It has built-in ad blocking and “experimental” support for chrome/firefox extensions. A hypothetical Orion port to Linux would presumably have non-experimental extension support. (I found some browsers based on the deprecated QtWebKit, but these should not be used due to unfixed security flaws.)
I wasn’t sure Ungoogled Chromium was fully FOSS, and I completely forgot about Debian Chromium. I tried to use Qute for a while and it was broken enough for me at the time that I assumed it was not actively developed.
When did Epiphany switch from Gecko to Webkit? Last time I was aware of what it used, it was like “Camino for Linux” and was good, but I still had it on the Gecko pile.
According to Wikipedia, Epiphany switched from Gecko to Webkit in 2008, because the Gecko API was too difficult to interface to / caused too much maintenance burden. Using Gecko as a library and wrapping your own UI around it is apparently quite different from soft forking the entire Firefox project and applying patches.
Webkit.org endorses Epiphany as the Linux browser that uses Webkit.
There used to be a QtWebKit wrapper in the Qt project, but it was abandoned in favour of QtWebEngine based on Blink. The QtWebEngine announcement in 2013 gives the rationale: https://www.qt.io/blog/2013/09/12/introducing-the-qt-webengine. At the time, the Qt project was doing all the work of making WebKit into a cross-platform API, and it was too much work. Google had recently forked Webkit to create Blink as a cross-platform library. Switching to Blink gave the Qt project better features and compatibility at a lower development cost.
The FOSS world needs a high quality, cross-platform browser engine that you can wrap your own UI around. It seems that Blink is the best implementation of such a library. WebKit is focused on macOS and iOS, and Firefox develops Gecko as an internal API for Firefox.
EDIT: I see that https://webkitgtk.org/ exists for the Gnome platform, and is reported to be easy to use.
I see Servo as the future, since it is written in Rust, not C++, and since it is developed as a cross platform API, to which you must bring your own UI. There is also Ladybird, and it’s also cross-platform, but it’s written in C++, which is less popular for new projects, and its web engine is not developed as a separate project. Servo isn’t ready yet, but they project it will be ready this year: https://servo.org/blog/2025/02/19/this-month-in-servo/.
I used to contribute to Camino on OS X, and I knew that most appetite for embedding gecko in anything that’s not firefox died a while back, about the time Mozilla deprecated the embedding library, but I’d lost track of Epiphany. As an aside: I’m still sorry that Mozilla deprecated the embedding interface for gecko, and I wish I could find a way to make it practical to maintain that. Embedded Gecko was really nice to work with in its time.
The FOSS world needs a high quality, cross-platform browser engine that you can wrap your own UI around.
I strongly agree with this. I’d really like a non-blink thing to be an option for this. Not because there’s anything wrong with blink, but because that feels like a rug pull waiting to happen. I like that servo update, and hope that the momentum holds.
Wikipedia suggests the WebKit backend was added to Epiphany in 2007 and they removed the Gecko backend in 2009. Wow, time flies! GNOME Web is one I would like to try out more, if only because I enjoy GNOME and it seems to be a decent option for mobile Linux.
I have not encountered any website that doesn’t work on firefox (one corporate app said it required Chrome for some undisclosed reason, but I changed the useragent and had no issue at all to use their sinple CRUD).
What kind of issues do you find?
I’ve wondered the same thing in these recent discussions. I’ve used Firefox exclusively at home for over 15 years, and I’ve used it at my different jobs as much as possible. While my last two employers had maybe one thing that only worked in IE or Chrome/Edge, everything else worked fine (and often better than my coworkers’ Chrome) in Firefox. At home, the last time I remember installing Chrome was to try some demo of Web MIDI before Firefox had support. That was probably five years ago, and I uninstalled Chrome after playing with the demo for a few minutes.
I had to install Chromium a couple of times in the last years to join meetings and podcast recording that were done with software using Chrome-only API.
When it happens, I bless flattpak as I install Chromium then permanently delete it afterward without any trace on my system.
