With brave you can make money as a publisher here https://brave.com/publishers/ Essentially, people browsing with brave who have put some amount of money in a wallet will disburse at the end of a cycle some funds to each publisher based on how much attention they spent on each site.
I doubt that the parent is talking about the out of the box experience.
Installing uBlock Origin takes less effort than installing Brave and probably does a better job at blocking ads than Brave, as it is the most aggressive ad-blocking engine available right now.
If someone from the Brave Team can explain why Brave is "so much faster" than Chrome i would like to be interested. Chrome + ublock wouldn't archive similar results ?
Correct. IIRC,Cosmetic adblocking is also not possible without adding uBlock.
I guess one advantage with their approach is that they’re doing their network filtering “closer to the metal” from what i’ve seen from a recent look at their codebase. If they’re able to block requests by bypassing the extensions API, it’s likely faster. They can probably also achieve some parallelism here since requests are done in multiple processes. If you can simply hook in and block a site, you likely eliminate several layers of IPC messages to the extension.
I see this browser as a skin on top of Chrome, much like Opera or (now) Edge. Hearing that it's 22% faster tells me it had a 22% overhead over the Chromium rendering engine.
What am I missing? I'm struggling to see serious innovation on display here - and I read TFA. The article is 99.9% a discussion on testing methodology, and not an analysis of the changes to Brave's core which may have resulted in the performance improvements.
As far as I'm concerned, Chromium released a more performant rendering engine and Brave merged it into their branch.
I think it's more of a progress report than a display of innovation targeted towards people who are looking to switch over from Google Chrome due to privacy issues.
I mean, if you consider the adblocking, tracker blocking, etc, then it's faster than Chrome, and may have been even before the switch (citation needed on that though). That stuff takes a long time to load, even on Chromium.
So the idea is that they've always been loading fewer things (so it's faster in that aspect), but now the speed of loading the same content is better.
> Note that we are comparing released versions; Brave 0.24.0 is based on Chromium build 69.0.3497.100, while Brave Core 0.55.12 uses a newer Chromium build 70.0.3538.45. We do not expect the move to a later underlying Chromium version to be responsible for significant performance variations. We don’t observe a statistically significant difference for unthrottled measurements—in fact, Chrome 70 is sightly slower for the sites we considered.
Been really happy with the new Brave so far. Made me able to drop my the last Google application on my computer.
Only thing that bugs me is still having to resort to either Firefox or Safari on mac when on battery, since Brave keeps the dedicated GPU in use after navigating to anything that activates it (a Brave Helper process seems to keep it active in the background).
I hear a lot of praise for Brave but I don't really get what's so great about it and the fact that it's cryptocurrency-related triggers all kinds of red flags and make it difficult for me to heed the praise. Are the fans genuine or do they have a vested interest in pumping BAT?
Trying to be a little more constructive, can somebody explain what's so great about it compared to Firefox? Because as far as I can tell it's just yet another Chromium derivative with built-in ad blocker, I don't really see what's so novel or exciting about that. Also AFAIK the source is available but it's not technically under an Open Source license?
Then of course there's the whole BAT thing which as far as I understand it replaces ads with... other ads but it's cryptocurrency based so it's better somehow? I never quite got that.
So what am I missing here? Why is Brave better than Firefox + uBlock origin?
I use it simply because it's de-Googlyfied and because of the integrated mix of adblock/https everywhere/NoScript without the need to install plugins and Tor tabs (without the need to switch browsers).
I have absolutely no idea what the BAT thing is. It's disabled on my install since I never even clicked on it.
Not sure if there is much better in Brave than Firefox + Containers + uMatrix, unless you like ads in your browser injected by the browser developer.
There are ethical concerns, half the Mozilla board resigned over Brendan Eich's appointment as CEO of Mozilla, and Brave is his new venture after essentially being ejected from Mozilla: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Mozilla
I want nothing to do with such a divisive character like Brendan, thus I'll steer clear of Brave.
This is clearly an opinion piece, not really an attempt at an objective evaluation of the browser's "trustworthiness" using objective metrics:
>There is probably no corporation that has fooled its userbase more and for longer than Mozilla. Pretending to be your friend, it has for years ruined the customizability, privacy, and usability of its browser. The marketing team was, and still is, in full swing trying to spin every one of its shitty decisions positively. [...] The amount of spyware in both these browsers is massive - FF has the most, but it can all be disabled through an user.js script
There's no denying that there have been some fuck ups in Mozilla in the past but it seems to me like the author has an axe to grind here. If they don't then they should at least reference their claims.
I mean they call IE, Chrome and Opera "Botnet web browsers". I suppose they're referencing the 4chan meme and not actually saying that these browsers contain botnet code but I'm not sure if that makes it better.
It's not just an opinion that Firefox regularly phones home. It also uses privacy-hostile services such as Google Search by default. It has an economic incentive to do that since Google, etc. are the ones who fund them.
As the website says your best options are GNU IceCat or Ungoogled Chromium with uMatrix and HTTPS Everywhere.
I have my problems with some of Mozilla's marketing and technical decisions but saying that the browser contains a "massive" amount of spyware is ludicrous and doesn't exactly inform the reader.
If the author listed more precisely their problems (like you just did for instance) then the reader could make an informed choice. Saying "Chrome is a botnet and Firefox is filled with spyware" is hogwash and disqualifies this page completely IMO.
It is not an evil thing to have "google search by default" and fund this browser with the money from google. Because people don't want to pay for it. Firefox doesn't stop you from changing the default search engine easily.
