alt Hacker NewsI switched to Brave
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> The elephant in the room
It's been 12 years and people are still making a fuss about a dude spending 8k(!) on politics some disagree with.
Incredible. I wish we'd hold other people in higher positions to such a standard.
> I had some messing around to do up front, like hiding all the crypto and AI nonsense...
Switching to Brave from Firefox due to AI and ethical concerns seems like a lateral move at best if being generous.
Normal Brave is so bloated with "features" I could never use it, but Brave Origin is the first browser in such a long time that actually stays out of my way and does its job well.
It may be better in the shorter term, but using yet another Chromium based browser doesn't really improve the current situation with Google's browser monopoly. I'm personally using Firefox Nightly, and so far it has served me well.
I won't be using Brave until it is built and packaged by a mainstream Linux distribution, following a process I can trust. I absolutely do not trust Brave's binaries. The company has a history of deceiving users (it was caught injecting affiliate links) and is openly hostile to forks, very ironically. The fact that it comes bundled with crapware is concerning enough.
Also been using Brave for a while. All the crypto stuff needs to be turned off but besides that for me, it's just better Chrome. Firefox always felt slower to me, Safari is just a weird kid from the neighborhood I could never get to like. I LOVED Arc. I think its a near perfect browser, but lack of proper mobile browser and Browser Company dropping Arc in favor of the new rebranded Arc with AI just left me with distrust. Brave just works, I can use it on all my devices, OSes, I can have uBlock Origin on it and vertical tabs. I don't really need anything else at this point.
Brave is the only Chromium browser recommended by Privacy Guides which is why I chose it. It has a good update schedule and I never have problems with ads.
Once I set it up, it's been just a clean, ad-free browser. Based on Little Snitch, which is free on Linux, like Brave Origin, Brave has a clean list of default connections.
While Firefox may be considering shipping Brave shields for ad block, wouldn't Brave be more opposing to Google's monopoly considering it blocks their business model? Firefox is funded by Google and has bad privacy by default. It connects to Google servers when you first set it up.
It's one thing being willing to fund people who are trying to destroy the life of LGBT folks, but it's quite to another to advertise that fact proudly by saying that having a better web browser is worth it.
What a disgusting person this is.
Isn't the problem with Brave, even after his departure that they keep making suss decisions? Over and over and over? Like they can keep apologising but if they keep making suss anti-privacy decisions, well, they can't really be trusted can they?
I’m a Brave user, but I really never really understood how do they make money? Does anyone actually use or care about BAT (the crypto token)?
I haven’t heard anyone mention it in years besides “the crypto thing in Brave that everyone turns off”
This is a little off-topic, but the article calls it out specifically, accusing Brendan Eich of being an "absolute scumbag" Aren't we past performative displays of outrage over this?
He, like 52% of voting Californians, in 2008, opposed gay marriage. This was a different time: there were various arguments about "civil unions", concern from religious groups, worries about slippery slopes, etc., but we are passed that now -- he no longer holds this belief, and time has proven those concerns to be ill founded. Nobody should be held in indefinite contempt for political positions they once held. If we can forgive Barack Obama for opposing gay marriage, then we can forgive Brendan Eich. You can say that you like his work without having to have endless caveats about how you don't agree with a political position he took twenty years ago that even he no longer advocates.
"Yes yes yes. Brave was founded by an absolute scumbag."
The linked source cites: "...a 2008 donation of $1,000 to California Proposition 8, which called for the banning of same-sex marriage in California, and donations in the amount of $2,100 to Proposition 8 supporter Tom McClintock between 2008 and 2010."
I assume Brendan Eich was already relatively wealthy at the time and that these donations represented a modest fraction of his income. Whatever happened to some nuance in public discourse? How do people who condemn someone’s character so categorically over donations made roughly 18 years ago function in a workplace with diverse opinions,...
... or for that matter, navigate society?
I've tried helium as a chrome-based ad-blocking browser alternative and found it nice to not have to hide the crypto/AI-nonsense since it doesn't exist. Everything beyond the Crypto/AI stuff is indeed pretty damn good in Brave.
At the end of the day it's basically just a uBlock-Origin preset for chromium, but that's really all I'd want from Brave regardless.
Ah, the author is Kev Quirk! I really enjoyed his SimpleCSS project: https://github.com/kevquirk/simple.css
I also relate to this post: tried to make Firefox my default browser for years, but slowly Brave became my default browser over time due to its adblocking abilities and general speed.