If you are an heavy user of such web apps, I guess that it makes sense to use Chrome as your main browser.
I can’t get launcher.keychron.com to work on LibreWolf but that’s pretty much it. I also have chrome just in case I’m too lazy to figure out what specifically is breaking a site
Thanks, yeah, that’s it. I knew it was some specific thing that wasn’t supported I just couldn’t remember and was writing that previous comment on my phone so I was too lazy to check. But yeah, it’s literally the only site I could think of that doesn’t work on Firefox (for me).
It’s pretty rare to be fair, so much so that I don’t have an example of the top off my head. I know, classic internet comment un-cited source bullshit, sorry. It was probably awful gov or company intranet pages over the years.
Some intensive browser based games run noticeably better on Chrome too, but I know this isn’t exactly a common use case for browsers that others care about.
For some reason, trying to log in to the CRA (Canadian equivalent of the IRS) always fails for me with firefox and I need to use chrome to pay my taxes.
I run into small stuff fairly regularly. Visual glitches are common. Every once in a while, I’ll run into a site that won’t let me login. (Redirects fail, can’t solve a CAPTCHA, etc.)
Some google workspace features at least used to be annoying enough that I just devote a chrome profile to running those workspace apps. I haven’t retried them in Firefox recently because I kind of feel that it’s google’s just deserts that they get a profile on me that has nothing but their own properties, while I use other browsers for the real web.
I should start keeping a list of specific sites. Because I do care about this, but usually when it comes up I’m trying to get something done quickly and a work-around like “use chrome for that site” carries the day, then I forget to return to it and dig into why it was broken.
According to https://lobste.rs/about, this site is about programming, not living in a society.
Some rules of thumb for great stories to submit: Will this improve the reader’s next program? Will it deepen their understanding of their last program? Will it be more interesting in five or ten years?
Some things that are off-topic here but popular on larger, similar sites: entrepreneurship, management, news about companies that employ a lot of programmers, investing, world events, anthropology, self-help, personal productivity systems, last-resort customer service requests via public shaming, “I wanted to see what this site’s amazing users think about this off-topic thing”, and defining the single morally correct economic and political system for the entire world when we can’t even settle tabs vs. spaces.
I would hope there are some key takeaways from the discussion. I see lots of things here that I definitely wouldn’t want to do in my “next program”. I don’t love that this is a link to a biased post on another discussion forum instead of a well-written blog post about the same, but I think the topic itself is sparking some useful discussion about what not to do if you want people to trust your software.
This feels quite biased. For example, presumably Brave has responded to these things. Even if the response is invalid, my preference would be to show it and then demonstrate it as being invalid. When I see a big list of “they did this” with no representation of the other side it makes me very skeptical and, perhaps unfairly, dismissive.
I have no stake in this but I will say that Brave seems to do two things that I see potential in.
It is one of the few cases where blockchain seems reasonable. I know people like to hate on blockchain because of cryptocurrency, and they hate on cryptocurrency because it is largely a tool for criminals, but just from a technical perspective there are potentially valid use cases where you have a distributed system with some number of participants who you do not want to trust while still ensuring that all participants are doing some kind of work (visiting a page).
It is the only browser project I have seen that actually seems like it could disrupt the singular monetization strategy of the web - advertising. Mozilla can’t exist without ad revenue, they already can’t meaningfully compete against it even if you ignore that all of their funding is ad-driven. We should probably be asking ourselves how we expect the web to continue if we reject advertising as a source. To my knowledge, Brave is the only company that’s taken an approach that even appears viable.
I don’t really have a strong stake in this but I find this list really unhelpful. It doesn’t do any of the hard work for me. I could search online for “brave controversy” and get a list of search results like this. What would be valuable is actually providing the hard information to find, to provide analysis, etc. A listicle of “I accuse them of this” is not valuable at all unless you’re either completely uninterested in basing your opinions on information or you’re already sold on the idea that Brave is bad and you want to add more urls to your evidentiary arsenal.
