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.
It may be YACB, but that is precisely why it works for the author. Chromium browsers have the best compatibility because that is what is tested for. If it were any other way, then this post wouldn't exist.
If anyone is reading this and sees compatibility as their primary reason for staying with a Chromium browser: I have been using Firefox as my main browser for many years now, and I can count on one hand the number of times where I've been hit by compatibility issues.
The big one is anything to do with video calling — things often work but not as well, or you can voice call but not use video, or something like that. Most of the time the call works well enough, or I use a native app anyway, in which case this isn't a problem, but I suspect this is the thing people are most likely to run into in practice.
The other one is WebUSB, which is useful for certain tools that flash hardware (e.g. keyboards) from the browser. This is rarer, but I still have Chrome around so I can still use these tools. And mostly there's another option anyway, it's just that WebUSB makes things more convenient.
I have heard people complain about Cloudflare, but I've never noticed this. I suspect this is less to do with Chrome/Firefox, and more to do with privacy settings that Firefox makes more accessible. But again, I've never had an issue with Cloudflare myself, so I can't say much about this.
Other than that, I genuinely can't think of the last time I wanted to use a website but couldn't because of Firefox. And even in the above situations, it's rare that I actually run into issues, it's just something I'm aware of as a possible cause if something happens. Most of the time things work perfectly well.
Unfortunately, by switching to YACB, the user is effectively making Firefox less relevant.
So if you want it to be relevant, you actually do have to use it. Otherwise you can just as well give up and not care at all about the browser monopoly.
It would be the elephant in the room for both Brave and Vivaldi (though the author is not wrong that Vivaldi doesn't seem to to have captured the old Opera magic). The article is at least partially juxtaposing Brave against Firefox.
Right, I felt the same thing. Switching to Brave because Firefox "isn't ethical enough" is like switching to McDonald's because the farmer's market produce isn't organic enough.
If you're going to take on doing personal tech support for Brave for your friends and family, why not let them keep what they're familiar with and switch their DNS to an adblocking provider instead?
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?
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.
Is there something in Firefox's license that prevents forking? Why does it seems like all of these browser are always Chromium forks and we never see Firefox forks go mainstream?
>but using yet another Chromium based browser doesn't really improve the current situation with Google's browser monopoly.
Not everyone wants to be a martyr/activist to change their habits and experience in order to support a political cause they don't really understand.
Most people just want the best, frictionless and most familiar experience to the product they already know and love, which often means a slick and shiny product from a monopolistic anti-consumer company.
> support a political cause they don't really understand.
I'll accept this as a reasonable excuse for the non-HN crowd.
But the HN crowd should understand the cause. We've all experienced or heard stories of the IE6 monopoly days, and few of us trust Google.
And it's not much of a sacrifice to use Firefox, it's a great browser. Maybe not the best for everybody, but it is the best for some and OK for many/all. Calling yourself a martyr just because you use Firefox for political reasons seems a stretch.
>I'll accept this as a reasonable excuse for the non-HN crowd.
That's who I was referring to. If you want Chrome to not be a monopoly anymore you'll need to convince gen-pop to switch not just part of HN.
>And it's not much of a sacrifice to use Firefox,
It can be. A few of my most visited websites have issues on FF, and Chrome does page translation far better than FF, which is a must-have for me as I live in a foreign country. Then Chrome's "Image lens" AI search is invaluable for my hobby work.
>Calling yourself a martyr just because you use Firefox for political reasons seems a stretch.
Majority of people will dump the new browser the second the find a website that doesn't work well on it. Using it despite that, IS a political statement, that not everyone will make. If you want FF to get more adoption, then you need to acknowledge its weaknesses so that it can fix them, and not bury our heads in the sand and attack its critics.
> Using it despite that, IS a political statement, that not everyone will make.
Not necessarily. Some of us just really don't like using Chromium-based browsers due to usability issues and want to use one that works better for them.
> A few of my most visited websites have issues on FF
I use FF with FingerprintResist on, and many things such as WebGL outright disabled, on top of very restrictive DNS blacklist and uBlock Origin, and even despite all of that I find Firefox very usable. I can make online payments and book flights and other such things normally. I rarely, if ever, have to use a clean, stock Firefox profile or fall back to Chromium. On machine at least, Firefox gets a higher Speedometer 3.1 score than Chromium.
I never said FF is unusable, I said some websites I frequent have issues in FF. Why is it so difficult to understand what I said? Is my English bad or what?
>Most people just want the best, frictionless and most familiar experience
Every time there's a thread about browsers, at least one commenter presents themselves as a self-appointed representative of "the users" and declares what the users really want.
And it's not that these self-appointed representatives are wrong, necessarily, but they tend to say one of two things: either The People want serious privacy and FOSS commitments and no AI, or they want everything smooth and don't care about privacy. And whichever one it is, it's the most obvious thing in the world, according to the person saying it.
>presents themselves as a self-appointed representative and declares what the users really want
Since you're making rude false accusations like that, let me ask you, are you saying most people DON'T want "the best, frictionless and most familiar experience"?
Because I never met anyone who said they wanted a slower jankier less intuitive product than what they used before.
So how was my statement wrong when I said what people want?
>either The People want serious privacy and FOSS commitments
Most people don't care about privacy and FOSS, otherwise Google wouldn't be one of the most valuable companies in the world with some of the most popular products.
To clarify, by "most people" I mean most people in absolute terms, like the ones you when you touch grass, not just those from your HN/tech bubble, those are not "most people".
> Since you're making rude false accusations like that, let me ask you, are you saying most people DON'T want "the best, frictionless and most familiar experience"?
People want frictionless and familiar experience. But they also want tools where they are not the product (either by having their data sold, or being fed ads, or being captured by enshittificating services because alternative services cannot compete due to artificial barriers, ...). (edit: and I'm not saying that Chromium does that, just showing that "what people want" is not so simplistic)
Can you prove me that this other statement is incorrect? Are you saying that most people DON'T want to not be abused by their tools?
