61–70 of 95 posts
Anyone using Brave? Would love to hear your impressions.
Love it for casual browsing (I use the anonimity by default) and am happy to be greeted by the "Hey you are a first time visitor of our site, please accept the cookies" every single time I visit a site (yes, I close the browser after browsing).
I like the mostly adfree experience.
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Muon was a fork of electron, which included many patches for features required for a variety of desktop apps. The amount of packages ensures that it takes time to upgrade to new chromium releases (regression testing with the patches). Since brave is just a browser, it does not need all of those extra patches and features. So it is simpler and easier to just roll with chromium directly.
Why was the fork necessary? Is the electron project hostile to changes?
It works fine for their intended userbase. For a browser that might be an issue due to exploits and vulnerabilities.
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> I ideologically refuse to consider that every piece of software is a product. 1. Who pays for the hosting? How do they pay for it? 2. Who pays for the site development? How do they pay for it? 3. Who pays for the site content? How do they pay for it? The vast majority of sites out there are commercial products, in some forms or another. Even Wikipedia is, they're periodically begging for money. Since we have this p…
Software is not only web sites/applications. In that very same application domain there are pieces of software like the Apache http server. AFAIK the Apache Foundation is founded by donations. Is httpd a product? They're not selling it and apparently they don't sell data about its users.
There's the ad model, which people don't like, the subscription model, which almost no one uses (it's used successfully for webapps, but not by websites, there's maybe 10 or 20 successful subscription based sites in the billions of sites out there).
What else is there that doesn't involve somehow turning the browser into a product?
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>Ideally the browser is the product I disagree. I don't have anything against paid software but it's not the only possibility, a lot of the software I use are open source projects maintained by volunteers, not products. I ideologically refuse to consider that every piece of software is a product. Now regarding Firefox things are not really clear cut, Mozilla is effectively non-profit but clearly their well being (and…
> I ideologically refuse to consider that every piece of software is a product. 1. Who pays for the hosting? How do they pay for it? 2. Who pays for the site development? How do they pay for it? 3. Who pays for the site content? How do they pay for it? The vast majority of sites out there are commercial products, in some forms or another. Even Wikipedia is, they're periodically begging for money. Since we have this p…
Regardless, hosting is a separate issue. You have open source projects who provide a piece of software that you're free to host yourself or pay somebody else to host for you. See for instance the Roundcube webmail.
It's similar to how I need to buy a computer to be able to run Emacs, that doesn't mean that Emacs itself is a product. Of course many web services are actual products and you pay for both the development and the hosting.
Here we're talking about a web browser though so the point is moot anyway.
I love the irony in “You are not a product“ from a commercial product (open source, I know) designed to monetize surfing (aka pay-to-surf), as if this is what the internet is about. I think we should resist such an effort and stick with projects (not companies) that want to keep the internet as it was meant to be, ie Mozilla Firefox. No problem with monetization but I want a browser that puts me first, not a middlema…
Maybe it's just me but why do we have to make the web about other people making money? In the 90s there were plenty of websites ran by hobbyists and amateurs and even professionals who did it for the joy of their craft and even today there are loads. Maybe I am being overly harsh but are we saying that a browser like Brave is required these days? I don't think the web would be worse-off if all commercial sites disapp…
It's not like the web/society consists of one collectivist "blob" that speaks in unison.
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> Firefox makes you the product, because Mozilla monetizes you with selling you to Google That's hyperbole. Firefox was the first browser that made switching search engines or dealing with multiple search engines easy. Firefox was also the first to have usable add-ons for blocking invasive ads and trackers, always promoted as the best add-ons in their addons.mozilla.org. The pro-privacy culture has basically grown on…
What would Google do if Mozilla blocks all ads browser wide by default? (Which they can't do adhoc because it is probably explitically forbidden in their contract with Google) The answer will give you a clue about the question who is the product. Irregardless of semantics, Mozilla is entirely dependent on the privacy invading ad system. Everyone knows that default settings matter, as around 80% of users never change…
Just a few things:
1. Mozilla did explore this a number of years ago, concluded that
a. if you block all ads, you break the revenue of pretty much the entire web, so that's probably not something you want;
b. if you block all ads, you break loading of many websites, and that's not something an established browser can afford to do;
c. if you do either, websites are just going to block your browser;
Also, to answer your specific question, Google pre-emptively reacted against any attempt of Mozilla by launching Chrome. If you recall, they launched Chrome pretty much because they could not buy Mozilla.
> Irregardless of semantics, Mozilla is entirely dependent on the privacy invading ad system.
While we live in a world where ads = privacy invasion, this doesn't have to be the case. If you look at recent versions of Firefox and ongoing projects, Mozilla has stepped up on privacy protection and keeps doing so.
Again, it's hard to do without breaking the web. But some can be done, one step at a time, and Mozilla is working on it.
> Everyone knows that default settings matter, as around 80% of users never change much in their browsers, and it is this majority user base which forms the foundation for the contracts between browser makers and search engines.
True.
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Software is not only web sites/applications. In that very same application domain there are pieces of software like the Apache http server. AFAIK the Apache Foundation is founded by donations. Is httpd a product? They're not selling it and apparently they don't sell data about its users.
Ok, but my questions haven't been answered: how do we pay for websites? There's the ad model, which people don't like, the subscription model, which almost no one uses (it's used successfully for webapps, but not by websites, there's maybe 10 or 20 successful subscription based sites in the billions of sites out there). What else is there that doesn't involve somehow turning the browser into a product?
Well in the case of Brave that might not be completely true because they have this whole agenda regarding ads but that's specific to this particular browser, not a fundamental aspect of web browsing technology. ELinks is not a product because you can use it to view ads for instance.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
I agree Mozilla is a corporation, despite its marketing and brand efforts, everything else is very corporate. It started out as a foundation with corporation-as-necessity, but no longer the case. They are able to distance themselves from ad money through Google, but it's the same. If they could make more profit and growth, they would choose to do so. A small example has twice been ads in the browser (now using local…
Going Duck Duck Go by default would mean firing pretty much all the developers and letting Google win. Do you think it would be a good strategy?
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Ok, but my questions haven't been answered: how do we pay for websites? There's the ad model, which people don't like, the subscription model, which almost no one uses (it's used successfully for webapps, but not by websites, there's maybe 10 or 20 successful subscription based sites in the billions of sites out there). What else is there that doesn't involve somehow turning the browser into a product?
Putting ads in your websites doesn't turn your browser into a product any more than putting ad into a PDF turns your PDF reader into a product or getting robocall turn your phone into (more of) a product. That's completely orthogonal. Well in the case of Brave that might not be completely true because they have this whole agenda regarding ads but that's specific to this particular browser, not a fundamental aspect of…
We need to turn this whole ecosystem on its head. How do we do that? I'd rather have the browser manage payments to the sites I use based on some usage statistics, but in this case, we still need some sort of payment system, probably centralized. It might not be turning the actual browser into a product, but it does make it put it awfully close to one.
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I agree Mozilla is a corporation, despite its marketing and brand efforts, everything else is very corporate. It started out as a foundation with corporation-as-necessity, but no longer the case. They are able to distance themselves from ad money through Google, but it's the same. If they could make more profit and growth, they would choose to do so. A small example has twice been ads in the browser (now using local…
Well, even foundations need to survive. Going Duck Duck Go by default would mean firing pretty much all the developers and letting Google win. Do you think it would be a good strategy?