Live data from Hacker News

Goodbye Brave

arunmozhi.in

131–140 of 252 posts

Re: Goodbye Brave

#131

Everyone wants to talk the respective merits of Brave vs Firefox vs ____, but I just want to talk about how the post itself is dumb. You're installing an extension from a web store. Of course it doesn't work if there is a problem with the backend servers. Where do you expect to get the extension from?

Must admit this was my question as well. It seemed from the post that the browser was still working but the extensions couldn't be installed. Not ideal but seems like a weird response.

Is the point that there should be a separate source of extension packages or something?

Re: Goodbye Brave

#132
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a surprise to me, but there is a group of people - possibly native to tech circles, possibly a broader group - who appear to be genuinely angry about the existence of advertising as a thing. Let alone if they personally have to view ads. It is a bit confusing to be honest. There seems to be something very upsetting happening but exactly what is causing that response I can't pick out.

Yea this confuses me too. Many advertisements have made me aware of things that I would be interested in but didn't know about. Marketing and advertising can be valuable to those on the receiving end.

They could have been, but there's too much abuse going on in the advertising space. In regards of online advertising: it's distracting, manipulative, infringes privacy and wastes bandwidth. Online life without ads is like going out to a park, out of the city center. You just can't believe how noisy it was before.

Re: Goodbye Brave

#133
Hah, article lists exactly two options I would suggest - Chromium and Vivaldi, I just switched last week from Edge to Vivaldi. Tried for a moment Brave, but immediately ditched it since you can't even customize address bar or toolbar.

Switched to Edge maybe last year after years with Firefox, but I was fed up with its hostile developers, who care more about their nerdy features than actually what users want, which is why Firefox declined into irrelevance.

edit: also get Kiwi Browser if you are using Android, the best Android browser, one of very few Chromium browsers with proper extensions support

Re: Goodbye Brave

#134

All these posts mentioning Firefox. If anyone has read HN for any length of time, then you’ll know all the shady stuff Mozilla/Firefox has done. And not just hand waving “crypto” stuff that Brave gets accused of doing, but truly slimeball stuff. Firefox and Normandy, when the certificate expired, it also disabled NoScript in the Tor browser which disabled some security. Might not be a coincidence in the attempt to ex…

A certificate expiration to disable tor browser is some serious tinfoil hat stuff. Certificate duration is usually extremely long, so they would have to have been in some long-con with an intelligence agency or something.

I haven't noticed their start page because I always disable it, but if they have some sort of news feeds on it then anyone nowadays would call it something or other.

A company that claims to support privacy launching a VPN service to support their development? Yeah so shady, they should have started a marketing company instead like Chrome! /s

Re: Goodbye Brave

#135
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they're being hosted on Mozilla's servers so no but FF doesn't in any way require a connection to Mozilla's servers to function.

You can host extension on your own server. Fireox will display a security warning when you try to install them, but that is it.

It doesn't, depending on your definition. You get them to sign it (given the speed - 5-10 minutes for a medium sized extension - it seems automated) and then when they click to download the signed xpi file it prompts them to install, saying "[domain] would like to install [extension name]." This is the same prompt you get in the official Mozilla addons site.

Re: Goodbye Brave

#136
Somehow all these browsers doesn't appeal as much as Mozilla/FF, since beginning. Never made a switch. If i were forced to use GOOG/MSFT stuff, just use it once and uninstall has been the pattern. Never looked back.

Re: Goodbye Brave

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is less secure, as has been said many times here already. You might dislike the Blink hegemony but they're the only ones who invest enough in security. Vivaldi's closed source, and Firefox doesn't have site isolation on all platforms yet. (Neither does Safari). Chrome had it in 2018. 3 years is not excusable when a 0day can be the difference between freedom and jail (or worse). "Privacy" is defective when you…

Can you cite one real-world example of someone who's been infected using Firefox in newer times? The link you're referencing talks about NT kernel syscalls - if the computer is already infected it doesn't matter what browser is being used. If one is a high-value target for a nation state or something of that caliber I would agree with you - but that doesn't apply to regular users. Atleast to my knowledge. Another cou…

> Can you cite one real-world example of someone who's been infected using Firefox in newer times?

Coinbase was, and that wasn't long ago. If I were a sysadmin I'd blacklist Firefox from all my machines, no matter how I feel about the open web, about Mozilla or their mission statement, it's not a reasonable risk to take.

> Another counter-argument here is that people looking for vulnerabilities would much rather spend their time looking for chrome exploits than firefox exploits (because of market share), no?

People look for both. Firefox is a much higher value target to governments than Chrome, because that's what Tor Browser is.

Tor is Firefox ESR, which only has big security fixes backported; other security flaws remain in Firefox ESR for much longer. But beyond that, the security fundamentals were never a part of the original Firefox project like they were for Chrome, and it still isn't. 13 years later, Chrome's still making faster progress with exploit mitigation than Firefox, and Firefox is the one that needed catching up. There's a reason why GrapheneOS, which people here trust, don't use Firefox. Check their website for a great readup[0].

On Zerodium, Chrome RCE+LPE goes for $500k, Firefox and Safari. People will argue that's marketshare, but get any exploit mitigation researcher in here and they'll tell you Firefox (and Safari) are fundamentally less secure than Chrome. Price isn't just determined by demand (by governments), it's supply too.

I understand the "cyberpunk" love for Firefox, they're the good guys fighting big G. But that doesn't change what their codebase is.

[0]: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

Re: Goodbye Brave

#138
post #42
post #5

I think this is due to Brave proxying some Google requests through their own servers, because otherwise the same people would complain that a Google server is being contacted. > I am thinking of going back to [Chromium] with the usual extensions like Ghostery, AdBlock+ > [Brave's] amazing ad-blocking and tracker protection If you just need an adblocker, sure. At this point everone should have heard of uBlock Origin.

Unfortunately I still see too many people use Adblock plus and the like which leads me to believe ublock origin lacks some sort of name or brand recognition with your average user

ABP just works better. I've tried uBlock a couple times and always had more problems with it.

Re: Goodbye Brave

#139

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).

Kiwi Browser has extensions on Android and not just few cherrypicked liked Firefox, whole design of Firefox on mobile is just horrible

Re: Goodbye Brave

#140

Everyone wants to talk the respective merits of Brave vs Firefox vs ____, but I just want to talk about how the post itself is dumb. You're installing an extension from a web store. Of course it doesn't work if there is a problem with the backend servers. Where do you expect to get the extension from?

installation doesn't work because of Brave servers, not because of extensions web store, completely unrelated, or at least it should be unrelated in normal browser
Post reply on HN