Of course not. The problem is not that your sentence is not true, it is that your sentence is loaded: you just provide one obvious sentence saying "most people love having the benefices of this product", but totally ignore that 1) this product also has disadvantages that people don't like, 2) alternative products provide other set of benefices and disadvantages.
I personally agree with the previous comment: these "most people" arguments are usually very poor, and it does not reflect very well on people who make them. (the fact that "best, frictionless and familiar experiences" is an advantage can be a good point to bring to the conversation, but it is way less simplistic than that (what is "best", what is "familiar", did people did not want browser tabs because it was not familiar, is a monopolistic situation as with IE6 at the time really "frictionless" when it allowed IE6 to not progress or fix bugs, is "open in 0.62 seconds" being better than "open in 0.75 seconds" really matter for the majority of people, ...) and this discussion can easily done in a better way than with the poor "most people want" argument)
>Can you prove me that this other statement is incorrect?
I already did before: Google.
>Are you saying that most people DON'T want to not be abused by their tools?
Firsty, most people don't consider themselves as "being abused" when they use Google Chrome instead of FF, otherwise they wouldn't use it voluntarily in such great numbers. That's just a hill HN and techies love to die on that not representative of the majority.
Secondly, most people (outside of tech) either don't even know they are the product, or they don't even care. See facebook, instagram, X, etc as proof.
People don't WANT to be abused. This is soooo stupid to pretend it is the case.
Simply, people are just making choices and no choice is perfect. They use Google Chrome DESPITE the disadvantages of Google Chrome.
And that is exactly why the argument "people use Google Chrome so Google Chrome cannot have negative consequence" is simplistic.
But more importantly, some of the advantages of Google Chrome only exist because some people are not using Google Chrome. It is not a zero sum game: the best situation is when we have an healthy balance when people are using alternative. The initial comment you answer to did nothing else, just said "me, I use Firefox", it did not even said "everyone should use Firefox".
And the fact that they are not aware of a bad consequence that is bad for them is really not a good argument. In fact, it demonstrates that your logic is flawed: the fact that the majority of people use something does not demonstrate that this product is a good idea. This is the usual race to the bottom: let's enshittify as much as the people can bare. That is just creating a shitty society. Civilisations would be so much better if this mentality did not exist.
I had this conversation so many time before, and it is so simplistic and naive. Can you not just do better?
One person's "rude" is another person's request to tether claims to objective reality in some tractable way, even if it's just a report of plausible enough anecdotal experience.
>Because I never met anyone who said they wanted a slower jankier less intuitive product than what they used before.
Well someone's having big feelings, but this is a straw man, speed and privacy don't have to be mutually exclusive and in practice they aren't for the most part. Users who are casual enough that ad tech telemetry and privacy are mysterious words to them are also not people who are going to note the 0.1% difference in performance that you claim they're prioritizing. Belligerently repeating a just so story based on a flawed framing of trade-offs faced by users doesn't make it more true.
>Most people don't care about privacy and FOSS
Again, this is a just so story, and I think it's just something weird about the vernacular of HN that people are comfortable making claims like this or thinking they can be leveraged to make authoritative judgments. But one person's trust me bro is as good as anothers, and I don't even think it's right that people really are trading privacy for performance and any sort of margin that significant enough to really be noticed. And frankly, if they do notice a performance difference, it's probably because they don't have ad block and if they don't have ad block it's probably because they're using Chrome.
Google actually maintains their market share through a combination of strong user experience and an utterly dominant position as a distributor. Chrome is the default browser on over a billion devices and is advertised and deeply integrated into the ecosystem of the world's most used website. I've said it a million times but if it was just about the inherent quality of the product then Opera would have conquered the world back in 2012.
This mechanism is well understood pretty much anytime software monopolies face legal scrutiny. Microsoft wanted people to believe that Internet explorer was just that much better than the competition, and Google probably wanted the world to believe its search was so much better, which is why it had to be the default option for Apple devices in Europe. But if that was an organic manifestation of consumer preference, it wouldn't have to be maintained with billion dollar arrangements, or hostile ecosystem lockout that came under legal scrutiny.
You can also make requests without being a dick and calling people "self appointed X" just because their viewpoint doesn't match yours. Conversation work better that way.
Firefox works on 99% of websites I use. In fact, it's always some weird AI product or SaaS product when something complains about user agents, so low quality and not worth looking at.
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.
Agreed. I went from 20+ years of Firefox (back to the earliest days with the .zip files and just dumping binaries into a folder) to Brave a couple years ago.
I'm the same way. Turn off crypto by default (is it these days?) and that's pretty much it.
I like how they host selected Manifest v2 extensions themselves so uBlock Origin latest continues to work and is actively maintained.
Speed of Chromium with privacy focus. Works for me.
Since Google has proven willing to stoop to bad behavior to lend Chromium the impression of superior performance[0] I don't consider subjective performance to be a meaningful benchmark.
As metrics go, I am more concerned with "demonstrable respect for user-agency", a competition in which a browser from the world's largest advertising conglomerate is forbidden entry.
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.
Is it just me that think injecting affiliate is fair game?
I hate with a passion all the sponsor segments everyone has now, grifting for something they pretend to use.
I find it better if that affiliate money goes to a product i actually use and makes my life better.
Brave origin is that, it solved my issue i had with regular brave. And i tried firefoz based browser but they are not up to par, they work for basic browsing, but struggle with video playback of jellyfin, some dont even have option to use mt own serxng service as search engine
"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,...
In my case, I find it doesn't matter to me or, often, anyone I know. So the conclusion becomes I don't care and my only concern is if it is useful to me.
It's also why I avoid almost all social platforms and, if I land on one accidentally, I look at headlines alone--rarely the comments.
