181–190 of 494 posts
Just the fastest and most ergonomic browser I've tried. I wish Firefox was like Brave, to be honest. Until that happens, I'll stick to Brave for both mobile and desktop.
I don't see why anyone would pick Brave over Vivaldi, especially on mobile.
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You mean in not caving to conservative-friendly "free speech" preferences? Its decision to downrank state-sponsored disinformation? One can question the wisdom of these decisions - but ultimately it's a matter of editorial control, not censorship.
> but ultimately it's a matter of editorial control, not censorship. So is all censorship. No censor calls censorship "Censorship". An example from my country of birth: Main Office of Control over the Press, Publications and Performances, since 1981 the Main Office of Control over Publications and Performances - the central office of state censorship in the Polish People's Republic. It was a censorship body (analogou…
https://philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html
It was a good time indeed.
Just started testing Brave Search, and it scored a rare 100 on the first test: If you type in the name of a favorite boutique hotel, will you get that hotel's true website -- or the usual hairball of third-party intermediaries? (For anyone who's ever tried to modify a reservation, the difference is astonishing. If you're booked with the hotel, all kinds of adjustments are at least possible. If you're booked with Book…
Are you counting ads as results? I just put "the 252 boutique hotel" into Google (without quotes) and the first non-ad result is the hotel's own website. It's also first in Brave. And first in Bing. So no difference here. Generally in my experience, I've never had a problem finding a hotel's website via Google.
It's even more difficult when trying to find the official site for a business I'm unfamiliar with.
I would really like to move away from google search, but unfortunately every other engine I tried sucks for localized searching... I get it that I come from small central europe country which is not that interesting market wise but it looks like google is able to provide relevant results while any other engine does not. For example I tried brave to search for watch I'm currently considering buying. When using site:sk…
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I want search, not editorial guidance from a search engine.
It's a search engine's job to rank results; there is no other way to do it: only one link can be in position #1, only one link can be in position #2, etc. Or in other words: "editorial guidance" is pretty much the entirety of a search engine's job: you give it a large set of documents (the internet), some user input (what you typed in the search box), and it ranks – or "editorializes" – the set of documents to someth…
You are basically arguing for a slippery slope argument. Because they already need some editorial control to filter spam and obviously irrelevant material does not mean that every type of filtering/block listing is ok.
I personally totally get how it can be offputting to people if a search engine starts hiding websites while openly saying that they do it for a political reason. Downranking would be fine, but blocking a news source (as bad as RT is at being that) that isn't spammy or playing with SEO is just different.
Yes, I know, everything is political and all. But that's the point! Blocking RT was obviously more so about politics than filtering fake news or trash results.
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Are you counting ads as results? I just put "the 252 boutique hotel" into Google (without quotes) and the first non-ad result is the hotel's own website. It's also first in Brave. And first in Bing. So no difference here. Generally in my experience, I've never had a problem finding a hotel's website via Google.
The ads can take up more than an entire display, requiring scrolling down a full screen of content before finding the official site. It's even more difficult when trying to find the official site for a business I'm unfamiliar with.
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I always buy directly from the hotel assuming that I will be treated better due to the hotel earning more money from me due to not having to pay commission to a travel agent. Also, I assume there is less probability of errors since when you reserve on a travel agent website, your reservation goes through an additional system before it gets to the hotel.
> I always buy directly from the hotel assuming that I will be treated better due to the hotel earning more money from me due to not having to pay commission to a travel agent. I have never found this to be true unfortunately. I have some conference related travel coming up, and the conference made some deal with Hilton for a special rate. Hilton's link wouldn't work, and I made 5 calls trying to get them to offer a…
Lifetime Platinum Marriott member here.
The special treatment is OK. It is nice to get room upgrades and freebies, but that's little stuff. It doesn't get you a room magically when they are sold out, and you don't magically get a better rate when prices are high.
The biggest benefit if you're traveling a lot is your points accrual rate is higher with status, which lets you more rapidly exchange points for things. The only sane way to spend points of course, is more hotel stays. Nothing else comes close value-wise. I recall running the numbers on that (points/dollar ratio), and you'd be a brazen fool to spend points on merchandise - when you compare the ratio of hotel stays to merchandise point cost, you realize that they have a 3-4x markup on the merchandise.
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That's pretty much how all small search engines work, but with varying backing indexes. Kagi's value-add is Google quality index (since they literally pay for it), no ads, their ranking algorithm, and tools to control the results that Google doesn't give you like blacklists and your own weights. $25/mo is unfortunately a little steep because their lower priced option with 700 searches/month is comically small. On jus…
I have the early adopter professional plan, but I must admit that while I consider myself very much a power user I have never been close to even 700 searches a month.
To me, the 700 soft limit seems absurd so I'm curious to hear how you interact with the product.
I average 50-100 searches per work day and 10-20 searcher per off day (totalling 1-2.5k per month). But I don't feel I'm using search in a particularly strange way.
For example, if I need to know how the new WidgetBean in SpringBoot works I'll usually end up making ~10 queries related to it before I move on to a new area of research.
E.g., I'll search "SpringBoot WidgetBean release notes" then "SpringBoot WidgetBean examples" or "WidgetBean test double", "WidgetBean in MockMvc test", "WidgetBean PowerMock known issues in MockMvc test", "WidgetBean FooService interation in MockMvc test SpringBoot 3".
Essentially, when I'm searching I go wide to survey the information landscape, then refine my search term as I discover what I actually need to know
This quickly balloons as I'm expected to know many things at $dayjob :)
What does it look like when you search?
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The Mozilla CEO is to blame for the chaos they caused around Firefox, and them losing market share to Chrome for the past 14 years. Mozilla is so dysfunctional that the CEO is rewarded a massive bonus for running the company to the ground and laying off their employees. They are not interested in competing against Chrome; instead they are chronically dependent on Google's money and on life support, making over 80% of…
Firefox usage is abysmal on Desktop (from the Cloudflare usage stats which doesn't depend on JavaScript being enabled) and practically inexistent on mobile. My tech friends gave up, and normal users just use the defaults: Edge (which is good enough for them), Safari or whatever browser default browser comes with their smartphone. Mozilla needs to figure out how to attract new users, and focus.
1. One example would be Cloudflare. Because some folks see SNI as a privacy concern, Cloudflare used to offer ESNI which was a way to encrypt SNI. It has since been discontinued while we wait for ECH. Some HN commenters will often try to argue that SNI is irrelevant to users without offering any evidence to support. Watch for it. For example, China found SNI was relevant enough to block ESNI. Apparently, China found it preferable to use SNI than to use only IP addresses, which of course are easy for websites to change. Go figure.
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/Dae-cukKMqfzmTT4Ks...
SNI can be used for censorship purposes, among other things. Many search engines work without SNI. But not Brave.
NB. As I understand it, these browsers do not allow the user to enable/disable SNI on a per site basis; in some of them it is not even possible to disable SNI at all.^2 TLS might enable the user to hide web pages from the proverbial "MITM", but with SNI enabled it will not allow them to hide web sites.
2. Thus, even when Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, GigaBlast, Qwant, Mojeek, etc., and millions of other websites do not require the user to send SNI in order to return SERPs or other pages, these browsers send it anyway. Brilliant.
3. SNI is different than DNS. DNS lookups can be done at a different time from when a user connects, if the user ever does connect. (Popular browsers are not good for this, of course.) Unlike DNS, SNI proves the user actually connected. Strangely, much effort has gone into encrypting DNS, while SNI, and to some extent TLS prior to version 1.3, leaks these same domain names on the wire, unencrypted.