Lets be realistic here. Mozilla is doing very good things for privacy and free software and it has arguably much bigger impact than GNU. The problem with real world is that change is gradular and things are about compromises.
People will not start suddenly compile their own browser or dig github for browser they never heard of.
They use Google and Gmail. Firefox surely knows that 70% of people will be pissed right there if google is not default browser so they atleast get money from google for it. It's compromise.
They need money to compete with mainstream browsers and they have to make smart decisions about which compromise to make.
Signal is getting similar shit for using google services for messaging. But it makes e2e encryption mainstream.
"ads injected" is false, we don't do anything without user and (if involved; our main opt-in model is user-private ads not in publisher slots) publisher consent.
Mozilla itself says, and I say, that "half the board" did not resign over me. See https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat..., and also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10654651 for a detailed breakdown from me based on what I can say that others involved also said. Mozilla (same FAQ link) testifies that I was not "ejected" and was welcome to stay at an unspecified C-level executive position. If you don't believe them, I can't help you.
The state of how you are viewed makes me want nothing to do with you, regardless of Mozilla's invitation to retain you and put you in a corner at the C level.
In my experience it is best to avoid following one's filter bubble on "how someone is viewed", especially in today's tribal regressive-left world. But YMMV!
Nope, just like how I don't hold what Jake Appelbaum may or may have not done against the Tor Project. I know we (the general public) will likely never have a good grasp of what happened inside Mozilla or the Tor Project when either of these events occurred.
Nice pot shot with the tribal regressive-left bit btw. Sadly inaccurate though.
The truly cheap shot here is lumping me in with the utterly unrelated case of Jake Appelbaum, who has had many accusations against him, while I have had zero. False equivalence piled on false claims looks like malice, so no point in arguing.
Not saying you have accusations of sexual misconduct against you, but you definitely angered the 3 board members that quit over your appointment as CEO, and upset many Mozilla employees.
Some discussions happened internally, we don't have the full story, and I won't be using your products due to the murky situation at Mozilla & your past support of certain political causes.
Opera mobile now also has a cryptocurrency wallet amongst other features that get disabled or ignored. I've only tried the mobile Brave version and reverted back to Opera after it has failed to block a Google ad in a floating div. Otherwise it was a quite nice experience and had easily acessible switches for scripts, ads, popups. Pehraps you could opt in to see ads and get BAT but I'm quite ignorant about that since I don't want any ads. Firefox mobile + uBlock origin was quite underwhelming last time I tried it, although I use it daily on the desktop. Never quite used Chrome on the desktop, not on a regular basis anyway.
Just blocking ads with ublock solves the problem of annoying ads but leaves the problem of website revenue.
Ads solve the problem of how to fund websites without subscriptions but create the problem of annoying ads of no relevance.
Google and Facebook mitigate the problem of annoying adverts by trying to make them relevant. That comes at the cost of their constant surveillance without permission, and use of that information to try to “influence” people’s opinions in unrelated ways.
The big lie of recent years has been “we value your privacy” followed some details of how “we” don’t.
BATs try to solve all of these problems by placing control of personal information back with the user.
If I give you a cryptographic representation of my interests you can serve me ads without having to know the intimate details of my life. You only need to know how to deal with the token.
What’s more I can compartmentalise my interests by sending different tokens at different times.
Google could get involved in this sort of research but I suspect that their interests go far beyond just serving ads.
>If I give you a cryptographic representation of my interests you can serve me ads without having to know the intimate details of my life. You only need to know how to deal with the token.
>What’s more I can compartmentalise my interests by sending different tokens at different times.
I'm really perplex. People who care enough about their privacy to make use of something like that are probably those who don't want ads or tracking at all anyway. The rest of the population obviously doesn't care.
I personally can't imagine ever willingly enabling ads in my browser. You want me to pay for your service? Then ask for my credit card number, I may give it to you. If you prefer to beg for me to turn my ad blocker off then be my guest but I won't do it.
The idea of installing Brave, curating several "tokens" containing my interests and selecting what to send to which website is frankly preposterous to me and of dubious value for the advertisers.
Well you should maybe think about the content creators. If they live off the ads then you just killed their living. Bat is about micro transactions - you load Brave with 20usd and leave it to distribute money. It is actually great usecase for crypto. I doubt you want to be giving out your credit card to sites you read and micro transaction services would also invade your privacy by paying for you. All crypto is not bad and BAT is pretty legit in my opinion.
I refuse to accept that ads are the only way for content creators
to make a living online. It's not the first time that the
cryptocurrency crowd sees a problem and thinks "clearly the
blockchain is the solution here". Except that behind buzzwords
and vague assertions I fail to see a coherent big picture of how
that's all going to work. Instead of giving me Internet Fun Bucks
to watch ads, how about you let me pay for your service?
I pay for Spotify, I pay for Memrize, I pay for Tarnsap, I bought
a Fontawesome subscription last friday, I used to donate to a
couple Patreons. I donate punctually to FreeBSD, Wikipedia and a
few other open source projects. I want to support people who
offer services that I use. I don't want to prostitute my private
life to do it.
If content creators don't want my money but insist that I should
let them spam me with ads and share my private info with third
parties then it's their problem, not mine.
Life is too short for me to curate "cryptographic interest
tokens" in order for advertisers to serve me content that I don't
want to see anyway.
Some cryptocurrency projects wanted to develop a cheap and easy
micropayment system. That seems a lot more interesting to me
although that probably can't work as long as the "currency" part
of "cryptocurrency" remains more aspirational than practical.