> a 2008 donation of $1,000 to California Proposition 8
The woke/cancel culture crowd (none of whom knew him personally) went after him with a vengeance in 2014, but there were LGBT and LGBT-allied co-workers of his at the time who were aghast at the outrage. Here are three examples I could find online just now [0][1][2]
Tbf opposing gay marriage is quite an extreme opinion in much of the developed world. I suspect Eich's position on the matter is tied to his Roman Catholic faith, so although he showed a certain level of remorse in 2014, he never actually came out in support of gay marriage. He then later spread misinformation about mask-wearing during COVID, including suggestions that people could die from wearing a mask.
Prop 8, the anti-gay-marriage proposition that Eich donated money to support, passed with 52% of the vote.
Eich never clarified his position (nor did he retract it nor apologize) so we have literally no idea what aspect of this he supported along with 52% of the population of California.
I don't think it's fair to call it "extreme". Small minority in some countries, minority in most and about half of the population in some is imo a fair assessment.
Even in USA it looks more like 70-30 if I am reading the polls correctly.
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.
I once mildly defended Eich on HN, and he replied and asked me not to. I hope he won't mind if I just say that my view of him is more in line with those of his old Firefox coworkers who personally worked with him.
>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 believes*.
I updated the comment to say that "... he no longer advocates". In the public record, to be clear, his total contribution to the discourse was a financial disclosure of a donation. We have literally no idea if he has made further donations, either in favor of or against this or any other policy (because smaller donations are anonymous) and he has refused to speak publicly about anything related to this, except to offer general support for "inclusiveness".
But this comment is of a type that I feel we have moved past. Ideological purity tests were always awful. If you want someone to set policy for how marriage should be considered in some context, then Eich is probably not the person to ask to do this.
But on technical matters unrelated to this I fail to see how it has any bearing at all, because his positions (based on indirect evidence) were not outlandish or out of the mainstream at the time.
I don't disagree that it's a pretty sharp left turn for this (kind of muddled in general) blog post; I was pretty narrowly focused on the ahistorical notion that Eich had recanted in the intervening years.
That being said, I find it odd that you think no one can sincerely hold the position that someone's bigotry was/is abhorrent, however mainstream it was when they were putting money behind it (which is about as direct a piece of evidence that you can get).
If you truly find it abhorrent then I think it's fine to continue to call it out. Since this was a position also held by the majority of California votes, or, to reuse my example above, Barack Obama, I find it hard to give much credence to the idea of it being an example of "abhorrent bigotry".
I was alive and an adult as of 2008, and I didn't live in California, but I remember this situation. At the time, I was a somewhat naive young libertarian and my thought was that this was a great time to get the government out of the marriage business completely; leave marriage to churches and have the government only involved in the civil union aspect, which more naturally generalizes to gay marriage as well as certain conservatorship relationships or even polyamory, without forcing any cultural or religious shifts. So had I been in California at the time, I might well have voted against this measure, but I do not feel that I was a bigot for this, much less an abhorrent bigot. Since Eich never made and has never made public statements in any direction, we have literally no idea what his actual views on the subject were.
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.
The LibreWolf browser, and if need be the IronFox browser for Android, should have been installed and analyzed in parallel with Brave by the OP, then I'd accept that a proper analysis was begun.
I am not trying to spread FUD, but at the edge of my consciousness, I remember privacyguides getting some flak for some reason. Looking it up now, there's a lot of posts on reddit accusing them of putting affiliates on the site instead of actual private software.
Looking at it briefly, their software choices seem mostly sane to me. Not a lot of FOSS, but a lot of non-technical people don't know how to setup FOSS to begin with. Can't really get mad at a site recommending Signal and Syncthing and local LLMs.
I haven't seen privacyguides mentioned since being on HN, and I trust this site more than others. What are people's opinions on it?
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.
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.
Huh, that does look nice. Its been a long time since I used Brave last. Does it do anything beyond ad-blocking over chrome? If not I don't think I can be be bothered to switch from one ad-blocking chrome to another, just to due inertia and my lazyness.
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.
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.
Opposing gay marriage is not denying the humanity of gay people. I'm not even opposed to gay marriage, but hyperbolic language like yours only hurts discussions, it never ever helps.
In a previous generation, the deserving target of eyerolls and groans was people who both-sidesed an issue. In part because it was shallow, and part because it was just a weaponized way of talking where you get to be political under superficial the guise of neutrality. Asking an audience to believe it is just not respecting the intelligence of your audience.
I think the version of that for our generation is the person who says "Gosh let's not talk politics" about obviously political things when doing so is clearly just to shield preferred targets from criticism. Of course it's not always that, and you can never prove it in any particular instance, which is why it's such convenient phrasing. But it gets eye-rolls for a reason.
There was a famous court case where the gay widow had no legal rights over their dying partners medical care, that is a pronounced human right that a heterosexual couple has over a gay couple that has been defined and why the opposition actually hurts people in ways many have not considered.
They are an absolute scumbag. It's really simple: in matters where doing the right thing is doing nothing, it means that you went out of your way to be evil. There's not even a self-interest vs. public benefit argument to be made in defense of prop 8: No one gained anything from banning gay marriage. No, the sole reason to vote for prop 8 was "I want to make people I find weird's lives worse". And that's scumbag behavior.
If your political views are "lets abuse a minority because I find them weird", those aren't merely political views.
I will help the creation of and donate to an anti-maga bill that bans magas from existing eg jailing them if they express maga views. Its called having political views. I hope you won't complaint.
Someone who derides someone else who donates to causes they find disgusting is also a political view. You're just talking about two people with political views.
If you're not willing to stand behind a view, and take all the well-deserved flak for holding it, you should shut up. Brendan Eich said "I hate gay people a couple thousand dollars much". That's a fucked up belief to hold, and if he didn't want it held against him, it was completely free to not donate thousands of dollars.
Having the opinion that there should be restaurants, stores, and bathrooms only for white people was an acceptable, mainstream political view during my father's lifetime. Expressing that opinion now would make you a social pariah. If you donated money in support of that cause today you'd probably be fair game for being openly called an "absolute scumbag" almost universally.