That said, Brave is a bit of a UI mess out of the box, with too many of their unnecessary "features" like their wallet and crypto BAT stuff being shoved at the user.
I think they're slowly realizing that their user base just wants a straightforward adblocking privacy browser though. They released "Brave Origin" recently, which is a paid app on some platforms, but at least cuts out of all the unnecessary baggage.
nowadays, it's just one thing that catches one's interest that sticks.
I use edge sometimes, chrome once in awhile, FF etc.
Never do I use brave ever because one incident I forgot about (not about the founder), and it was good enough reason not to go back.
I originally used Brave for mobile because I could watch YouTube with the display turned off or unfocused and it not interrupt playback and, of course, blocked adds. I quickly adopted it on desktop and everywhere else.
The sync works really well, and all of the added "features" can be easily disabled.
So did Brave stop that crypto thing that was clearly designed to steal money from content creators?
Yes I know, it's a tired complaint years after the fact, but if you launch a browser with that system as a core value prop then it should probably taint the leadership team for a good long while.
It still amazes me that in California if someone donates to anti-gay marriage initiative they can be openly called "absolute scumbag" and people just roll with it. It's called having political views.
I use Arc, I tried moving to Zen and to Safari, but I always end up coming back for the goddamn Google Meet PIP feature
> It's worth stating that things not working isn't the fault of Firefox. It's developers not testing their web apps with Firefox, since it has such a small market share.
Um. As a developer who frequently switches between them, it's both. There are animation issues on some of my own stuff that are specific to FF and that I haven't been able to pin down yet. (It's low priority because I'm considering reworking the whole frontend in something other than React anyway and I haven't ruled out this being some state or ref related bug.)
The whole point of initiatives like Interop has been to make browsers' rendering and other functionality more consistent.
The author mentions that he tried Vivaldi. Vivaldi is the spiritual successor to the original Opera browser (not the Opera browser you get today, which is crap). Opera was for power users, and the same goes for Vivaldi today. I can see that there's a learning curve, and it takes some time to get used to. But overall, it's a no-nonsense, fully featured workhorse that I use as my main browser. It has built-in ad blocking, mouse gestures, sync between devices, pane tiling, and a myriad of other nice little features I miss when using any other browser. Bonus points: Vivaldi on Android recently added support for Chrome extensions. It's not for everyone, but I suggest giving it a try.
The author has a lot to say about firefox [1]. I use it and don't really have problems. Maybe 1/200 sites works not as well. I have had wayyy more issues on Safari.
It seems like most of their criticisms are a gut feeling of declining quality due to their intentions with AI. I don't love that, but the browser still works for me. What do other people think?
Brave has the best filter lists built into a blocker. Between Bypass Paywalls Clean Filters and Brave Experimental Adblock rules for blocking twitch.tv ads, it's just the best option for most people.
Giving away Brave Origin for free on Linux is just the cherry on top.
I've been enjoying Brave for a long time, and recently I have been using their AI sidebar connected to my own local server, which is so pleasant to use. I can ask questions about a web page or other things. I also like that using Brave has reduced my dependence on ad blockers because Brave itself is really good at blocking ads. In fact, there are some that don't get blocked by uBlock, but then Brave catches them. Not to mention that YouTube is completely ad-free, and the software isn't as bloated as Google Chrome.
FFS people the "crypto" shit is all opt-in. It's not enabled by default. Don't mindlessly regurgitate disinformation. Yes, Brave does show ads in the new tab page by default just like Chrome and Firefox.
Annoyingly, Cursor dumped a ton of tokens into creating FastRender, but won't answer my request for a license on their code, so we can't go anywhere with it.
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I was eager to jump to Brave ~5 years ago, but was so turned off by the scammy crypto stuff that when I rebuilt my laptop I didn't bother. And then when all of the details came out of one of the founders -- support for banning same sex marriage, resignations from his previous boards when he was appointed, being a COVID denier / anti-vaxxer -- the reasons it came bundled with all of this weird crypto stuff made a lot more sense.
I knew the "elephant in the room" section of the article was coming before I started reading... but then it wasn't even about the right thing! The other different, bigger, angrier, elephant in the room is about Brave being YACB (Yet Another Chromium Browser). A browser built on the Chromium project is riding on top of that elephant trying to tell it where to go.
I think Google created a "moat" in terms of hyperaccelerating browser development with disproportionate firepower that nobody else could keep up with. And one potential non-terrible use of AI might be diminishing that moat and with it Google's ability to steer the whole web into their ecosystem. So if you want to be an optimist maybe that's a silver lining that will grow with time.