That does sound a lot more like something I would use. Do the Brave folks get a cut of that money or is it completely peer-to-peer using a cryptocurrency network? If it's the latter what's Brave's business model, they just have a whole bunch of BAT and bet on them gaining value through adoption and deflation?
Making it easier and faster to transfer small amounts of money online is definitely something that needs improving but unfortunately so far cryptocurrency-based solution haven't really managed to solve the problem, mainly because speculation makes them a pretty terrible currency. That's a tough problem to solve.
>Do the Brave folks get a cut of that money or is it completely peer-to-peer using a cryptocurrency network?
No, they don't take a cut if you fund your wallet directly and use it to tip the content creators.
>If it's the latter what's Brave's business model
Here is how they make money, just pasting my comment from below:
By default, ads are blocked, but users of Brave can opt-in to have privacy-friendly ads from the Brave network displayed on websites they browse.
Brave get 30% of the revenue from those ads, and the users get 70% of the revenue as BAT tokens
Users can then use those BAT tokens to tip the websites they like that signed up as Brave publishers (see a list here: https://batgrowth.com/publishers)
So the Ads / Get paid to browse part of Brave is 100% optional and opt-in, many people think it is mandatory
>Making it easier and faster to transfer small amounts of money online is definitely something that needs improving but unfortunately so far cryptocurrency-based solution haven't really managed to solve the problem, mainly because speculation makes them a pretty terrible currency. That's a tough problem to solve.
Yeah, I'm kinda fascinated about Brave's model, I'm wondering if it will be the first cryptocurrency-based solution that make sense to me
Yeah but it's like cable tv. You would pay a quarter to watch an episode but they want $10 a month. There is no piecemeal solution yet and crypto is not a real solution yet.
But this is exactly what they try to achieve! There are so many creators that don't have regular content worth subscription or patreon. They might be doing one quality blogpost a month or a year. For them ads were only way how to monetize the content somehow.
BAT is trying to change that - instead of ads you put money into Brave and pay those tiny amounts to creators directly. The idea is that you might not even know that you often read some blog and the browser distribute BAT for you (if you want).
Honestly it is not about the cryptocurrency hype at all. Like everybody wanted some legit usecase for crypto and now when there is one then people hate it because it is crypto...
Oh but that does sound interesting, I just wasn't aware of this before this discussion so that was actually quite insightful for me.
I'm still not really considering switching to Brave but if this BAT thing makes it into Firefox (as an extension for instance) I'll probably give it a try.
I remain unconvinced that decentralized blockchains can really scale up to the number of transactions that would be generated by everybody "tipping" individual website as they browse them but that's a different issue.
Oh i fully agree on the crypto part. The scaling is big issue and it could get inefficient financially. I think it was the most straightforward way how to do private transactions without them being fintech company with all the requirements. It is sort of MVP. If they start to have scaling issues they will have time to tackle those.
They also don't have to make the transactions instant. They are basically donations so the transaction time does not really matter. They could spread the transactions for efficiency.
Plus crypto is evolving and they are counting on it. When their scaling issues come there might very well be some ok solution in likes of lightning network. Or doing stuff offchain.
For me Brave is actually secondary browser now because it is the "ungoogled chrome" that is easy to install and i can test webwork i do without chrome.
I feel for them, but ads are just too annoying, intrusive, and possibly malicious for me to willingly disable my adblocker unless they are promising curated ads. The web is already a pretty terrible experience these days, but it's downright painful without an ad blocker.
I’m thinking about the content creators, they have a warm spot in my heart, but it’s not my job to figure out their business model for them. They sent me their web page, and I get to choose how it’s presented - otherwise, I have no control over my own computer. So I choose to enjoy it without ads - ads which often track you, install malware, or act in bad faith in other ways.
If that ruins their business model, they need to figure out how to collect payment before sending me the web page. Don’t freely send OTA TV signals into my house then get offended when I decide to skip the ads. Same thing.
I think a lot of sites have already figured this out. They sell t-shirts. Mugs. Premium podcast episodes, and Patreon sponsorships. The Web is working around this as we speak. But the Googles of the world will make it sound like we’re “stealing web pages”. This will be “the new piracy”. All to defend a business model that relies on my equipment assaulting me with your malicious ads on your behalf. No thank you.
> I personally can't imagine ever willingly enabling ads in my browser.
I have a really hard time reconciling this opinion with "Then ask for my credit card number, I may give it to you."
Even with ad blockers, I have much more control what information I give out than if I trust someone with my credit card number.
Even if the content creator is genuine, there have been so many hacks in the past.
Credit cards are also not good for microtransactions and BAT is a potentially enabler for them. Sure, we aren't there yet but it doesn't look as impossible as it were in 1999 when microtransactions came up the first time as a solution to the ads problem.
If an idea is preposterous to you then fair enough the status quo sounds like a fit for your needs and you are free to stick with it. I'm old enough to remember the time when the World Wide Web and electric self-driving cars were dismissed as preposterous.
For me, I like the idea of paying for content without having to supply my credit card number to each news outlet that I want to read. With no link to me directly the websites no longer need to track me and Brave can go out of it's way to back that up. No need to curate tokens. Just switch profiles if/when you need to.
BTW you don't _need_ to see any ads at all. You can instead just buy BATs and use them for content payment without ads.
Its not several tokens, its just use of the BAT token
User experience aside it makes it clear when you revoke permission to your data
You can point to the public transaction where you did that and show consent to that advertiser and whoever they copied that data to, massive liability for them if they arent playing along
A step towards cooperation, not a cure all
Tokens are also useful in bootstrapping any two sided marketplace, and people would also be aligned in seeing it become more valuable. To you, that means damning unobjectiveness, to others that means necessary skin in the game to know what theyre talking about.