How that analogy compares to being against same-sex marriage is going to vary from person to person, but times change, as does what is considered just political views vs a civil rights issue.
It always surprises me that people can't take a step back and understand that objecting to today's progress is like objecting to women voting, or interracial marriage. You're just signing up to be mad your whole life and to be seen as a historical curiosity.
The majority of the voters was on his side. 52.24% voted yes and there was a 79.42% voter turn out. A huge number of Californians agreed with him at the time. This is quite a bit different than segregation today since acceptance of gay marriage was quite a bit lower and it was a newer issue than segregation.
Racial integration was wildly unpopular in the south when it became a hot political issue of the day, yet that fact doesn't make the opposition to it any more palatable to modern sensibilities. The only point I was trying to make was that you can't hand-wave away something you don't want to pick a side on by saying it's just a political view when a large portion of the society you exist in see it as a civil rights issue.
Well, I guess that too has its caveats. Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama were both vocally against same-sex marriage during run up to the 2008 election, I believe roughly the same time that the Prop 8 fight was happening. They didn't switch sides until public opinion started swaying in favor of it and I've never seen anyone hold their feet to the fire or call them "absolute scumbags" over it. Well, no one that wasn't already calling them that at least.
> 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.
Adblocking is pretty poor in Vivaldi. I'm planning to migrate away as a result. Only thing that would keep me is if they adopted Brave's adblocker, which actually works.
I absolutely love vivaldi and switched a few years ago, probably 2 years ago, so I've used it enough to really know it's for me today and not 2 months then gone back to chrome after problems. I had major annoyances with its default settings (omnibars mostly) and it throws opinionated stuff at you but its customizability is incredible and once I fixed the omnibars annoying default search settings I was good. It defaults to any typos or wrong domain names taking you to startpage searches and its frustrating for new users but you can turn it off.
Drag and drop tiling into the same window instead of having to create a new window sold me a long time ago but I also have tons of other customizations. But then you have the vivaldism where I can't open a new window and drag a link into it because because the start page captures that as a page add. It has some hiccups but in general I love it.
As an example instead of ctrl+n'ing 4 windows side by side and having to add all the additional window padding a new browser window vs tab has, you can sit on amazon or whatever retailer and price compare 4 tabs right next to each other in the same window and there is almost no padding taking up room, etc. It's very clean, you just drag a product tab into the same window and it pops into it as a tiled page that you control separately, and its marked with a highlight. You can tread the tiled page as a new tab, but its much smaller and you have to click it inside of the tab, so it's not something you're going to drive all day long. I'll put 4 products next to each other, read about them then close it or use that tab as my research tab.
Built-in full page screenshotting/exporting way better than Chrome. I haven't used the mail. The sidebar takes getting used to, I use that as a favorite bookmarks bar and look at downloads in it and RSS feeds. Built in vertical tabs I never look at that. Its sync is much better than it was a year ago, I've had no problems, it's not google chrome sync but you just throw a code onto both ends, my android vivaldi doesn't have extensions unfortunately.
It has an insane amount of settings that I spent a few days tweaking and sync between everything, and now I never touch that menu it's frightful. Sometimes I have to edit my right click context menu because Vivaldi decided to move a button under something (hello, close all tabs to the right). But you CAN do it vs other browsers that don't have full UX control and I'm now stuck with Googles (maybe) decision to hide my right-click close tab button under a 2nd dropdown.
It's been basically a chrome experience in that I don't get errors and ever have to use chrome or safari/bingthing basically ever.
I was always a heavy chromium extension user and customizer, never clicked with opera and firefox runs me off by some business decision every few years, burnt me migrating profiles, etc. I may have to hop off the chrome train completely though.
Whatever I pick next will feel ancient without vivaldis drag and drop tab system.
I haven't yet but eventually I'll happily donate $20 to the project. It's the first time I've felt in years like a browser was actually doing something new.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> A browser built on the Chromium project is riding on top of that elephant trying to tell it where to go.
You can give away all the insanely expensive base software to build a browser and you'll still get blamed for not encouraging enough competition.
Thanks KHTML and the KDE Project!
I'm excited for ladybird to reach alpha
likewise, as we all should be
It's okay, soon everybody will switch to their own vibe-coded browsers, right?
(https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender this looks so dead...)
no license file :(
It may be YACB, but that is precisely why it works for the author. Chromium browsers have the best compatibility because that is what is tested for. If it were any other way, then this post wouldn't exist.
If anyone is reading this and sees compatibility as their primary reason for staying with a Chromium browser: I have been using Firefox as my main browser for many years now, and I can count on one hand the number of times where I've been hit by compatibility issues.
The big one is anything to do with video calling — things often work but not as well, or you can voice call but not use video, or something like that. Most of the time the call works well enough, or I use a native app anyway, in which case this isn't a problem, but I suspect this is the thing people are most likely to run into in practice.
The other one is WebUSB, which is useful for certain tools that flash hardware (e.g. keyboards) from the browser. This is rarer, but I still have Chrome around so I can still use these tools. And mostly there's another option anyway, it's just that WebUSB makes things more convenient.
I have heard people complain about Cloudflare, but I've never noticed this. I suspect this is less to do with Chrome/Firefox, and more to do with privacy settings that Firefox makes more accessible. But again, I've never had an issue with Cloudflare myself, so I can't say much about this.
Other than that, I genuinely can't think of the last time I wanted to use a website but couldn't because of Firefox. And even in the above situations, it's rare that I actually run into issues, it's just something I'm aware of as a possible cause if something happens. Most of the time things work perfectly well.
Same but for Safari. I use it as my daily driver and rarely get issues related to unsupported APIs. Everything seems to work fine.
Unfortunately, by switching to YACB, the user is effectively making Firefox less relevant.
So if you want it to be relevant, you actually do have to use it. Otherwise you can just as well give up and not care at all about the browser monopoly.
