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“Web Environment Integrity”: Locking Down the Web

brave.com

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Re: “Web Environment Integrity”: Locking Down the Web

#31

Post by kavaruka »

franczesko wrote: post #7
skilled wrote: post #5

Hard to listen to anything from a company that constantly: 1) Doesn’t innovate on anything, social media accounts are plagued with pointing fingers at others while using a Chromium fork themselves, ignorance at its finest. 2) Has been accused of selling copyrighted data for AI training and has not made a public statement. 3) Has a history of making stupid decisions and only apologizing when a big news outlet calls th…

Seems like a biased opinion. Brave and their products innovate a LOT. Browser, (good) search engine, crypto as a way to keep websites profitable, etc.

do you remember when they put (silently) their referral code in crypto exchange websites?

lol, what a great innovation!

Re: “Web Environment Integrity”: Locking Down the Web

#32

Post by benatkin »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #8
benatkin wrote: post #4

"Brave's browsers" distributions of browsers , there ftfy

"We are a fork, have been all along" https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1684561924191842304

> the “reskinned” claim is complete nonsense

With me that's a straw man, I haven't been using the word "reskinned".

The way he mentions Chromium proves my point that it's a distribution of Chromium.

Chrome is a browser because Google has Chromium, and they've chosen Chrome as the name for their distribution of Chromium. But it is also a distribution of Chromium.

Re: “Web Environment Integrity”: Locking Down the Web

#33

Post by jsnell »

sircastor wrote: post #15
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #3

I personally think the upsides of WebBundles are huge. There's nothing that would stop the browser from being able to filter & ignore content coming from in a WebBundle, so I'm not sure what Brave's greivance is here. The adserving topic is complicated as heck, but everyone seems to acknowledge big change is necessary & Google and Firefox both have proposals to radically overhaul the system while enhancing user priva…

I don’t mean to be an apologist here, but Google’s vs Apple’s intention seem crystal clear. Google is trying to make it impossible not to see the ads it’s selling. Apple’s intent seems to be lock down the Apple platform…? I know Apple is blatantly abusive in lots of spaces, but Chrome is a super-majority of the browsers in use. It’s an odd take to spin this into “they started it” finger pointing. The reason Chrome is…

The stated goal of both is the same: to provide a privacy-preserving primitive for anti-abuse. Both explicitly state that the goal is not to exclude competing browsers or operating systems or to limit things like browser features or extensions.

You're just assuming that they're both lying about the motives, and making up the worst possible motives you can think of for each. I think in both cases you're wrong, and the stated goal is the actual goal. (Apple is not looking to lock down their platform with this, and Google is not thinking about ad blockers at all here.)

Their reasons for needing such an anti-abuse primitive are not the same, but the mechanisms are very similar, and the range of attestations they could provide without public opinion or regulatory backlash is probably almost identical.

Re: “Web Environment Integrity”: Locking Down the Web

#34

Post by JohnFen »

mrguyorama wrote: post #10

What is Brave going to do when the code for WEI becomes load bearing in the chromium code base? Still excuse after excuse after excuse to just not use Firefox. I literally don't care if you have to hold up your nose, there's only one actual alternative browser engine, and it's a matter of survival for anyone who doesn't want the whole internet controlled by google. It could be half as fast (it isn't) and use twice as…

Firefox is legitimately not an option for me. It's literally unusably slow. So slow that it's not actually better than no browser at all.

Re: “Web Environment Integrity”: Locking Down the Web

#35

Post by ziftface »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #28
Melatonic wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly modern Firefox works better than Chrome for me at everything - better memory management - faster loading times - better extension support.

On Linux the one area where I feel (nothing scientific) that Chrome is faster is for JavaScript code execution. But I still use Firefox instead of Chrome.

I used to feel that too but not anymore. Now when I boot up chrome to test something I don't notice a difference. I think it's improved quite a bit over the last few years.

Re: “Web Environment Integrity”: Locking Down the Web

#36

Post by alphanullmeric »

hamandcheese wrote: post #27
alphanullmeric wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox on iOS is awful. Basic features like swiping the toolbar to switch tabs are still missing.

Firefox on iOS is not Firefox.

Nor is chrome or brave, yet Firefox is the only one with such a poor experience.

Re: “Web Environment Integrity”: Locking Down the Web

#37

Post by MrAlex94 »

pkulak wrote: post #17
mrguyorama wrote: post #10

What is Brave going to do when the code for WEI becomes load bearing in the chromium code base? Still excuse after excuse after excuse to just not use Firefox. I literally don't care if you have to hold up your nose, there's only one actual alternative browser engine, and it's a matter of survival for anyone who doesn't want the whole internet controlled by google. It could be half as fast (it isn't) and use twice as…

The excuse is always that Gecko is harder to integrate... but at what point is maintaining all these patches harder?

I’ve been maintaining a “soft” fork now for about 12 years now, most of that time on my own. It’s actually possible to get quite involved and do some cool stuff with the changes you make, while keeping up to date; with the resources the size of a company like Brave have, it’d be incredibly straightforward to actually use your own browser logic, with a bit of good engineering. (To all intents and purposes, using Gecko as the engine and your own browser features on top of that, separate to Firefox itself).

I’ve started myself in the past, and am picking that back up again. But by all means it’s quite possible.

Re: “Web Environment Integrity”: Locking Down the Web

#38

Post by ryukafalz »

jsnell wrote: post #33
sircastor wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t mean to be an apologist here, but Google’s vs Apple’s intention seem crystal clear. Google is trying to make it impossible not to see the ads it’s selling. Apple’s intent seems to be lock down the Apple platform…? I know Apple is blatantly abusive in lots of spaces, but Chrome is a super-majority of the browsers in use. It’s an odd take to spin this into “they started it” finger pointing. The reason Chrome is…

The stated goal of both is the same: to provide a privacy-preserving primitive for anti-abuse. Both explicitly state that the goal is not to exclude competing browsers or operating systems or to limit things like browser features or extensions. You're just assuming that they're both lying about the motives, and making up the worst possible motives you can think of for each. I think in both cases you're wrong, and the…

If you're pointing a gun at me, I don't care if you say it's your intention not to shoot.

Whether it's their goal or not to exclude competing/upstart browsers and operating systems, that will be the end result given the content of the proposed standard.

Re: “Web Environment Integrity”: Locking Down the Web

#39

Post by pjerem »

JohnFen wrote: post #34
mrguyorama wrote: post #10

What is Brave going to do when the code for WEI becomes load bearing in the chromium code base? Still excuse after excuse after excuse to just not use Firefox. I literally don't care if you have to hold up your nose, there's only one actual alternative browser engine, and it's a matter of survival for anyone who doesn't want the whole internet controlled by google. It could be half as fast (it isn't) and use twice as…

Firefox is legitimately not an option for me. It's literally unusably slow. So slow that it's not actually better than no browser at all.

You have an issue. Firefox is not slow by any means. I use all the browsers for work and Firefox for my navigation. Firefox have never been slower than anything else.

Re: “Web Environment Integrity”: Locking Down the Web

#40

Post by super256 »

hamandcheese wrote: post #27
alphanullmeric wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox on iOS is awful. Basic features like swiping the toolbar to switch tabs are still missing.

Firefox on iOS is not Firefox.

The engine is not, but the UI still sucks. I read on HN that Mozilla started working on a new iOS browser, since we all expect Apple to open up iOS in this or next year to custom browser engines. I hope they will make this new Firefox for iOS a reason to never touch Safari again (I miss Firefox Sync + Firefox add-ons so much!!)
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