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Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

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Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#111

Post by hitpointdrew »

bartread wrote: post #17
girst wrote: post #4

well, compared to undisclosed affiliate marketing for trading sites[1], soliciting of donations without consent[2] or the recent redirection through affiliate links[3], this seems pretty tame. [1]: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/8793 [2]: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027

I've disliked Brave from the beginning. Initially because of the pretentious - and frankly appropriated - name, but now for the much more substantive reasons you've cited. Seriously, if you want a browser that gives you control over your data and privacy, use Firefox. It doesn't do any of this shady nonsense.

>I've disliked Brave from the beginning. Initially because of the pretentious - and frankly appropriated - name

I always joked that if you were really Brave you wouldn't need their browser, it should be more aptly named "Wimp".

Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#112

Post by kop316 »

afiori wrote: post #106
esperent wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first link is about Firefox studies. I had never heard of these before, but when I go to about:studies, I see that I have never participated in any studies, and when I click the link from that page to "Firefox data collection and use" setting, I see that I am opted out from everything. Pretty sure I didn't do that manually. Your second link is to a page called "Firefox health report". I have no idea what conclus…

> but when I go to about:studies, I see that I have never participated in any studies Are you in the US? I also have not participated in any studies but in the preferences it is marked as active. My guess would be that they either run very few of them or are restricted to the US.

I am in the US. It was disabled by default in Debian, but it is on in Windows. It looks like I have not participate din any studies on the Windows machine.

Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#113

Post by afiori »

anonymousDan wrote: post #84
AzzieElbab wrote: post #67

This is a bug, have you guys seen a software bug before? What is it with the appetite for outrage? Using brave on Android devices and not planning to switch

Ya I find the outright hatred for Brave on HN a bit bizarre. The more sustainable alternatives we have to Google Chrome hegemony the better IMHO. I say this as both a FF and Brave user.

I know nothing about pro and cons of Brave, but many people that criticize Chrome hegemony often see Brave as inconsequential. It has zero leverage on the evolution of web standards as they will never be able to hard-fork the engine.

In particular it does close to nothing to solve the problem of chrome-only websites.

It is one of the reason the demise of edgeHTML/chakra was a bittersweet news for many (in this case Microsoft could have the resources, in extreme cases, to hard-fork blink/V8).

Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#114

Post by kristianc »

esperent wrote: post #103
sp332 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=browser%20ch...

Apparently the main reason Chrome has the name is that the dev team leads like fast cars and that was the initial project code name. The reference to "UI Chrome" was largely an accident. https://www.thewindowsclub.com/google-chrome-reason-revealed...

And doesn’t actually make much sense, as Chrome when it was released made a point of having vastly less ‘chrome’ than the incumbent IE.

Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#116

Post by patrickaljord »

freediver wrote: post #108
patrickaljord wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About [1], read the reply from the devs, seems reasonable and it was announced on their blog, it was temporary and could be turned off at anytime. Besides eToro is a well established site in Europe to buy stocks (no affiliations here), the reporter seems to really hate them for some reasons. [2] was fixed a while ago as mentioned in your link. [3] was also fixed quickly. I don't know if you've ever run a company but…

I did run a company and I feared making mistakes. In principle the best way to avoid making kinds of mistakes your users will hate you for is to put user interest first. By looking at Brave's profile I can not say they are living by that principle 100%. For example, the decision to hijack links to insert their own affiliate links is not a mistake, it was a decision. These kind of decisions are not made by a developer…

Putting your users interest first needs to be balanced with remaining profitable so you can keep existing. It's hard to put your user interest first when you don't exist anymore.

This is why Firefox decided for example to support non-free mp4 or EME (DRM), even though it goes against their mission of supporting the open web. They decided that not supporting these features would kill their market share, relevance and revenue making it hard to support their users in the future.

When Brave made the decision to insert affiliate, they saw it as a way to help with their revenue which helps their mission without hurting privacy too much (they still block more trackers than any other browser in the market including firefox). Still, they rectified this quickly showing that they are not stubborn and are ready to sacrifice revenue for their users. Anyway, it's not easy to balance all this and you will be hard put to find saints that do it all perfectly out there, good luck finding one though.

Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#117

Post by monokh »

pschastain wrote: post #82

Brave Browser continues to behave in ways that are contrary to their stated principles. I dropped the browser a couple of months ago on the heels of the bitcoin affiliate link scandal and went back to Safari and Firefox. I am keeping an eye on Braver Browser, a fork of Brave with the intention of removing the questionable behavior: https://github.com/braver-browser

I've also been keeping an eye on Braver. There was an initial flurry of work that seemed to have gotten it to a decent point but no activity since.

Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#118

Post by giancarlostoro »

edoceo wrote: post #102
giancarlostoro wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or fill it with some AAA Steam games shouldnt take long to fill the whole thing.

I found random source to be slow, so, I made Perl script (in the 90s) - basically writing the same random blob over and over. Two passes with different blobs seemed to do the trick http://edoceo.com/creo/drive-shred

This is also something I've done, just fill a text file, copy it over and over, eventually look for the old files, it's gone, good enough. It sucks laptops dont come with FDE by default.

Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#119

Post by eredengrin »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #67

This is a bug, have you guys seen a software bug before? What is it with the appetite for outrage? Using brave on Android devices and not planning to switch

Yeah any time brave comes up here, you can be assured the pitchforks will be out faster than anyone could load (much less read) the article. Seems people are always ignoring many of the unique ideas that brave brings to the space that I think could be quite important, but you never see those discussed.

Re: Brave Browser, wiping history still leaves trace of visited sites

#120

Post by nix23 »

yaiNua9o wrote: post #96
nix23 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try mothra, the browser for the real 'hackers' ;) http://man.9front.org/1/mothra

Thanks, never heard about it, I'll have a look.

OK now i feel bad, you have to install 9front (it's a plan9 fork) first, then you can use mothra
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