I'd assume that isn't the elephant in the room since Vivaldi is also YACB
It would be the elephant in the room for both Brave and Vivaldi (though the author is not wrong that Vivaldi doesn't seem to to have captured the old Opera magic). The article is at least partially juxtaposing Brave against Firefox.
It's really a shame Opera didn't open source the Presto engine.
> 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.
Right, I felt the same thing. Switching to Brave because Firefox "isn't ethical enough" is like switching to McDonald's because the farmer's market produce isn't organic enough.
I got fed up with ads in search results and invasive tracking from Google.
I've switched fully to Meta's Muse for all of my research going forward.
I'd like to switch friends and family over to brave, but trying to avoid ads that might confuse them was kind of the point...so....
If you're going to take on doing personal tech support for Brave for your friends and family, why not let them keep what they're familiar with and switch their DNS to an adblocking provider instead?
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?
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.
Is there something in Firefox's license that prevents forking? Why does it seems like all of these browser are always Chromium forks and we never see Firefox forks go mainstream?
> using yet another Chromium based browser doesn't really improve the current situation with Google's browser monopoly
It's not a monopoly if you can build your own with it. This is like saying glibc is a monopoly.
Billions of people use non-Google web browsers every day. Monopoly does not mean "company or product I don't like".
Like?
Edge, chrome, chromium, brave, vivaldi, opera... its all just rebadged chromium.
There's chrome, Firefox, safari.
Look at how many iPhones have been sold. They use Safari as the default browser.
>but using yet another Chromium based browser doesn't really improve the current situation with Google's browser monopoly.
Not everyone wants to be a martyr/activist to change their habits and experience in order to support a political cause they don't really understand.
Most people just want the best, frictionless and most familiar experience to the product they already know and love, which often means a slick and shiny product from a monopolistic anti-consumer company.
> support a political cause they don't really understand.
I'll accept this as a reasonable excuse for the non-HN crowd.
But the HN crowd should understand the cause. We've all experienced or heard stories of the IE6 monopoly days, and few of us trust Google.
And it's not much of a sacrifice to use Firefox, it's a great browser. Maybe not the best for everybody, but it is the best for some and OK for many/all. Calling yourself a martyr just because you use Firefox for political reasons seems a stretch.
>I'll accept this as a reasonable excuse for the non-HN crowd.
That's who I was referring to. If you want Chrome to not be a monopoly anymore you'll need to convince gen-pop to switch not just part of HN.
>And it's not much of a sacrifice to use Firefox,
It can be. A few of my most visited websites have issues on FF, and Chrome does page translation far better than FF, which is a must-have for me as I live in a foreign country. Then Chrome's "Image lens" AI search is invaluable for my hobby work.
>Calling yourself a martyr just because you use Firefox for political reasons seems a stretch.
Majority of people will dump the new browser the second the find a website that doesn't work well on it. Using it despite that, IS a political statement, that not everyone will make. If you want FF to get more adoption, then you need to acknowledge its weaknesses so that it can fix them, and not bury our heads in the sand and attack its critics.
> Using it despite that, IS a political statement, that not everyone will make.
Not necessarily. Some of us just really don't like using Chromium-based browsers due to usability issues and want to use one that works better for them.
Fair point indeed.
> A few of my most visited websites have issues on FF
I use FF with FingerprintResist on, and many things such as WebGL outright disabled, on top of very restrictive DNS blacklist and uBlock Origin, and even despite all of that I find Firefox very usable. I can make online payments and book flights and other such things normally. I rarely, if ever, have to use a clean, stock Firefox profile or fall back to Chromium. On machine at least, Firefox gets a higher Speedometer 3.1 score than Chromium.
I never said FF is unusable, I said some websites I frequent have issues in FF. Why is it so difficult to understand what I said? Is my English bad or what?
>Most people just want the best, frictionless and most familiar experience
Every time there's a thread about browsers, at least one commenter presents themselves as a self-appointed representative of "the users" and declares what the users really want.
And it's not that these self-appointed representatives are wrong, necessarily, but they tend to say one of two things: either The People want serious privacy and FOSS commitments and no AI, or they want everything smooth and don't care about privacy. And whichever one it is, it's the most obvious thing in the world, according to the person saying it.
>presents themselves as a self-appointed representative and declares what the users really want
Since you're making rude false accusations like that, let me ask you, are you saying most people DON'T want "the best, frictionless and most familiar experience"?
Because I never met anyone who said they wanted a slower jankier less intuitive product than what they used before.
So how was my statement wrong when I said what people want?
>either The People want serious privacy and FOSS commitments
Most people don't care about privacy and FOSS, otherwise Google wouldn't be one of the most valuable companies in the world with some of the most popular products.
To clarify, by "most people" I mean most people in absolute terms, like the ones you when you touch grass, not just those from your HN/tech bubble, those are not "most people".
> Since you're making rude false accusations like that, let me ask you, are you saying most people DON'T want "the best, frictionless and most familiar experience"?
People want frictionless and familiar experience. But they also want tools where they are not the product (either by having their data sold, or being fed ads, or being captured by enshittificating services because alternative services cannot compete due to artificial barriers, ...). (edit: and I'm not saying that Chromium does that, just showing that "what people want" is not so simplistic)
Can you prove me that this other statement is incorrect? Are you saying that most people DON'T want to not be abused by their tools?
Of course not. The problem is not that your sentence is not true, it is that your sentence is loaded: you just provide one obvious sentence saying "most people love having the benefices of this product", but totally ignore that 1) this product also has disadvantages that people don't like, 2) alternative products provide other set of benefices and disadvantages.