Am I to click each of these links, find the responses, analyze them myself, etc? I could do that, but it’s kind of a heavy lift.
I know people like to hate on blockchain because of cryptocurrency, and they hate on cryptocurrency because it is largely a tool for criminals
I haven’t seen this be the reason people criticize crypto for at least 10-15 years. People have concerns about the ecological concerns, and the rampancy of pump-and-dump and other scams. But people haven’t cared about crypto being used to buy drugs in years. At least, not to a prominent degree
I wasn’t thinking of drugs specifically, I was thinking about scams, identity theft, blackmail, ransomware, etc. But it isn’t really important to my point, I don’t think.
Bitcoin is ESG and Brave use a blockchain that is not proof of work. FIAT as USD is the most used to buy drugs and fund wars. Also Chainalisys loves open ledgers because transactions can be traced.
The way Brave disrupts advertising on the Web is by intercepting it and replacing the ads with their own ads. It is the sleaziest of all possible disruptions.
Assuming content creators (god I hate that word) actually try to make a living using only advertisement and actually give a shit while choosing partners it’s taking away their income while still showing the user advertisement.
It’s kind of like syphoning off the money the actual creator could make.
It feels to me like selling an open source product you don’t develop (without support) or selling fandubs.
I’m not really familiar with this stuff, so I don’t know much about it. My understanding was that Brave intended to pay creators in that circumstance, perhaps not though?
Afaict from all the controversies they don’t give a shit, are intransperent and come off as evil. See everything in the linked reddit list. And I don’t know either how brave is supposed to work, but after everything I read about it
https://lobste.rs/s/iopw1d/what_s_up_with_lobste_rs_blocking_brave
I don’t want to touch it with a 10 foot pole
Yeah, that’s fair. I am not really trying to defend Brave. I just wanted to point out that a big list of accusations isn’t very helpful to me personally and I think that the premise of finding new ways to monetize the web is valuable. I have no other thoughts on the matter tbh.
After engaging in that discussion, it reaffirmed to me that two reasonable people can see the exact same events/discussions and come to opposite conclusions.
two reasonable people can see the exact same events/discussions and come to opposite conclusions
It’s mostly preconceived notions/beliefs. For some reason a lot of people are predisposed to give the benefit of the doubt to Brave, and so we gets lots of rebuttals which try to see the things Brave has done in the best possible light/downplay the criticism/find a charitable interpretation/etc.
By contrast a lot of people, for whatever reason, are predisposed to never give benefit of the doubt to Mozilla, so we get lots of angry threads where people will do whatever they can to view decisions by Mozilla in a negative light.
Personally I’m in the exact opposite position – I am inclined to give Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and look for charitable interpretations of things they do (especially the recent ToS kerfuffle, which just seems like silly overreaction by the internet), and inclined to view Brave and especially Brendan Eich negatively and never give the benefit of the doubt.
We can dig further about why one wants to give the benefit of the doubt and another does not, and lay out all the arguments, and still reach opposite conclusions.
I agree if you mean to say that it’s ideological, I think that is true by definition.
It is one of the few cases where blockchain seems reasonable.
To me, blockchain is merely a public ledger that cannot (easily) be amended once written to. In that case, Git’s commit system is technically blockchain. Each commit hash depends on the previous hash and the commit’s diff, meaning it cannot be edited without throwing everyone’s clone out of sync. Pretty useful!
Based on activities listed in the OP, Brave is funded by advertising (injecting their own ads into your browser, replacing the ads of the site you are visiting), soliciting donations for open source projects they have no relation with and pocketing the funds, subscription fees from the VPN that they install without permission, scraping web sites without permission and reselling copyrighted data for AI training, and injecting URLs with affiliate codes into your web browser.
Based on Brave’s own description of their company, from their FAQ:
We generate revenue in several ways, including:
The sale of New Tab Takeovers, Brave Search Ads, and other Brave Ads (the first-party ad units that users opt into via our privacy-preserving ad platform). Note that opted-in users receive 70% of this ad revenue back in the form of BAT.