>"Just blocking ads with ublock solves the problem of annoying ads but leaves the problem of website revenue."
To put it bluntly, that is their problem, not mine. I feel absolutely no obligation to support a flawed business model, in fact I feel absolutely no obligation to support the commercialization of the internet.
Based on the egregious attacks on privacy we've seen, I have absolutely no intention of ever allowing ads again.
>To put it bluntly, that is their problem, not mine.
This reminds me of my friends that used to download games of thepiratebay because the gaming industry was a "flawed business model", but were still expecting content to be produced
If you don't support content creators with money, how can you expect content to be produced ? Content creators need to eat too, especially indie ones
>Based on the egregious attacks on privacy we've seen
I like how Brave tackle the privacy issue by displaying only privacy-friendly ads from Brave publishers network while giving a way for users to contribute towards content creator with the built-in tip feature. And this is a opt-in feature, so if you hate ads, you just don't have to opt-in and can still enjoy a fast and privacy-focused browser
I've ditched chrome 2 weeks ago, not going back anytime soon
> Content creators need to eat too, especially indie ones
The vast majority of the World's photographers are amateurs, who derive little or no income from their hobby. Yet they collectively produce stunning photos that are amongst the best ever taken.
Why can't websites be the same? Like they were in the 90s. Why must side-projects monetise ASAP instead of being a hobby?
Perhaps Gmail wouldn't exist in that World, but Fastmail would. And postfix, dovecot, sendmail too.
Depends on what you do for a living. If you have an unrelated job/source of income, then yes, your site and your content can purely be a labour of love. It's an ideal aspiration, but it may not be feasible when EVERY Tom, Dick and Harry wants to have a site or produce content because a large proportion of people have poor or no income. It is also the case that not all content is 'free' to produce (except time & energy) like a blogpost. A news site for example needs to pay real money to employ people. Same with another SaaS solution. How will the creators recoup the expenses if they can't charge direct money or show ads?
You need an ideal world of universal basic income, healthcare and a reasonable standard of living for all if you want people to abandon all ideas of monetising their activities. Sadly we're very far from that world.
>"If you don't support content creators with money, how can you expect content to be produced ? Content creators need to eat too, especially indie ones"
They can throw content at me willy-nilly, but they can't expect me to watch it. I simply let my browser do the filtering, rather than my eyeballs. I also default-deny all 3rd-party frames and scripts, due to security concerns. That alone happens to filter out the majority of ads, all by itself.
This situation is not at all comparable to copyright infringement, where you have to actively seek out the content in question.
Besides, I would never click any ad anyway, no matter if it's a simple text ad or a spinning, jumping, music-playing animated pop-up monstrosity. Never.
But I do support content creators, most often through buying their games on Steam/GOG, though direct purchases on Bandcamp or through Patreon.
However the movie/TV show segment is missing a similarly accessible service. Netflix/HBO/etc. all limit my region to a very reduced catalogue, and they implement overly-strict DRM that prevents me from actually using their services without rebooting to my (gaming-only) Win10 install.
At least Spotify works brilliantly on Linux. The client may be a relatively heavy Electron app, but it works.
>"I like how Brave tackle the privacy issue by displaying only privacy-friendly ads from Brave publishers network"
I don't trust them, because I distrust the entire advertising and marketing industry on principle.
On desktops I don't see any reason to use Brave, but on smartphones it's a different story.
Advantages of Brave on mobile in comparison to Firefox:
- Single package with add blocking and HTTPS upgrading
- Better handling of offline cache
- Those little PIP clouds to disambiguate a tap
- I always understand how to long press to show context menu instead of selecting
- I believe scrolling is smoother on Brave
- I prefer card/tab layout on Brave
- Less crashes
Advantages of Firefox over Brave on mobile:
- Same browser I use on desktop - helpful with Firefox account and it's FOSS
- I can disable JavaScript and images when I'm on severely limited connection like right now
- Extensions
- I like text search better
- Better location bar search
- Usable reader mode
Now saying all this I would like to have a pure HTML browser, at least for bad mobile connections. It would be lightinnig fast and would show me offline version first and upgrade to more recent version if needed or it was downloaded after all. It would be like a permanent reader mode. So my font, my colors, my line length, no obnoxious position:fixed bars. One of the things on my to-do list.
Use Firefox Focus browser on mobile. It is more privacy focused than Firefox and other browsers, and blocks ads instead of replacing them with its own like the Brave browser does.
Firefox Focus isn't really designed to be a "long-term" browser, in my experience. My normal FF on Android has like 12 different tabs open at any given time, and I maintain logins on a few sites. Firefox Focus doesn't really intend for you to have more than one tab open at once (although it does support it), and its default functionality is to delete the browser history as soon as you close it.
I use Focus for quick, one-time things: open a quick article from my news feed, login to pay my credit card bill, etc., and then trash it.
Yes, Focus is specifically designed for use as a default browser to quickly and safely open links and perform one-off tasks. It's recommended that it be used alongside another browser for more long-term sessions and cases where you want history preserved.
I'd like to point out that Brave never has replaced ads on websites, only blocked them, and in the future will only replace ads on websites whose owner explicitly signed up to let Brave replace their ads. This comment from the Community Manager lays out reasonably well why they're using this model https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/8j4uiy/fud_from...
Brave's big thing is they get to keep some of the revenue from the ads they've removed and replaced for themselves. I think that's a bad thing, not a good thing, but it is why the company exists.