I personally agree with the previous comment: these "most people" arguments are usually very poor, and it does not reflect very well on people who make them. (the fact that "best, frictionless and familiar experiences" is an advantage can be a good point to bring to the conversation, but it is way less simplistic than that (what is "best", what is "familiar", did people did not want browser tabs because it was not familiar, is a monopolistic situation as with IE6 at the time really "frictionless" when it allowed IE6 to not progress or fix bugs, is "open in 0.62 seconds" being better than "open in 0.75 seconds" really matter for the majority of people, ...) and this discussion can easily done in a better way than with the poor "most people want" argument)
>Can you prove me that this other statement is incorrect?
I already did before: Google.
>Are you saying that most people DON'T want to not be abused by their tools?
Firsty, most people don't consider themselves as "being abused" when they use Google Chrome instead of FF, otherwise they wouldn't use it voluntarily in such great numbers. That's just a hill HN and techies love to die on that not representative of the majority.
Secondly, most people (outside of tech) either don't even know they are the product, or they don't even care. See facebook, instagram, X, etc as proof.
People don't WANT to be abused. This is soooo stupid to pretend it is the case.
Simply, people are just making choices and no choice is perfect. They use Google Chrome DESPITE the disadvantages of Google Chrome.
And that is exactly why the argument "people use Google Chrome so Google Chrome cannot have negative consequence" is simplistic.
But more importantly, some of the advantages of Google Chrome only exist because some people are not using Google Chrome. It is not a zero sum game: the best situation is when we have an healthy balance when people are using alternative. The initial comment you answer to did nothing else, just said "me, I use Firefox", it did not even said "everyone should use Firefox".
And the fact that they are not aware of a bad consequence that is bad for them is really not a good argument. In fact, it demonstrates that your logic is flawed: the fact that the majority of people use something does not demonstrate that this product is a good idea. This is the usual race to the bottom: let's enshittify as much as the people can bare. That is just creating a shitty society. Civilisations would be so much better if this mentality did not exist.
I had this conversation so many time before, and it is so simplistic and naive. Can you not just do better?
One person's "rude" is another person's request to tether claims to objective reality in some tractable way, even if it's just a report of plausible enough anecdotal experience.
>Because I never met anyone who said they wanted a slower jankier less intuitive product than what they used before.
Well someone's having big feelings, but this is a straw man, speed and privacy don't have to be mutually exclusive and in practice they aren't for the most part. Users who are casual enough that ad tech telemetry and privacy are mysterious words to them are also not people who are going to note the 0.1% difference in performance that you claim they're prioritizing. Belligerently repeating a just so story based on a flawed framing of trade-offs faced by users doesn't make it more true.
>Most people don't care about privacy and FOSS
Again, this is a just so story, and I think it's just something weird about the vernacular of HN that people are comfortable making claims like this or thinking they can be leveraged to make authoritative judgments. But one person's trust me bro is as good as anothers, and I don't even think it's right that people really are trading privacy for performance and any sort of margin that significant enough to really be noticed. And frankly, if they do notice a performance difference, it's probably because they don't have ad block and if they don't have ad block it's probably because they're using Chrome.
Google actually maintains their market share through a combination of strong user experience and an utterly dominant position as a distributor. Chrome is the default browser on over a billion devices and is advertised and deeply integrated into the ecosystem of the world's most used website. I've said it a million times but if it was just about the inherent quality of the product then Opera would have conquered the world back in 2012.
This mechanism is well understood pretty much anytime software monopolies face legal scrutiny. Microsoft wanted people to believe that Internet explorer was just that much better than the competition, and Google probably wanted the world to believe its search was so much better, which is why it had to be the default option for Apple devices in Europe. But if that was an organic manifestation of consumer preference, it wouldn't have to be maintained with billion dollar arrangements, or hostile ecosystem lockout that came under legal scrutiny.
>One person's "rude" is another person's request
You can also make requests without being a dick and calling people "self appointed X" just because their viewpoint doesn't match yours. Conversation work better that way.
Firefox works on 99% of websites I use. In fact, it's always some weird AI product or SaaS product when something complains about user agents, so low quality and not worth looking at.
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.
Agreed. I went from 20+ years of Firefox (back to the earliest days with the .zip files and just dumping binaries into a folder) to Brave a couple years ago.
I'm the same way. Turn off crypto by default (is it these days?) and that's pretty much it.
I like how they host selected Manifest v2 extensions themselves so uBlock Origin latest continues to work and is actively maintained.
Speed of Chromium with privacy focus. Works for me.
> Firefox always felt slower to me
Since Google has proven willing to stoop to bad behavior to lend Chromium the impression of superior performance[0] I don't consider subjective performance to be a meaningful benchmark.
As metrics go, I am more concerned with "demonstrable respect for user-agency", a competition in which a browser from the world's largest advertising conglomerate is forbidden entry.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/why-google-took-year...
Arc is still usable and gets chromium updates. It's still my daily driver since as you said, it's great.
Edit: I also use it as my mobile browser. I really don't see any problems on their mobile app (iOS)
See also Brave Origin: https://brave.com/origin/
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.
It's open-source so you can just compile it yourself.
Is it just me that think injecting affiliate is fair game? I hate with a passion all the sponsor segments everyone has now, grifting for something they pretend to use. I find it better if that affiliate money goes to a product i actually use and makes my life better. Brave origin is that, it solved my issue i had with regular brave. And i tried firefoz based browser but they are not up to par, they work for basic browsing, but struggle with video playback of jellyfin, some dont even have option to use mt own serxng service as search engine
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.
> it raised my heckles even more
Hackles.
"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?
In my case, I find it doesn't matter to me or, often, anyone I know. So the conclusion becomes I don't care and my only concern is if it is useful to me.
It's also why I avoid almost all social platforms and, if I land on one accidentally, I look at headlines alone--rarely the comments.
Oh! Damn it!
> a 2008 donation of $1,000 to California Proposition 8
The woke/cancel culture crowd (none of whom knew him personally) went after him with a vengeance in 2014, but there were LGBT and LGBT-allied co-workers of his at the time who were aghast at the outrage. Here are three examples I could find online just now [0][1][2]
[0] https://subfictional.com/on-brendan-eich-as-ceo-of-mozilla/
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150202162458/http://words.tofu...
