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

davidgerard.co.uk

271–280 of 394 posts

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

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here to suggest Vivaldi. I’ve been using it for nearly two years as my primary browser. It’s not perfect, but no browser is. However, it’s the only browser I’ve found that treats It’s users like an adult and lets them setup the browser the way they want.

Vivaldi is the true successor of Opera, more so than the Opera we have today.

Opera is run by some random company but Vivaldi is developed by the original Opera developer.

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

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate it when people do this. Have you actually even tried it ? It just shows the referral link suggestion at the top, it doesn't hijack the link you typed in. You're still free to open the original link. Of course the twitter post cleverly hides this by hiding the list of suggestions. Now we have this long flaming thread for something that's totally normal and perfectly acceptable.

Firefox: type in Binance.us and immediately press enter - no referral code. Chrome: type in Binance.us and immediately press enter - no referral code. Brave: type in Binance.us and immediately press enter - yes referral code.

Hahah, when you delete ref code and enter Binance.us again it loads without ref.

This experience sucks, but at least the refs aren't fully hardcoded.

Github issue: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/10129

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone use Brave on the desktop? I thought Brave was only relevant on mobile, since mobile Chrome doesn't support extensions, and for some reason unknown to me people don't want to just use Firefox there.

I use it on desktop primarily and have earned ~$40usd with the rewards program so far. You can import your Chrome account and use chrome extensions in Brave, it's basically a faster version of Chrome to me.

You earned that in how long?

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

#274
post #33
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 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?

Chrome was waaaaaay faster. It made Firefox look like a student project. I held out a lot longer than all of my laymen friends, but the gap eventually was hard to ignore.

There were also a ton of innovations that caused real quality of life improvements that it took firefox an incredibly long time to catch up to, like process isolation preventing a single misbehaving tab from crashing your entire session.

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

#275
post #172
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’ve become a fan of NextDNS.

Same here. I really like NextDNS because you can adjust it such that it also blocks network traffic inside apps.

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very rarely, I fall back to Safari because I'm on Mac. But on my laptop, I don't have anything installed from Google. It's just not necessary.

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked, Ungoogled Chromium did not have self-updates, and installing Chrome Extensions was a bit of a chore without a special extension.

You can install extensions normally with a regular Chromium and then uninstall it and use the ungoogled.

That's quite a bit of a chore. Are those extensions ever going to update themselves when there's a security vulnerability?

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

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is indirectly funded by Google, yes. They don't have ownership. It's the same way that the NY Times is indirectly funded by Mazda. They pay for ads.

Mozilla is funded by Google and also sends user data to Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1165858896176660480.html

It would inform people better if you would be more precise here.

According to the links, the "Get Add-ons" view in Firefox uses Google Analytics to collect aggregate visitor statistics. Furthermore they note that they negotiated a special contract with Google to only collect a subset of data.

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

#279
post #8
post #2

I would think the affiliate programs wouldn't like this either. The browser isn't doing anything to drive traffic. It's just taking credit for traffic that was coming already.

Good point. Maybe brave should make affiliate-able links blink and/or respond to clicks in a wider area? (Just to be clear: this is satire. Please don't do this.)

Don't give him ideas.
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