Subscriptions to our premium products: Brave Firewall + VPN, Brave Talk Premium, Brave Leo Premium, and Brave Search Premium.
A 1% fee on fiat-to-crypto transactions (through onramp partners) in Brave Wallet, and a nominal fee on creator tips and auto-contributions made via Brave Rewards.
Subscriptions to our Search API.
Partnership deals (for example with platforms integrated into the Brave browser).
Elsewhere in the FAQ, they talk about collecting user data and selling that to advertisers, for targeted advertising.
Early on I think the intent was to fund entirely via BAT. At this point, from what I understand at least, they have a number of things they’re doing, including at least some funding being advertisement based.
I have been using Brave without any broken link and no ads, and my main as LibreWolf because there is nothing better than multi-containers.
But looking at Orion and Ladybird when its released.
Even if half of the things I have heard about Brave are wrong, why even bother when so many other great, free alternatives exist. The first and last time I tried it was the home page ad fiasco… uninstalled and went back to Chrome.
These days I try to use Firefox, but escape hatch to Chrome when things don’t work. I know there are better alternatives to both Firefox and Chrome, I’ll start exploring them… maybe? It’s hard for me to care about them since most of them are just Chrome/Firefox anyway. I’ll definitely give Ladybird a go when it’s ready. On paper, at least, it sounds like the escape from Google/Mozilla that is desperately needed.
Kagi bringing Orion to Linux feels promising. It’s OK on Mac, though after using it for 6 months I switched back to Safari. It looks like they’re using Webkit for that on Linux, not blink, which is a happy surprise IMO. That feels like a good development. (I’m also looking forward to Ladybird, though. Every so often I build myself a binary and kick the tires. Their progress feels simultaneously impossibly fast and excruciatingly slow.
If I understand correctly, Orion is not open source. That feels like a huge step backward and not a solution to a browser being controlled by a company with user-hostile incentives. I think Ladybird is more in line with what we really need: a browser that isn’t a product but rather a public good that may be funded in part by corporations but isn’t strongly influenced by any one commercial entity.
I believe they have stated that open sourcing is in the works1
Their business model is, at the minimum, less user hostile than others due to users paying them money directly to keep them alive.
Disclaimer: Paid Kagi user.
That help page has said Kagi is “working on it” since 2023-09 or earlier. Since Kagi hasn’t finished that work after 1.5 years, I don’t believe Kagi is actually working on open sourcing Orion.
If US DoJ has their way, google won’t be able to fund chrome any more the way it was doing so far. That also means apple and firefox lose money too. So Kagi’s stuff might work out long term if breakup happens.
That’s totally valid, and I’d strongly prefer to use an open source UA as well!
In the context of browsers, though, where almost all traffic comes from either webkit-based browsers (chiefly if not only Safari on Mac/iPad/iPhone), blink-based browsers (chrome/edge/vivaldi/opera/other even smaller ones) or gecko-based browsers (Firefox/LibreWolf/Waterfox/IceCat/Seamonkey/Zen/other even smaller ones) two things stand out to me:
I thought that Orion moving Webkit into a Linux browser was a promising development just from an ecosystem diversity perspective. And I thought having a browser that’s not ad-funded on Linux (because even those FOSS ones are, indirectly ad-funded) was also a promising development.
I’d also be happier with a production ready Ladybird. But that doesn’t diminish the notion that, in my eye, a new option that’s not beholden to advertisers feels like a really good step.
There are non-gecko pure FOSS browsers on Linux.
Of the blink-based pure FOSS browsers, I use Ungoogled Chromium, which tracks the Chromium project and removes all binary blobs and Google services. There is also Debian Chromium; Iridium; Falkon from KDE; and Qute (keyboard driven UI with vim-style key bindings). Probably many others.
The best Webkit based browser I’m aware of on Linux is Epiphany, aka Gnome Web. It has built-in ad blocking and “experimental” support for chrome/firefox extensions. A hypothetical Orion port to Linux would presumably have non-experimental extension support. (I found some browsers based on the deprecated QtWebKit, but these should not be used due to unfixed security flaws.)