[2] https://medium.com/@__davidflanagan/for-the-record-7645a4bf8...
None of the three authors you are citing here knew him personally, either, and none of them seem to be particularly 'aghast'.
Same way Muslim or russian immigrants integrate. By forcing their opinion on everybody else.
Tbf opposing gay marriage is quite an extreme opinion in much of the developed world. I suspect Eich's position on the matter is tied to his Roman Catholic faith, so although he showed a certain level of remorse in 2014, he never actually came out in support of gay marriage. He then later spread misinformation about mask-wearing during COVID, including suggestions that people could die from wearing a mask.
Prop 8, the anti-gay-marriage proposition that Eich donated money to support, passed with 52% of the vote.
Eich never clarified his position (nor did he retract it nor apologize) so we have literally no idea what aspect of this he supported along with 52% of the population of California.
I don't think it's fair to call it "extreme". Small minority in some countries, minority in most and about half of the population in some is imo a fair assessment. Even in USA it looks more like 70-30 if I am reading the polls correctly.
The now popular trend of "if you don't agree with my politics and/or are not loud enough supporting my positions then you are Nazi/scumbag/fascist".
Hopefully AI help us find a cure for that mind virus one day.
AI is training on angry X/Reddit/Facebook posts, I'm sure it'll only make this problem worse.
Do moralities expire like tomatoes left on the counter?
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.
I once mildly defended Eich on HN, and he replied and asked me not to. I hope he won't mind if I just say that my view of him is more in line with those of his old Firefox coworkers who personally worked with him.
>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 believes*.
Not according to the public record.
I updated the comment to say that "... he no longer advocates". In the public record, to be clear, his total contribution to the discourse was a financial disclosure of a donation. We have literally no idea if he has made further donations, either in favor of or against this or any other policy (because smaller donations are anonymous) and he has refused to speak publicly about anything related to this, except to offer general support for "inclusiveness".
But this comment is of a type that I feel we have moved past. Ideological purity tests were always awful. If you want someone to set policy for how marriage should be considered in some context, then Eich is probably not the person to ask to do this.
But on technical matters unrelated to this I fail to see how it has any bearing at all, because his positions (based on indirect evidence) were not outlandish or out of the mainstream at the time.
I don't disagree that it's a pretty sharp left turn for this (kind of muddled in general) blog post; I was pretty narrowly focused on the ahistorical notion that Eich had recanted in the intervening years.
That being said, I find it odd that you think no one can sincerely hold the position that someone's bigotry was/is abhorrent, however mainstream it was when they were putting money behind it (which is about as direct a piece of evidence that you can get).
If you truly find it abhorrent then I think it's fine to continue to call it out. Since this was a position also held by the majority of California votes, or, to reuse my example above, Barack Obama, I find it hard to give much credence to the idea of it being an example of "abhorrent bigotry".
I was alive and an adult as of 2008, and I didn't live in California, but I remember this situation. At the time, I was a somewhat naive young libertarian and my thought was that this was a great time to get the government out of the marriage business completely; leave marriage to churches and have the government only involved in the civil union aspect, which more naturally generalizes to gay marriage as well as certain conservatorship relationships or even polyamory, without forcing any cultural or religious shifts. So had I been in California at the time, I might well have voted against this measure, but I do not feel that I was a bigot for this, much less an abhorrent bigot. Since Eich never made and has never made public statements in any direction, we have literally no idea what his actual views on the subject were.
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.
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47697870
The LibreWolf browser, and if need be the IronFox browser for Android, should have been installed and analyzed in parallel with Brave by the OP, then I'd accept that a proper analysis was begun.
Ironfox has been well received and will be added eventually, from what I skimmed.
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/ironfox-a-new-mull-fork/...
Librewolf has community support as you can see here.
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/librewolf-firefox-based-...
They don't do anti-recommendations on the pages but you can see the discussion for things on the forum.
I am not trying to spread FUD, but at the edge of my consciousness, I remember privacyguides getting some flak for some reason. Looking it up now, there's a lot of posts on reddit accusing them of putting affiliates on the site instead of actual private software.
Looking at it briefly, their software choices seem mostly sane to me. Not a lot of FOSS, but a lot of non-technical people don't know how to setup FOSS to begin with. Can't really get mad at a site recommending Signal and Syncthing and local LLMs.
I haven't seen privacyguides mentioned since being on HN, and I trust this site more than others. What are people's opinions on it?
Not FUD, just oudated. I wasn't around then but privacytools.io, now, is definitely not trustworthy.
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/about/privacytools/
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/about/#history
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”
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.
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.
You might like Brave Origin then. If hidable crypto integration is what keeps Brave free, I am personally content with it.
I haven't heard of it before, and the crypto ads was the reason I lost interest for Brave. I will have a look, thanks!
It's $60 for other platforms but free for Linux
https://brave.com/origin/linux/
Huh, that does look nice. Its been a long time since I used Brave last. Does it do anything beyond ad-blocking over chrome? If not I don't think I can be be bothered to switch from one ad-blocking chrome to another, just to due inertia and my lazyness.
Still needing some work (part 2 coming) but Brave has Containers support.
https://brave.com/blog/containers/
Not phoning home, vertical tabs and peak new tab aesthetic is what got me in.
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.
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.
Maybe they meant to link to the element where it says the guy invented Javascript. That would have been more appropriate.
"having political views" is not an escape hatch for denying the humanity of other people.
Opposing gay marriage is not denying the humanity of gay people. I'm not even opposed to gay marriage, but hyperbolic language like yours only hurts discussions, it never ever helps.
In a previous generation, the deserving target of eyerolls and groans was people who both-sidesed an issue. In part because it was shallow, and part because it was just a weaponized way of talking where you get to be political under superficial the guise of neutrality. Asking an audience to believe it is just not respecting the intelligence of your audience.