Because it blocks ads by default, everywhere across all platforms.
Sure you can use Chrome / Firefox / Safari and install extensions and plugins that do something similar but end users don't want to jump through hoops and play whack a mole with ads. If a browser proactively fights ads for them out of the box, it enriches their lives without them needing any additional technical knowledge.
BAT doesn't replace ads with ads - it leaves that part of the website blank like a conventional adblocker. You pay a monthly fee of your choice to the browser, and it distributes that via the ad network to the sites you visit.
It's a 'set and forget' way of supporting your favourite sites. User experience wise it's no better than Firefox + uBlock origin, it's purely a moral choice.
Monthly fee of your choice, regular donation... I may have been imprecise about what happens at the back end, but I think I described the user experience fairly well.
Not about BAT,cryptocurrency. It's all about usable privacy. Makes it easy for me to quarantine Google services, social media, from each other. Privacy as the killer feature is what makes it killer
The primary use case for BAT seems to be a micropayment scheme that replaces ad revenue. Of course, micropayments are still payments and people still don't want to pay for content, so you can also pay them (in BAT) for watching your ads, and then they can spend those BAT somewhere else.
As dubious as I am of cryptocurrency in general, display advertising is evil and needs to be destroyed, and BAT is the best (only?) micropayments alternative out there, as far as I can tell.
I really don’t think they’re giving this a fair treatment.
From what i gather, they switched from Muon which looks to be an Electron that uses later versions of Chromium. This version also had a custom UI written entirely in web technologies.
They’re comparing that to their new version based directly on the Chromium code base + some privacy related patches. Their UI changes are now mostly relegated to a bundled extension so it looks and feels like Chrome.
It seems they could have dug a bit deeper to find out where the speed up actually came from. The chromium build system is incredibly complex but very specially tuned to produce maximum performance for a specific configuration (Google Chrome Branded Release). When you go in trying to use bits and pieces of Chromium as dynamic libraries, things can go south rather quickly for performance. It could also mean that GPU acceleration or sandbox configurations differed between their modified Chromium versions they’re comparing here. Was LTO enabled on both builds?
Either way, It feels like they’re taking claim for developing some browser performance increase of what is in all likelihood solely attributable to the Chromium project.
How does Brave make money? My understanding is that their entire purpose is to block tracking and ads, but those ads is how a lot of places fund their services.
By default, ads are blocked, but users of Brave can opt-in to have privacy-friendly ads from the Brave network displayed on websites they browse.
Brave get 30% of the revenue from those ads, and the users get 70% of the revenue as BAT tokens
Users can then use those BAT tokens to tip the websites they like that signed up as Brave publishers (see a list here: https://batgrowth.com/publishers)
I thought brave was going to become the privacy/security browser but they seemed to push that to the side while Firefox rapidly filled that niche in the past year at least for privacy. I just don't get why I'd use brave over Chrome, they renamed a lot of options just for the sake of differentiating, which makes it unintuitive at times.
until recently i tried using firefox to quarantine social media and google but the persona extensions would break all the time, leaving me to reconfigure things over and over. Is there another way to quarantine now?
There are container plugins. There is a Facebook one and a Google one, but I'm using a generic one that lets you create containers for any website you want.
It's unclear from the title and the first paragraph what it is actually 22% faster at doing. Deep into the first paragraph, the article finally reveals that the new version has 22% faster 'load time' but to me it wasn't immediately clear what the loading time meant. Is it startup time or time to load a site? What site did it load?
I wish engineering articles such as this can be more to the point instead of being ceremonial.
What I love about Chrome and what I have not seen in any other Chromium-based browser is the inline translation feature. It allows you to translate a website on the fly (even websites that require a login). Sadly, Brave does not have this feature neither.
I stopped using Firefox when they hijacked my browser by installing an extension I did not approve (the one about Mr. Robot). Moved back to chrome for a bit and finally moved over to Brave. For the most part, it feels like I'm using chrome, although a lot of sites break because of the built-in ad blocker.
It's still morally bancrupt, hijacking ads and replacing them with their own, then holding the money hostage until the actual creators give in to whatever cut this software-enabled protection racket demands.
It also does nothing against the fear of a Chromium monoculture, since it's just yet another reskinned fork.
Very "Brave", indeed. Kinda telling when you have to come up with the laudatory adjectives yourself.
Well, the one thing I see on HN is that people are crazy about Firefox, and I see where they are coming from. And I agree too that Firefox separates itself from the rest by setting higher moral standards, but on the same hand Brave is a good browser, atleast on Ubuntu 16.04 Brave performs way better than Firefox. Using firefox has given me frozen screens quite a number of times, they really need to improve their resource management process. However, in the meantime we should not undermine the engineering effort being put into it.
Perhaps I've become a bit of a cynic but I find it hard to imagine a well funded company without an exit plan.
I applaud BAT and hope either it or a successor works out to make it clear how we pay as users.
I expectation (or fear/disappointment) is that if Brave and BAT become widespread it will merely just form a new ad serving network with a different group collecting transaction fees.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadBeen minting some genuine crypto thanks to Brave!
Thanks!
What have you used to implement that?
Switched from Chrome => Brave. So much faster and no more fan freakouts. Love it.
Installing uBlock Origin takes less effort than installing Brave and probably does a better job at blocking ads than Brave, as it is the most aggressive ad-blocking engine available right now.