I wasn’t sure Ungoogled Chromium was fully FOSS, and I completely forgot about Debian Chromium. I tried to use Qute for a while and it was broken enough for me at the time that I assumed it was not actively developed.
When did Epiphany switch from Gecko to Webkit? Last time I was aware of what it used, it was like “Camino for Linux” and was good, but I still had it on the Gecko pile.
According to Wikipedia, Epiphany switched from Gecko to Webkit in 2008, because the Gecko API was too difficult to interface to / caused too much maintenance burden. Using Gecko as a library and wrapping your own UI around it is apparently quite different from soft forking the entire Firefox project and applying patches.
Webkit.org endorses Epiphany as the Linux browser that uses Webkit.
There used to be a QtWebKit wrapper in the Qt project, but it was abandoned in favour of QtWebEngine based on Blink. The QtWebEngine announcement in 2013 gives the rationale: https://www.qt.io/blog/2013/09/12/introducing-the-qt-webengine. At the time, the Qt project was doing all the work of making WebKit into a cross-platform API, and it was too much work. Google had recently forked Webkit to create Blink as a cross-platform library. Switching to Blink gave the Qt project better features and compatibility at a lower development cost.
The FOSS world needs a high quality, cross-platform browser engine that you can wrap your own UI around. It seems that Blink is the best implementation of such a library. WebKit is focused on macOS and iOS, and Firefox develops Gecko as an internal API for Firefox.
EDIT: I see that https://webkitgtk.org/ exists for the Gnome platform, and is reported to be easy to use.
I see Servo as the future, since it is written in Rust, not C++, and since it is developed as a cross platform API, to which you must bring your own UI. There is also Ladybird, and it’s also cross-platform, but it’s written in C++, which is less popular for new projects, and its web engine is not developed as a separate project. Servo isn’t ready yet, but they project it will be ready this year: https://servo.org/blog/2025/02/19/this-month-in-servo/.
I used to contribute to Camino on OS X, and I knew that most appetite for embedding gecko in anything that’s not firefox died a while back, about the time Mozilla deprecated the embedding library, but I’d lost track of Epiphany. As an aside: I’m still sorry that Mozilla deprecated the embedding interface for gecko, and I wish I could find a way to make it practical to maintain that. Embedded Gecko was really nice to work with in its time.
I strongly agree with this. I’d really like a non-blink thing to be an option for this. Not because there’s anything wrong with blink, but because that feels like a rug pull waiting to happen. I like that servo update, and hope that the momentum holds.
Wikipedia suggests the WebKit backend was added to Epiphany in 2007 and they removed the Gecko backend in 2009. Wow, time flies! GNOME Web is one I would like to try out more, if only because I enjoy GNOME and it seems to be a decent option for mobile Linux.
I have not encountered any website that doesn’t work on firefox (one corporate app said it required Chrome for some undisclosed reason, but I changed the useragent and had no issue at all to use their sinple CRUD). What kind of issues do you find?
I’ve wondered the same thing in these recent discussions. I’ve used Firefox exclusively at home for over 15 years, and I’ve used it at my different jobs as much as possible. While my last two employers had maybe one thing that only worked in IE or Chrome/Edge, everything else worked fine (and often better than my coworkers’ Chrome) in Firefox. At home, the last time I remember installing Chrome was to try some demo of Web MIDI before Firefox had support. That was probably five years ago, and I uninstalled Chrome after playing with the demo for a few minutes.
I had to install Chromium a couple of times in the last years to join meetings and podcast recording that were done with software using Chrome-only API.
When it happens, I bless flattpak as I install Chromium then permanently delete it afterward without any trace on my system.
If you are an heavy user of such web apps, I guess that it makes sense to use Chrome as your main browser.
I can’t get launcher.keychron.com to work on LibreWolf but that’s pretty much it. I also have chrome just in case I’m too lazy to figure out what specifically is breaking a site
Firefox doesn’t support WebUSB, so that’s probably the issue.
