HN Explorer

Tell HN: Brave Browser is still messing with affiliate links

67 points by jimhi ↗ HN
Previously they had been autofilling links and replacing affiliate links with their code:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology

They stopped doing that but I found they appear to remove affiliate links altogether unless it comes from them.

Just to test I put NordVPN's affiliate link structure and viola it gets removed:

<a href="https://go.nordvpn.net/aff_c">Test Affiliate Link</a>

39 comments

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ev1
Do you have any adblocking? /aff_c are almost universally blocked because they're 99% spam, on any domain
gravitate
I read a while back that Bitly the popular URL shortener replaced Amazon links with their own affiliate tag. After hearing this I ran my own URL shortener service. Seems Brave is replacing the affiliate code URL too. You could get around this by setting up your own URL shortener service.
ev1
Tinyurl and several others do this
gabrielsroka
I'm running Brave for Android. I tested your link, and it works fine for me.
jimhi
Did you put it on a webpage so it's actually rendering the HTML or just look at it here in this post?
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t6jvcereio
Stick to Firefox guys.
behnamoh
I actually switched from FF to Brave. Much happier with it now. The only thing I miss from FF is PiP for videos, but that can be solved by an extension on Brave.
t6jvcereio
Sorry, I don't want crypto in my browser.
prepend
I switched from FireFox to Brave. The UX is just so much better. Launch is faster. Updates are faster (and smaller). And resource load is less.

I also like being less entailed with Google and view Brave’s chromium base a lesser evil than FireFox’s funding dependency.

For what it’s worth, I don’t care at all about this affiliate hijacking and think it’s actually a benefit that more things should do as long as they don’t break the experience (eg, screw up the rewrites).

jraph
> I also like being less entailed with Google and view Brave’s chromium base a lesser evil than FireFox’s funding dependency.

Right. Instead of relying on funding coming from Google to develop the browser, Brave just uses Google's one directly, which in my opinion is quite equivalent to getting 100% funded by Google for developing the browser.

I hope Firefox will be able to get its founding from other entities. Brave, however, is never getting rid of Google and its technical decisions without a rewrite from scratch and is just participating in Google's dominance on the Web.

You may like Brave for its technical qualities, but we can't pretend it is better than Firefox wrt dependency on Google.

Developing the browser skin is not the hard part, and it is also not the place where the Web desperately needs help. I wish there was a browser that could keep up with the current web and that is not mostly funded by a GAFAM (or a GA, at this point), and Brave isn't one.

cuteboy19
> view Brave’s chromium base a lesser evil than FireFox’s funding dependency.

This is very short-sighted. All chromium forks are an extension of Google Chrome.

ZGDUwpqEWpUZ
Chromium is the base. Google Chrome is one browser built on top of it, Brave is another.
ocdtrekkie
If Google Chrome wants a feature designed one way, and Brave wants it designed another way, which one is going into Chromium?

Pretending Chromium isn't just an open source fork of Chrome is silly, it's just a method of letting a bad actor have it's cake and eat it too: Forcing a proprietary blob down everyone's throat while claiming it's open source because they toss some of it's code over the wall.

mixedCase
Which proprietary blob? What are you talking about? Brave is open source, the only proprietary blob I'm aware of is if you request DRM support, in which case it downloads Widevine but it doesn't ship that by default just like Firefox, for the same reasons.
ocdtrekkie
I was referring to Google Chrome in my comment.
RobertWHurst
Chromium is open source. They can fork the entire codebase, which I imagine they have done. They likely just cherry-pick changes they want from the upstream.
scopecreep
Brave browser is literally an intelligence gathering honeypot funded by the guy who created a big data analytics company with an extensive history of working with intelligence services [1].

But yeah. That darn google being the default search provider is very troubling.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies

madamelic
You might be confused with something else.

Brave was founded by Brandon Eich (created JS, worked at Mozilla) and Brian Bondy who also worked at Mozilla (https://brianbondy.com/resume).

Neither have Palantir on their resumes.

samtheDamned
> I also like being less entailed with Google and view Brave’s chromium base a lesser evil than FireFox’s funding dependency.

I don't understand how this makes sense. Running chromium with a skin and some components removed as opposed to a completely independent browser/engine that has proven to not implement features that will reduce user control over ads or tracking (most notably FLOC or Manifest V3) that google is fighting to implement. If you wanted the lesser evil and still believe firefox is evil, then wouldn't a WebKit based browser be the least evil?

Schroedingersat
The day the firefox rendering engine dies is the day google owns the internet.

Firefox may be controlled opposition, but it's better than total monopoly.

Plus there are projects like librewolf ypu could direct your attention to.

t6jvcereio
Sorry, I don't want crypto in my browser.
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leros
I'm surprised that's noy in violation of the affiliate and getting them kicked off the program.
propogandist
did you check if it's saved in the cookie? I see on my machine visiting Nord via one of those terrible "VPN comparison" websites; affiliate links usually just drop a cookie.
jimhi
All I did was put the link in my post above on my own website to see why it was acting weird without console errors.
FrenchDevRemote
"They stopped doing that but I found they appear to remove affiliate links altogether unless it comes from them."

isn't that the whole purpose of adblocking? :)

hertzrat
Removing affiliate codes is arguably a privacy feature. People don’t especially like having so many sites know where they just came from. I know some people who rely on those affiliate codes for some of their income though

Did they really replace the codes with their own for a while??

Kaze404
The whole purpose of adblocking is blocking ads except when it comes from the company doing the blocking?
kbelder
I'm always a little uncomfortable seeing accusations like that when there's just a sample size of one. It's worth raising the question, so we can check, but people always remember the accusation and not the exoneration.

This should probably be communicated as "I'm seeing this behavior... can anybody else replicate it?"

An "Ask HN", not a "Tell HN".

jimhi
I only wrote this after some coworkers asked me about a weird looking websites. I'm not a brave user. I just downloaded it and messed around with links on my own site until I saw that was what was happening.
mp3geek
I had no issues here. In Easylist we will remove many of the nord ad (image) spam. Which uBO and Brave uses.

/Disclaimer Easylist Maintainer and Brave Webcompat

hasperdi
My thank you for maintaining Easylist
hopth
The fact they would do this at all is what stopped me from using the browser the first time around. More for the reason, what else would they do to make a profit.
max_hammer
I only use Brave only for iOS (Ipad) because you can't I stall ad blocker (ublock origin) on firefox/chrome.

Any other alternative of brave for iOS ?

newscracker
You could setup NextDNS (nextdns.io) on it and enable various DNS level filter lists (and manual lists) on your NextDNS account. Each account can have multiple profiles too, which allows you to use different profiles on different devices. This will help block ads and trackers across all apps on your device, not just on the browser.

To augment it further, you could use Firefox Focus (which comes with a built-in content blocker).