I guess one advantage with their approach is that they’re doing their network filtering “closer to the metal” from what i’ve seen from a recent look at their codebase. If they’re able to block requests by bypassing the extensions API, it’s likely faster. They can probably also achieve some parallelism here since requests are done in multiple processes. If you can simply hook in and block a site, you likely eliminate several layers of IPC messages to the extension.
What am I missing? I'm struggling to see serious innovation on display here - and I read TFA. The article is 99.9% a discussion on testing methodology, and not an analysis of the changes to Brave's core which may have resulted in the performance improvements.
As far as I'm concerned, Chromium released a more performant rendering engine and Brave merged it into their branch.
So the idea is that they've always been loading fewer things (so it's faster in that aspect), but now the speed of loading the same content is better.
> Note that we are comparing released versions; Brave 0.24.0 is based on Chromium build 69.0.3497.100, while Brave Core 0.55.12 uses a newer Chromium build 70.0.3538.45. We do not expect the move to a later underlying Chromium version to be responsible for significant performance variations. We don’t observe a statistically significant difference for unthrottled measurements—in fact, Chrome 70 is sightly slower for the sites we considered.
Only thing that bugs me is still having to resort to either Firefox or Safari on mac when on battery, since Brave keeps the dedicated GPU in use after navigating to anything that activates it (a Brave Helper process seems to keep it active in the background).
Trying to be a little more constructive, can somebody explain what's so great about it compared to Firefox? Because as far as I can tell it's just yet another Chromium derivative with built-in ad blocker, I don't really see what's so novel or exciting about that. Also AFAIK the source is available but it's not technically under an Open Source license?
Then of course there's the whole BAT thing which as far as I understand it replaces ads with... other ads but it's cryptocurrency based so it's better somehow? I never quite got that.
So what am I missing here? Why is Brave better than Firefox + uBlock origin?
I have absolutely no idea what the BAT thing is. It's disabled on my install since I never even clicked on it.
There are ethical concerns, half the Mozilla board resigned over Brendan Eich's appointment as CEO of Mozilla, and Brave is his new venture after essentially being ejected from Mozilla: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Mozilla
I want nothing to do with such a divisive character like Brendan, thus I'll steer clear of Brave.
Neither is great though.
>There is probably no corporation that has fooled its userbase more and for longer than Mozilla. Pretending to be your friend, it has for years ruined the customizability, privacy, and usability of its browser. The marketing team was, and still is, in full swing trying to spin every one of its shitty decisions positively. [...] The amount of spyware in both these browsers is massive - FF has the most, but it can all be disabled through an user.js script
There's no denying that there have been some fuck ups in Mozilla in the past but it seems to me like the author has an axe to grind here. If they don't then they should at least reference their claims.
I mean they call IE, Chrome and Opera "Botnet web browsers". I suppose they're referencing the 4chan meme and not actually saying that these browsers contain botnet code but I'm not sure if that makes it better.
As the website says your best options are GNU IceCat or Ungoogled Chromium with uMatrix and HTTPS Everywhere.
If the author listed more precisely their problems (like you just did for instance) then the reader could make an informed choice. Saying "Chrome is a botnet and Firefox is filled with spyware" is hogwash and disqualifies this page completely IMO.
People will not start suddenly compile their own browser or dig github for browser they never heard of.
They use Google and Gmail. Firefox surely knows that 70% of people will be pissed right there if google is not default browser so they atleast get money from google for it. It's compromise.
They need money to compete with mainstream browsers and they have to make smart decisions about which compromise to make.
Signal is getting similar shit for using google services for messaging. But it makes e2e encryption mainstream.
Mozilla itself says, and I say, that "half the board" did not resign over me. See https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat..., and also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10654651 for a detailed breakdown from me based on what I can say that others involved also said. Mozilla (same FAQ link) testifies that I was not "ejected" and was welcome to stay at an unspecified C-level executive position. If you don't believe them, I can't help you.
On "divisive", beware false division and fake cover stories or excuses. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13429898
In my experience it is best to avoid following one's filter bubble on "how someone is viewed", especially in today's tribal regressive-left world. But YMMV!
Nice pot shot with the tribal regressive-left bit btw. Sadly inaccurate though.
Some discussions happened internally, we don't have the full story, and I won't be using your products due to the murky situation at Mozilla & your past support of certain political causes.
Mozilla FAQ includes answer on whether board quit because they were "angered" and says nope: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat....
For more back-story, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13429898.
Ads solve the problem of how to fund websites without subscriptions but create the problem of annoying ads of no relevance.
Google and Facebook mitigate the problem of annoying adverts by trying to make them relevant. That comes at the cost of their constant surveillance without permission, and use of that information to try to “influence” people’s opinions in unrelated ways.
The big lie of recent years has been “we value your privacy” followed some details of how “we” don’t.
BATs try to solve all of these problems by placing control of personal information back with the user.
If I give you a cryptographic representation of my interests you can serve me ads without having to know the intimate details of my life. You only need to know how to deal with the token.
What’s more I can compartmentalise my interests by sending different tokens at different times.
Google could get involved in this sort of research but I suspect that their interests go far beyond just serving ads.
>What’s more I can compartmentalise my interests by sending different tokens at different times.
I'm really perplex. People who care enough about their privacy to make use of something like that are probably those who don't want ads or tracking at all anyway. The rest of the population obviously doesn't care.
I personally can't imagine ever willingly enabling ads in my browser. You want me to pay for your service? Then ask for my credit card number, I may give it to you. If you prefer to beg for me to turn my ad blocker off then be my guest but I won't do it.
The idea of installing Brave, curating several "tokens" containing my interests and selecting what to send to which website is frankly preposterous to me and of dubious value for the advertisers.