Thanks, yeah, that’s it. I knew it was some specific thing that wasn’t supported I just couldn’t remember and was writing that previous comment on my phone so I was too lazy to check. But yeah, it’s literally the only site I could think of that doesn’t work on Firefox (for me).
It’s pretty rare to be fair, so much so that I don’t have an example of the top off my head. I know, classic internet comment un-cited source bullshit, sorry. It was probably awful gov or company intranet pages over the years.
Some intensive browser based games run noticeably better on Chrome too, but I know this isn’t exactly a common use case for browsers that others care about.
Probably not a satisfying reply, apologies.
For some reason, trying to log in to the CRA (Canadian equivalent of the IRS) always fails for me with firefox and I need to use chrome to pay my taxes.
I run into small stuff fairly regularly. Visual glitches are common. Every once in a while, I’ll run into a site that won’t let me login. (Redirects fail, can’t solve a CAPTCHA, etc.)
Some google workspace features at least used to be annoying enough that I just devote a chrome profile to running those workspace apps. I haven’t retried them in Firefox recently because I kind of feel that it’s google’s just deserts that they get a profile on me that has nothing but their own properties, while I use other browsers for the real web.
I should start keeping a list of specific sites. Because I do care about this, but usually when it comes up I’m trying to get something done quickly and a work-around like “use chrome for that site” carries the day, then I forget to return to it and dig into why it was broken.
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How does this make us better programmers? Really feels like all of this is business stuff.
Some days I wish that the submit page had a prompt like “explain how this is on topic for lobsters”
There’s more to living in a society than just programming.
According to https://lobste.rs/about, this site is about programming, not living in a society.
I would hope there are some key takeaways from the discussion. I see lots of things here that I definitely wouldn’t want to do in my “next program”. I don’t love that this is a link to a biased post on another discussion forum instead of a well-written blog post about the same, but I think the topic itself is sparking some useful discussion about what not to do if you want people to trust your software.
Don’t program this kind of crap and you’ll become better.
Makes me quite sad that I used Brave for as long as I did. Back to Firefox now, and very happy!
This feels quite biased. For example, presumably Brave has responded to these things. Even if the response is invalid, my preference would be to show it and then demonstrate it as being invalid. When I see a big list of “they did this” with no representation of the other side it makes me very skeptical and, perhaps unfairly, dismissive.
I have no stake in this but I will say that Brave seems to do two things that I see potential in.
It is one of the few cases where blockchain seems reasonable. I know people like to hate on blockchain because of cryptocurrency, and they hate on cryptocurrency because it is largely a tool for criminals, but just from a technical perspective there are potentially valid use cases where you have a distributed system with some number of participants who you do not want to trust while still ensuring that all participants are doing some kind of work (visiting a page).
It is the only browser project I have seen that actually seems like it could disrupt the singular monetization strategy of the web - advertising. Mozilla can’t exist without ad revenue, they already can’t meaningfully compete against it even if you ignore that all of their funding is ad-driven. We should probably be asking ourselves how we expect the web to continue if we reject advertising as a source. To my knowledge, Brave is the only company that’s taken an approach that even appears viable.
I don’t really have a strong stake in this but I find this list really unhelpful. It doesn’t do any of the hard work for me. I could search online for “brave controversy” and get a list of search results like this. What would be valuable is actually providing the hard information to find, to provide analysis, etc. A listicle of “I accuse them of this” is not valuable at all unless you’re either completely uninterested in basing your opinions on information or you’re already sold on the idea that Brave is bad and you want to add more urls to your evidentiary arsenal.
Am I to click each of these links, find the responses, analyze them myself, etc? I could do that, but it’s kind of a heavy lift.
I haven’t seen this be the reason people criticize crypto for at least 10-15 years. People have concerns about the ecological concerns, and the rampancy of pump-and-dump and other scams. But people haven’t cared about crypto being used to buy drugs in years. At least, not to a prominent degree
I wasn’t thinking of drugs specifically, I was thinking about scams, identity theft, blackmail, ransomware, etc. But it isn’t really important to my point, I don’t think.
has ransomware moved on from cryptocurrency?
