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Goodbye Brave

arunmozhi.in

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Re: Goodbye Brave

#81

Post by rmbyrro »

echelon wrote: post #72
weq wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to firefox after NEVER using it before when google started forcefully logging me in. Honestly, i havnt missed it all. Firefox on mobile is awesome - plugins work! Plus, no longer does google know where i am anymore. Its ability to track and suggest ads to me is pathetic.

My one gripe about Firefox mobile is that "pull down to refresh" and other common gestures don't work. Unless I'm missing something, there aren't settings available to enable this. Is this some kind of patented behavior that Mozilla is afraid to implement?

That we have to worry whether "pull down" is patented shows how far the patent system is from fulfilling its promise.

Re: Goodbye Brave

#82

Post by cmeacham98 »

whakim wrote: post #68
cmeacham98 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but AB+'s acceptable ads program does not whitelist "acceptable ads", it whitelists "acceptable ads who have paid AB+ 30% of their ad revenue". Bonus points for the obvious conflict of interest of AB+ privately determining what "acceptable" means (where remember, if they say yes they make money). AB+ "acceptable ads" exists to solicit bribes from websites to display their ads.

I'm not directly disputing what you're saying, just wanted to point out for context that (1) you have to reach some threshold before you have to start paying AB+ to whitelist you (I don't know much about the business of advertising so unclear how high a bar this is to clear); (2) technically an independent entity gets to determine what's "acceptable" (I don't know how independent it actually is in practice). > AB+ "a…

> you have to reach some threshold before you have to start paying AB+ to whitelist you

Irrelevant. I (and 99% of other users) spend the majority of my time on the internet on websites large enough to meet the threshold.

> technically an independent entity gets to determine what's "acceptable"

Skimming the first page of that "independent" committee's bylaws: they self describe as being "hosted by eeyeo" (the developer of AB+).

> So even if you find the model icky, it's also "improving" the overall quality of ads (i.e. making them less intrusive/obnoxious/annoying)?

I don't care about via what mechanism advertisers improve their ads - that is their job to worry about not mine.

> what do you think is a better way of defining acceptable ad standards

I, the user, choose what is acceptable in my browser, not a for-profit company that benefits from bribes to whitelist ads. Believe it or not I do whitelist some websites with what I consider acceptable ads, but I do not and will never use an ad whitelist.

> generating enough revenue as an organization to build/maintain ad whitelists

Ad whitelists that generate revenue essentially always have a conflict of interest.

Web advertising's abysmal reputation isn't some freak accident. Websites and advertisers should work together to create actually acceptable ads rather than trying to bribe adblockers and hope users don't notice.

Re: Goodbye Brave

#83

Post by donkarma »

keyle wrote: post #18

It's so bad lately that I'm working on my own web browser in my free time (off WebKit, won't be big, or public and will be a pile of hacks) but at least I won't rely on this mess.

what are you doing in terms of javascript?

Re: Goodbye Brave

#84

Post by aero-glide2 »

bbbobbb wrote: post #74

Brave is the only browser on my iPad that blocks majority of ads. I have went as far as try to pay for ad blockers in the app store (this is my first and last apple device so it is a weird concept for me). If I could just install unblock origin or find system wide adblocker then I would use that instead

Does iPad have something similar to DNS66?

Re: Goodbye Brave

#85

Post by o_m »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #3

The thing I don't understand about Brave users is that they are essentially using Chromium with a bunch of extra bloat added. Wouldn't it make more sense to just use Chromium with the extensions that you want and need?

Last time I tried it, Chromium didn't support video

Re: Goodbye Brave

#86

Post by kaba0 »

whakim wrote: post #68
cmeacham98 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but AB+'s acceptable ads program does not whitelist "acceptable ads", it whitelists "acceptable ads who have paid AB+ 30% of their ad revenue". Bonus points for the obvious conflict of interest of AB+ privately determining what "acceptable" means (where remember, if they say yes they make money). AB+ "acceptable ads" exists to solicit bribes from websites to display their ads.

I'm not directly disputing what you're saying, just wanted to point out for context that (1) you have to reach some threshold before you have to start paying AB+ to whitelist you (I don't know much about the business of advertising so unclear how high a bar this is to clear); (2) technically an independent entity gets to determine what's "acceptable" (I don't know how independent it actually is in practice). > AB+ "a…

Just whitelist some pages that reasonably uses ads with ublock origin. Putting a profit-seeking entity into the picture is not a good idea.

Re: Goodbye Brave

#87

Post by fastball »

systemvoltage wrote: post #48
invalidname wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is truly amazing today. I keep a chrome instance for Google docs which seems to work better there, the rest I do in FF which is better for everything else...

I just tried Chrome after jumping on FireFox bandwagon 2 years ago and honestly, I was not impressed. Chrome feels “jittery” while Firefox feels “snappy”. It’s the way a page loads. Hard to describe. Firefox is the top choice for me. I recommend it properly and not just for the sake of supporting Firefox. That said, please support Firefox. We should not be allowing Big Tech behemoths from taking away the window into…

I have the opposite experience. Any non-chromium (i.e. non-V8) browser feels sluggish on JS-heavy workloads.

Re: Goodbye Brave

#88

Post by rmbyrro »

growt wrote: post #61

For me brave mobile was the only usable browser on android because it has a bottom tab bar. I don’t know why chrome itself ditched it, does nobody at Google have a >6 inch phone? Then I discovered edge on android and it is really good (if you can live with the fact that it is from Microsoft). Now I switched to iOS and safari has bottom navigation by default.

Microsoft has changed a lot. They should probably have changed their name, at least for dev-related stuff. I think maybe you have a 1990's era Microsoft view?

Re: Goodbye Brave

#89

Post by kaba0 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #20
sombremesa wrote: post #4

Weird that this person doesn’t even consider Firefox, the only browser that lets you have Adblock and other addons on mobile (but not on iOS, sadly).

Does firefox let you install extensions without contacting Mozilla servers? I'm not sure how the extension signing works, but it may fail the same reason they're leaving Brave.

Who cares? Also, you can manually download and install an extension if that is truly killing off your privacy.

Re: Goodbye Brave

#90

Post by fhd2 »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #6

Hi author, if you're here on HN please consider ditching sketchy extensions like Ghostery (sells your user data) and Adblock+ (participates in paid bypass of "acceptable ads" program) for the open-source and user-focused uBlock Origin ( https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock ). Also, if you haven't tried Firefox since the quantum days come back and give it another try.

Another point for Firefox over all the other Chromium based ones: Chromium is actively working on stifling extensions, especially ad and tracking blockers, dubiously so in the name of privacy and security of all things: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/intro/ (primarily the deprecation of webRequest in favour of the severely, deliberately limited declarativeNetRequest).

While I suppose Brave with its integrated ad blocking is going to keep it working, I believe it will be wildly unsustainable for Chromium based browsers to keep the V2 APIs for extensions amidst the torrent of upstream changes coming from Chromium. So the only functioning blockers these browsers are probably going to have are built in ones - and only if they care enough.

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