I pay for Spotify, I pay for Memrize, I pay for Tarnsap, I bought a Fontawesome subscription last friday, I used to donate to a couple Patreons. I donate punctually to FreeBSD, Wikipedia and a few other open source projects. I want to support people who offer services that I use. I don't want to prostitute my private life to do it.
If content creators don't want my money but insist that I should let them spam me with ads and share my private info with third parties then it's their problem, not mine.
Life is too short for me to curate "cryptographic interest tokens" in order for advertisers to serve me content that I don't want to see anyway.
Some cryptocurrency projects wanted to develop a cheap and easy micropayment system. That seems a lot more interesting to me although that probably can't work as long as the "currency" part of "cryptocurrency" remains more aspirational than practical.
You don't have to, just don't opt-in for Brave rewards (aka ads), and fund your tipping wallet with your money (you can as of today) and voilà !
You'll have:
- No ads, no trackers
- You contribute toward content creators with your cash like you do with Spotify/Netflix using a built-in wallet in your browser
- A fast and privacy-first browser
Making it easier and faster to transfer small amounts of money online is definitely something that needs improving but unfortunately so far cryptocurrency-based solution haven't really managed to solve the problem, mainly because speculation makes them a pretty terrible currency. That's a tough problem to solve.
No, they don't take a cut if you fund your wallet directly and use it to tip the content creators.
>If it's the latter what's Brave's business model
Here is how they make money, just pasting my comment from below:
By default, ads are blocked, but users of Brave can opt-in to have privacy-friendly ads from the Brave network displayed on websites they browse.
Brave get 30% of the revenue from those ads, and the users get 70% of the revenue as BAT tokens
Users can then use those BAT tokens to tip the websites they like that signed up as Brave publishers (see a list here: https://batgrowth.com/publishers)
So the Ads / Get paid to browse part of Brave is 100% optional and opt-in, many people think it is mandatory
>Making it easier and faster to transfer small amounts of money online is definitely something that needs improving but unfortunately so far cryptocurrency-based solution haven't really managed to solve the problem, mainly because speculation makes them a pretty terrible currency. That's a tough problem to solve.
Yeah, I'm kinda fascinated about Brave's model, I'm wondering if it will be the first cryptocurrency-based solution that make sense to me
Brave intends to pay content publishers 55% of the replaced ad revenue. Brave Software 15% Brave ad partners 15% Browser users 15% of the revenue.
So roughly 30%
BAT is trying to change that - instead of ads you put money into Brave and pay those tiny amounts to creators directly. The idea is that you might not even know that you often read some blog and the browser distribute BAT for you (if you want).
Honestly it is not about the cryptocurrency hype at all. Like everybody wanted some legit usecase for crypto and now when there is one then people hate it because it is crypto...
I'm still not really considering switching to Brave but if this BAT thing makes it into Firefox (as an extension for instance) I'll probably give it a try.
I remain unconvinced that decentralized blockchains can really scale up to the number of transactions that would be generated by everybody "tipping" individual website as they browse them but that's a different issue.
They also don't have to make the transactions instant. They are basically donations so the transaction time does not really matter. They could spread the transactions for efficiency.
Plus crypto is evolving and they are counting on it. When their scaling issues come there might very well be some ok solution in likes of lightning network. Or doing stuff offchain.
For me Brave is actually secondary browser now because it is the "ungoogled chrome" that is easy to install and i can test webwork i do without chrome.
If that ruins their business model, they need to figure out how to collect payment before sending me the web page. Don’t freely send OTA TV signals into my house then get offended when I decide to skip the ads. Same thing.
I think a lot of sites have already figured this out. They sell t-shirts. Mugs. Premium podcast episodes, and Patreon sponsorships. The Web is working around this as we speak. But the Googles of the world will make it sound like we’re “stealing web pages”. This will be “the new piracy”. All to defend a business model that relies on my equipment assaulting me with your malicious ads on your behalf. No thank you.
I have a really hard time reconciling this opinion with "Then ask for my credit card number, I may give it to you."
Even with ad blockers, I have much more control what information I give out than if I trust someone with my credit card number.
Even if the content creator is genuine, there have been so many hacks in the past.
Credit cards are also not good for microtransactions and BAT is a potentially enabler for them. Sure, we aren't there yet but it doesn't look as impossible as it were in 1999 when microtransactions came up the first time as a solution to the ads problem.
For me, I like the idea of paying for content without having to supply my credit card number to each news outlet that I want to read. With no link to me directly the websites no longer need to track me and Brave can go out of it's way to back that up. No need to curate tokens. Just switch profiles if/when you need to.
BTW you don't _need_ to see any ads at all. You can instead just buy BATs and use them for content payment without ads.
User experience aside it makes it clear when you revoke permission to your data
You can point to the public transaction where you did that and show consent to that advertiser and whoever they copied that data to, massive liability for them if they arent playing along
A step towards cooperation, not a cure all
Tokens are also useful in bootstrapping any two sided marketplace, and people would also be aligned in seeing it become more valuable. To you, that means damning unobjectiveness, to others that means necessary skin in the game to know what theyre talking about.
To put it bluntly, that is their problem, not mine. I feel absolutely no obligation to support a flawed business model, in fact I feel absolutely no obligation to support the commercialization of the internet.
Based on the egregious attacks on privacy we've seen, I have absolutely no intention of ever allowing ads again.