Bitcoin is ESG and Brave use a blockchain that is not proof of work. FIAT as USD is the most used to buy drugs and fund wars. Also Chainalisys loves open ledgers because transactions can be traced.
The way Brave disrupts advertising on the Web is by intercepting it and replacing the ads with their own ads. It is the sleaziest of all possible disruptions.
Why is that? I don’t know much about that, it sounds fine to me, personally.
Assuming content creators (god I hate that word) actually try to make a living using only advertisement and actually give a shit while choosing partners it’s taking away their income while still showing the user advertisement.
It’s kind of like syphoning off the money the actual creator could make.
It feels to me like selling an open source product you don’t develop (without support) or selling fandubs.
I’m not really familiar with this stuff, so I don’t know much about it. My understanding was that Brave intended to pay creators in that circumstance, perhaps not though?
Afaict from all the controversies they don’t give a shit, are intransperent and come off as evil. See everything in the linked reddit list. And I don’t know either how brave is supposed to work, but after everything I read about it https://lobste.rs/s/iopw1d/what_s_up_with_lobste_rs_blocking_brave I don’t want to touch it with a 10 foot pole
Yeah, that’s fair. I am not really trying to defend Brave. I just wanted to point out that a big list of accusations isn’t very helpful to me personally and I think that the premise of finding new ways to monetize the web is valuable. I have no other thoughts on the matter tbh.
I tried to do that in this thread which has some of the bigger criticisms: https://lobste.rs/s/iopw1d/what_s_up_with_lobste_rs_blocking_brave#c_ezne5h
After engaging in that discussion, it reaffirmed to me that two reasonable people can see the exact same events/discussions and come to opposite conclusions.
It’s mostly preconceived notions/beliefs. For some reason a lot of people are predisposed to give the benefit of the doubt to Brave, and so we gets lots of rebuttals which try to see the things Brave has done in the best possible light/downplay the criticism/find a charitable interpretation/etc.
By contrast a lot of people, for whatever reason, are predisposed to never give benefit of the doubt to Mozilla, so we get lots of angry threads where people will do whatever they can to view decisions by Mozilla in a negative light.
Personally I’m in the exact opposite position – I am inclined to give Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and look for charitable interpretations of things they do (especially the recent ToS kerfuffle, which just seems like silly overreaction by the internet), and inclined to view Brave and especially Brendan Eich negatively and never give the benefit of the doubt.
We can dig further about why one wants to give the benefit of the doubt and another does not, and lay out all the arguments, and still reach opposite conclusions.
I agree if you mean to say that it’s ideological, I think that is true by definition.
To me, blockchain is merely a public ledger that cannot (easily) be amended once written to. In that case, Git’s commit system is technically blockchain. Each commit hash depends on the previous hash and the commit’s diff, meaning it cannot be edited without throwing everyone’s clone out of sync. Pretty useful!
How is Brave funded?
Based on activities listed in the OP, Brave is funded by advertising (injecting their own ads into your browser, replacing the ads of the site you are visiting), soliciting donations for open source projects they have no relation with and pocketing the funds, subscription fees from the VPN that they install without permission, scraping web sites without permission and reselling copyrighted data for AI training, and injecting URLs with affiliate codes into your web browser.
Based on Brave’s own description of their company, from their FAQ:
Elsewhere in the FAQ, they talk about collecting user data and selling that to advertisers, for targeted advertising.
Early on I think the intent was to fund entirely via BAT. At this point, from what I understand at least, they have a number of things they’re doing, including at least some funding being advertisement based.
I have been using Brave without any broken link and no ads, and my main as LibreWolf because there is nothing better than multi-containers. But looking at Orion and Ladybird when its released.
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Who gives a shit. Let’s see how long they can support ublock origin. That’s all that matters for me.