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“Web Environment Integrity”: Locking Down the Web

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

#41

Post by wilsonnb3 »

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…

IMO the best hedges against Googles web monopoly at the moment are Apple and Microsoft, not Mozilla.

Apple because of Safari (duh) and Microsoft because they are possibly the only company that could reasonably maintain a hard Chromium fork in the case of Google going crazy.

Unfortunately all three of them are more or less aligned on this issue of remote attestation so I don't really see a path forward.

Firefox just doesn't have the market share to matter. If everyone had switched to it 10 years ago there might have been a chance but the goose is cooked.

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

#42

Post by orangecat »

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…

Google is not thinking about ad blockers at all here.

The first example in the WEI doc is enforcing that ads are viewed by humans: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...

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

#43

Post by cmgriffing »

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…

Brave is not just a wrapper on top of Chromium. It is actually using a forked version of Chromium. So, it might not be that big of a concern.

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

#44

Post by popcorncowboy »

thewataccount wrote: post #29
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…

> Still excuse after excuse after excuse to just not use Firefox. What happens when Firefox refuses to implement WEI - then start to require it? If WEI becomes a common requirement then Firefox will effectively be forced to implement it or it won't be usable as a web browser at that point for the average consumer

Yeah this gets tricky for Google and Mozilla. Goog need FF (and pay for it) to be around and not be meaningless in terms of market share because anything else and it's hard for big G to keep pretending they don't have a crushingly obvious monopoly. Mozilla need Goog because you know, hundreds of millions of reasons. FF bowing to WEI would be the ultimate capitulation. But as you say, if WEI flies, Moz capitulates or dies.

It's tough for Goog. They're playing the end-game card here. It's tough, because it's the game winner. On the one hand, total and complete domination of the web. On the other.. Kahn's FTC and the pesky EU technocrats shaking those tired old antitrust lawsuits..

I love FF. But if WEI or whatever future version of WEI gets up, FF will join the party or consign itself to eventual irrelevance. "I use FF for the web, except banking, most major corp sites, paid content, and an increasing bunch of other stuff - but those four bloggers who still post plain HTML pages, FF all the way, go indie web!"

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

#45

Post by sedatk »

Melatonic wrote: post #14
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…

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

Firefox is great but I can't make it my daily driver because of two issues:

- Terrible font kerning on canvas (Google Docs, Spreadsheets) (probably a decade old bug)

- Doesn't sync icons in favorites bar (which I use without accompanying text, so, big deal)

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

#46

Post by JohnFen »

pjerem wrote: post #39
JohnFen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Clearly, I do, yes! But I've given up on trying to nail down what the issue actually is after about a year of trying. It exists on all of my machines, so it's likely related to some other piece of software I commonly use. I just don't know which one.

I am not asserting that FF is bad and nobody should use it. I'm asserting that there are some people (at least one, anyway) who can't use it. Shaming people for not using FF is, therefore, uncalled for.

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

#47

Post by mminer237 »

saurik wrote: post #12

It's nice that they are changing their marketing on this a bit now that there is a wave to ride and the evils of DRM are coming for them; but, let's not forgot that, at the end of the day, Brave is just another company that makes money on ads :(, and (thereby) has most of the same anti-user incentives. So, sure... they clearly don't want to be prevented from blocking other peoples' ads (a big part of their pitch); bu…

Blocking Brave's ads is literally three clicks. I don't care if I don't get paid if I block ads. What I don't want is to lose the ability to block ads or to allow websites to block me for using an unapproved system. Google seems to be working for both of those things while I don't see any chance Brave ever allows either.

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

#48

Post by input_sh »

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

...and then you click on that GitHub link and it explains that they fetch the Chromium codebase and then apply a set of patches on top of it. I wouldn't diminish that work by refering to it as just a reskin, but it's also not what I have in mind when I hear about something being forked.

They don't maintain a separate Chromium codebase, nor do they refer to it as a fork anywhere on GitHub. They do refer to it as a customised Chromium, which I think is a far more accurate description:

> Brave Core is a set of changes, APIs, and scripts used for customizing Chromium to make the Brave browser.

I also think of Chrome as a customised Chromium, not a fork of Chromium.

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

#49

Post by jauntywundrkind »

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…

I was trying to paint a broader picture of how we view Google. I think in many cases there is a lot more complexity, and in most cases, we don't see or appreciate a lot of good things that do help us all. blink-dev is generally a pretty great mailing list of good things, in my view.

This comment is a return to what kind of disturbs me, of using a very narrow focus on one specific thing: one specific thing I already said is the very worst shit.

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

#50

Post by gabrielsroka »

postalrat wrote: post #30
geraldwhen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is a political organization, not a web browser developer. I’ll keep using brave.

Brave is a cryptocurrency. No thanks.

I don't see that at all. I've been using Brave for years and nothing to do with crypto. There is a BAT thing, but you can disable it.
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