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The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

davidgerard.co.uk

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Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#101

Post by ifdefdebug »

doc_gunthrop wrote: post #60
meerita wrote: post #15

Being a happy Firefox user and watching all the browser drama from the backyard. I still don't understand why people uses Chrome or Chrome variants claiming privacy things.

With Chrome taking the lion's share of the browser user market, you end up with a lot of sites that work well in Chrome but not so well with other browsers. So even if you use Firefox as your main driver, you'll still want to have a Chromium-based browser as a backup. Now the problem for Android users is that, in light of this news, there's now one less (seemingly) viable option if you're using Google Play services.…

> So even if you use Firefox as your main driver, you'll still want to have a Chromium-based browser as a backup.

Nope. When something doesnt work in my FF then good bye. I cant be bothered to do extra work like switching browsers for to support their incompetence. It'been rare though.

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#102

Post by lyonlim »

mmcru wrote: post #100
this_user wrote: post #13

I'm surprised people are surprised by this. Brave have said from the beginning that this is how their business model works. What I'm even more surprised about is that Brave has gotten any traction at all, as there is really no reason to use it instead of a normal browser with regular ad blockers.

I use it on iOS because its an easy solution for ad-blocking. Is there a good ad-blocker for Safari on iOS?

I use Ad Guard and it works!

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#103

Post by aasasd »

molticrystal wrote: post #57
phnofive wrote: post #5

> However, Eich is very sorry that Brave got caught — again — and something will be changed in some manner to stop this behaviour, or at least obscure it. No surprise there. > There is no good reason to use Brave. Use Chromium — the open-source core of Chrome — with the uBlock Origin ad blocker [...] or use Firefox with uBlock Origin — ‘cos it blocks more ads than the Chromium framework will let anything block. Is th…

How is the android scene for Chromium based browsers that either have extension support or adblockers? I am aware only of Yandex & Kiwi as Chromium browsers that support extensions that allow you to install an adblocker. So perhaps Brave is trying to integrate itself there somehow by having it built in. Anybody know a better breakdown than this for mobile browser market share? https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-marke…

Yandex is the company whose sites actively fight ad-blocking more than anyone else of whom I know. Afaik Yandex is just not in the uBO lists anymore, because it was no use changing the filters again and again. So I guess Yandex might allow installing filters which can't catch it anyway, but I wonder if it won't cripple the extension somehow for good measure.

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#104

Post by rpdillon »

mixedCase wrote: post #87
meerita wrote: post #15

Being a happy Firefox user and watching all the browser drama from the backyard. I still don't understand why people uses Chrome or Chrome variants claiming privacy things.

Firefox's performance on Linux is markedly worse than Chrome's.

This has never been my experience, FWIW.

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#105

Post by moooo99 »

dmantis wrote: post #46
tygrak wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't understand why everyone moved away from Firefox back in the day. Is it really just the fact that Google put up so many ads everywhere?

First, old firefox (pre-quantum) really started to be slow and non-competitive. Second, Google actually were caught on making their resources work worse on firefox and other competitors with some hacks. E.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... Assuming that literally everyone use gmail, youtube, etc - it had looked that mozilla doesn't work reliably for end users.

I switched for that exact reason - Firefox was starting to become really slow. After a few years of exclusively using Chrome, Firefox (thanks to Quantum) became my default browser again. It still sometime feels slower than Chrome, especially on Google sites (YouTube and GMail are incredibly slow). But that could just be my current pc starting to show its age.

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#106

Post by andai »

milankragujevic wrote: post #38
alexruf wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Not sure what else needs to happen to encourage Chromium users to finally give Firefox a try.

I gave it a try tens of times, and continue trying to switch every major release, but keep going back. Too many things are just not right, and can't be fixed for me because I am not ALL of the users + not even the most vocal part of the user base + some things are just meant to be like that in Firefox and that's their "thing" that I don't like. It's pointless to list it here, but I really do continuously try it in go…

Have you written about your experience with Firefox somewhere else? I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

I just wrote another comment here about its performance, about how I want it to succeed, how I donate to Mozilla, and yet still use a Chromium-based browser due to the performance issues.

At this point (I mean, they've literally invented a new programming language to make it faster, and it's still slow) I think the only thing left to do is to learn C++ and Rust and fix it myself...

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#107

Post by MattGaiser »

meerita wrote: post #15

Being a happy Firefox user and watching all the browser drama from the backyard. I still don't understand why people uses Chrome or Chrome variants claiming privacy things.

Do you find that there are irritating glitches?

A lot of the web doesn't officially support Firefox anymore (Groupon, Airbnb, my organization).

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#108

Post by drannex »

Sevaris wrote: post #39
drannex wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have Android try the new Firefox Preview, best browser I've used on mobile so far. Complete rewrite.

Which is missing nearly all of the addons that I use and which don't seem to be a priority for Mozilla. Their whole strategy regarding addons is incredibly frustrating.

They are opening it up, just taking time as they are developing the appropriate API points. This is a complete rewrite, going to take awhile before all the same API is available. They have opened some major addons as they are tested and stable.

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#109

Post by the_duke »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #67
dkdk8283 wrote: post #28

Brave has to pay salaries - I suppose this is better than selling user data. Chrome is subsidized by search and Firefox gets money from Google. The revenue model for browsers is fucked up.

Ironically there’s only one browser with a sane business model and it’s Safari. You have to buy an Apple product to use it. Simple. That’s probably why it’s the only mainstream browser, outside of obscure open source browsers like Falkon and Gnome Web, that doesn’t have any built-in ties to third party services.

Apple gets billions and billions each year to make Google the default search engine in Safari on iOS and Mac OS. (reported to be 12 billion in 2019 [1])

Apples privacy efforts and signaling are motivated by differentiation to Android/Google and are mostly just marketing targeted at increasingly privacy-aware consumers. Not some value judgement. (in my opinion)

[1] https://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-en...

Re: The Brave web browser is hijacking links, and inserting affiliate codes

#110

Post by olliej »

mmcru wrote: post #100
this_user wrote: post #13

I'm surprised people are surprised by this. Brave have said from the beginning that this is how their business model works. What I'm even more surprised about is that Brave has gotten any traction at all, as there is really no reason to use it instead of a normal browser with regular ad blockers.

I use it on iOS because its an easy solution for ad-blocking. Is there a good ad-blocker for Safari on iOS?

I use 1blocker but its a paid one - there are a bunch of free ones as well but I got bored working out which ones were scammy and 1blocker (at the point in time I started using it) seemed not to be scammy.
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