This reminds me of my friends that used to download games of thepiratebay because the gaming industry was a "flawed business model", but were still expecting content to be produced
If you don't support content creators with money, how can you expect content to be produced ? Content creators need to eat too, especially indie ones
>Based on the egregious attacks on privacy we've seen
I like how Brave tackle the privacy issue by displaying only privacy-friendly ads from Brave publishers network while giving a way for users to contribute towards content creator with the built-in tip feature. And this is a opt-in feature, so if you hate ads, you just don't have to opt-in and can still enjoy a fast and privacy-focused browser
I've ditched chrome 2 weeks ago, not going back anytime soon
The vast majority of the World's photographers are amateurs, who derive little or no income from their hobby. Yet they collectively produce stunning photos that are amongst the best ever taken.
Why can't websites be the same? Like they were in the 90s. Why must side-projects monetise ASAP instead of being a hobby?
Perhaps Gmail wouldn't exist in that World, but Fastmail would. And postfix, dovecot, sendmail too.
You need an ideal world of universal basic income, healthcare and a reasonable standard of living for all if you want people to abandon all ideas of monetising their activities. Sadly we're very far from that world.
They can throw content at me willy-nilly, but they can't expect me to watch it. I simply let my browser do the filtering, rather than my eyeballs. I also default-deny all 3rd-party frames and scripts, due to security concerns. That alone happens to filter out the majority of ads, all by itself.
This situation is not at all comparable to copyright infringement, where you have to actively seek out the content in question.
Besides, I would never click any ad anyway, no matter if it's a simple text ad or a spinning, jumping, music-playing animated pop-up monstrosity. Never.
But I do support content creators, most often through buying their games on Steam/GOG, though direct purchases on Bandcamp or through Patreon.
However the movie/TV show segment is missing a similarly accessible service. Netflix/HBO/etc. all limit my region to a very reduced catalogue, and they implement overly-strict DRM that prevents me from actually using their services without rebooting to my (gaming-only) Win10 install.
At least Spotify works brilliantly on Linux. The client may be a relatively heavy Electron app, but it works.
>"I like how Brave tackle the privacy issue by displaying only privacy-friendly ads from Brave publishers network"
I don't trust them, because I distrust the entire advertising and marketing industry on principle.
Quality content does need to be paid for, one way or another, whether you enjoy supporting it or not.
Obviously this doesn't bring in as much money so as long as those of us who don't want to be tracked remains a small minority: business as usual.
Advantages of Brave on mobile in comparison to Firefox:
- Single package with add blocking and HTTPS upgrading
- Better handling of offline cache
- Those little PIP clouds to disambiguate a tap
- I always understand how to long press to show context menu instead of selecting
- I believe scrolling is smoother on Brave
- I prefer card/tab layout on Brave
- Less crashes
Advantages of Firefox over Brave on mobile:
- Same browser I use on desktop - helpful with Firefox account and it's FOSS
- I can disable JavaScript and images when I'm on severely limited connection like right now
- Extensions
- I like text search better
- Better location bar search
- Usable reader mode
Now saying all this I would like to have a pure HTML browser, at least for bad mobile connections. It would be lightinnig fast and would show me offline version first and upgrade to more recent version if needed or it was downloaded after all. It would be like a permanent reader mode. So my font, my colors, my line length, no obnoxious position:fixed bars. One of the things on my to-do list.
I use Focus for quick, one-time things: open a quick article from my news feed, login to pay my credit card bill, etc., and then trash it.
Sure you can use Chrome / Firefox / Safari and install extensions and plugins that do something similar but end users don't want to jump through hoops and play whack a mole with ads. If a browser proactively fights ads for them out of the box, it enriches their lives without them needing any additional technical knowledge.
It's a 'set and forget' way of supporting your favourite sites. User experience wise it's no better than Firefox + uBlock origin, it's purely a moral choice.
You DON'T pay a monthly fee for anything. That statement was terribly misleading.
As dubious as I am of cryptocurrency in general, display advertising is evil and needs to be destroyed, and BAT is the best (only?) micropayments alternative out there, as far as I can tell.
I think this is my new browser.
From what i gather, they switched from Muon which looks to be an Electron that uses later versions of Chromium. This version also had a custom UI written entirely in web technologies.
They’re comparing that to their new version based directly on the Chromium code base + some privacy related patches. Their UI changes are now mostly relegated to a bundled extension so it looks and feels like Chrome.
It seems they could have dug a bit deeper to find out where the speed up actually came from. The chromium build system is incredibly complex but very specially tuned to produce maximum performance for a specific configuration (Google Chrome Branded Release). When you go in trying to use bits and pieces of Chromium as dynamic libraries, things can go south rather quickly for performance. It could also mean that GPU acceleration or sandbox configurations differed between their modified Chromium versions they’re comparing here. Was LTO enabled on both builds?
Either way, It feels like they’re taking claim for developing some browser performance increase of what is in all likelihood solely attributable to the Chromium project.
Brave get 30% of the revenue from those ads, and the users get 70% of the revenue as BAT tokens
Users can then use those BAT tokens to tip the websites they like that signed up as Brave publishers (see a list here: https://batgrowth.com/publishers)
I wish engineering articles such as this can be more to the point instead of being ceremonial.
I live abroad so it's fairly often I have to interact with pages in another language.
It also does nothing against the fear of a Chromium monoculture, since it's just yet another reskinned fork.
Very "Brave", indeed. Kinda telling when you have to come up with the laudatory adjectives yourself.
I applaud BAT and hope either it or a successor works out to make it clear how we pay as users.
I expectation (or fear/disappointment) is that if Brave and BAT become widespread it will merely just form a new ad serving network with a different group collecting transaction fees.