I think the version of that for our generation is the person who says "Gosh let's not talk politics" about obviously political things when doing so is clearly just to shield preferred targets from criticism. Of course it's not always that, and you can never prove it in any particular instance, which is why it's such convenient phrasing. But it gets eye-rolls for a reason.
There was a famous court case where the gay widow had no legal rights over their dying partners medical care, that is a pronounced human right that a heterosexual couple has over a gay couple that has been defined and why the opposition actually hurts people in ways many have not considered.
> Opposing gay marriage is not denying the humanity of gay people
How so?
They are an absolute scumbag. It's really simple: in matters where doing the right thing is doing nothing, it means that you went out of your way to be evil. There's not even a self-interest vs. public benefit argument to be made in defense of prop 8: No one gained anything from banning gay marriage. No, the sole reason to vote for prop 8 was "I want to make people I find weird's lives worse". And that's scumbag behavior.
If your political views are "lets abuse a minority because I find them weird", those aren't merely political views.
I will help the creation of and donate to an anti-maga bill that bans magas from existing eg jailing them if they express maga views. Its called having political views. I hope you won't complaint.
Someone who derides someone else who donates to causes they find disgusting is also a political view. You're just talking about two people with political views.
disagreeing with someone is a political view, debasing them for it is ideological
If you're not willing to stand behind a view, and take all the well-deserved flak for holding it, you should shut up. Brendan Eich said "I hate gay people a couple thousand dollars much". That's a fucked up belief to hold, and if he didn't want it held against him, it was completely free to not donate thousands of dollars.
Yeah — but JavaScript... :D
Having the opinion that there should be restaurants, stores, and bathrooms only for white people was an acceptable, mainstream political view during my father's lifetime. Expressing that opinion now would make you a social pariah. If you donated money in support of that cause today you'd probably be fair game for being openly called an "absolute scumbag" almost universally.
How that analogy compares to being against same-sex marriage is going to vary from person to person, but times change, as does what is considered just political views vs a civil rights issue.
It always surprises me that people can't take a step back and understand that objecting to today's progress is like objecting to women voting, or interracial marriage. You're just signing up to be mad your whole life and to be seen as a historical curiosity.
The majority of the voters was on his side. 52.24% voted yes and there was a 79.42% voter turn out. A huge number of Californians agreed with him at the time. This is quite a bit different than segregation today since acceptance of gay marriage was quite a bit lower and it was a newer issue than segregation.
Racial integration was wildly unpopular in the south when it became a hot political issue of the day, yet that fact doesn't make the opposition to it any more palatable to modern sensibilities. The only point I was trying to make was that you can't hand-wave away something you don't want to pick a side on by saying it's just a political view when a large portion of the society you exist in see it as a civil rights issue.
Well, I guess that too has its caveats. Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama were both vocally against same-sex marriage during run up to the 2008 election, I believe roughly the same time that the Prop 8 fight was happening. They didn't switch sides until public opinion started swaying in favor of it and I've never seen anyone hold their feet to the fire or call them "absolute scumbags" over it. Well, no one that wasn't already calling them that at least.
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.
Adblocking is pretty poor in Vivaldi. I'm planning to migrate away as a result. Only thing that would keep me is if they adopted Brave's adblocker, which actually works.
I gave Vivaldi a few chances and its UI was always slow and clunky. It also had a sea of settings that were by default opinionated in a bad way.
I absolutely love vivaldi and switched a few years ago, probably 2 years ago, so I've used it enough to really know it's for me today and not 2 months then gone back to chrome after problems. I had major annoyances with its default settings (omnibars mostly) and it throws opinionated stuff at you but its customizability is incredible and once I fixed the omnibars annoying default search settings I was good. It defaults to any typos or wrong domain names taking you to startpage searches and its frustrating for new users but you can turn it off.
Drag and drop tiling into the same window instead of having to create a new window sold me a long time ago but I also have tons of other customizations. But then you have the vivaldism where I can't open a new window and drag a link into it because because the start page captures that as a page add. It has some hiccups but in general I love it.
As an example instead of ctrl+n'ing 4 windows side by side and having to add all the additional window padding a new browser window vs tab has, you can sit on amazon or whatever retailer and price compare 4 tabs right next to each other in the same window and there is almost no padding taking up room, etc. It's very clean, you just drag a product tab into the same window and it pops into it as a tiled page that you control separately, and its marked with a highlight. You can tread the tiled page as a new tab, but its much smaller and you have to click it inside of the tab, so it's not something you're going to drive all day long. I'll put 4 products next to each other, read about them then close it or use that tab as my research tab.
Built-in full page screenshotting/exporting way better than Chrome. I haven't used the mail. The sidebar takes getting used to, I use that as a favorite bookmarks bar and look at downloads in it and RSS feeds. Built in vertical tabs I never look at that. Its sync is much better than it was a year ago, I've had no problems, it's not google chrome sync but you just throw a code onto both ends, my android vivaldi doesn't have extensions unfortunately.
It has an insane amount of settings that I spent a few days tweaking and sync between everything, and now I never touch that menu it's frightful. Sometimes I have to edit my right click context menu because Vivaldi decided to move a button under something (hello, close all tabs to the right). But you CAN do it vs other browsers that don't have full UX control and I'm now stuck with Googles (maybe) decision to hide my right-click close tab button under a 2nd dropdown.
It's been basically a chrome experience in that I don't get errors and ever have to use chrome or safari/bingthing basically ever.
I was always a heavy chromium extension user and customizer, never clicked with opera and firefox runs me off by some business decision every few years, burnt me migrating profiles, etc. I may have to hop off the chrome train completely though.
Whatever I pick next will feel ancient without vivaldis drag and drop tab system.
I haven't yet but eventually I'll happily donate $20 to the project. It's the first time I've felt in years like a browser was actually doing something new.
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/tab-tiling/
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.
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.
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?
[1] https://kevquirk.com/is-firefox-firefucked
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.
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.