Content creators are strong armed into becoming verified publishers, while users have to trust Brave that their data is handled properly and carefully.
Brave is the only hope I see for a strictly "privacy-by-default" browser, which is not powered by an ad-based business model. Brendan Eich isn't a dumbell, he knows what is wrong with broswer-based privacy and what needs fixing.
PS: I use Brave on Android and the experience has been better than Chrome.
Layer 1: Blocking everything that is not helpful for the user (i.e. being a browser that is a user-agent first and foremost), thus doing essentially the same as content-blocking extensions or other content-blocking browsers (Opera mini, UC)
In this way, there is nothing to be outraged about, since this is a reaction to a complete lack of respect for human dignity and the state of the web on the side of the publishers. The only thing that is parasitic are the ad-networks that pray on vulnerable people. It is easy to overlook that for years browsers have ignored the user so that many gullible people nowadays think that this is how things are supposed to be, but just like ad-tech, users can lobby against the state of things with chosing their software.
Layer 2: Allowing privacy-friendly ads, as opt-in, to help publishers get money and get free from the parasitic ad-networks at the same time
Layer 3: A future-proof patreon like payment network to help publishers survive the ad-backlash, and connect readers and publishers on a new, voluntary, respectful level while also being privacy-friendly.
Honestly I can't see how anything of this is problematic for anyone, except for Brave's rivals (Google, Facebook, Criteo, etc.)
> is not driven by ads
Pretty dishonest to say "not driven by ads."
Besides if I REALLY wanted to I could run one of the GPL forks of Firefox. They may be dated after a while but they work usually.
Edit: I meant to say GNU forks like IceWeasel and GNU IceCat which are licensed as GPL usually. There's other forks too.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_...
and
What's the alternative to Brave's model? I personally will keep using Firefox with an adblocker and publishers will get nothing.
Can you elaborate more?
That's the short version.
It's pitched as a way to allow people like me who won't browse without an adblocker a way to contribute to sites we like.
I had an issue where my firefox browser was great, but the other apps on my phone were extremely noisy with ad networks. This would compliment an ad blocked Brave/Firefox browser nicely.
Why do you think this? What have we done to give you this impression? Our primary focus is to protect the user's rights online, and to create a sustainable experience for content creators.
On android it is essentially identical to Chrome in every way apart from the Brave icon next to the address bar that controls the blocking.
I really like it.
I tried the desktop version though and did not like the look and feel of the UI - tabs under the address bar etc. Felt like it was a slavish copy of Safari and I did not like it. Much prefer Firefox on desktop.
I have also learnt of Brave's plans to replace a sites ads with its own ads which I do not like. Will move off of Brave on mobile when Firefox is workable on android (last time I tried it was awful, clunky and slow on android).
Try https://brave.com/download-dev for better desktop browser that is coming to stable very soon. Almost all chromium extensions work - any using Google accounts/sync do not.
Also (to anyone who doesn't know) you can install Firefox addons on Firefox mobile, so uBlock Origin works (can personally confirm it) to block ads.
My browser is for reading docs, for JS/WASM development, and the occasional Gmail or HN visit, so maybe I'm not their target market.
BTW, chromium bloat rep in part comes from Chrome not blocking ads and tracking well. Extensions must use JS and so use more memory. Brave uses C++ in the network threads of the browser process.
[0] https://basicattentiontoken.org/BasicAttentionTokenWhitePape...
Firefox offers various privacy features (check about:config), but they're opt-in and typically have a bar to entry for users to be willing to change settings and know what they will do.
Mozilla might claim to care about privacy, but by not clamping down on third party content and referers, it left most of its userbase in the position of having their privacy invaded by default when using their product. If you care about privacy you fix that, they didn't.
much smoother scrolling
EDIT: Tried just now. Pinch-to-zoom works fine on HN.
Otherwise, I could say links is a superior browser because it loads pages even faster than Brave.
BTW, the rampant inefficiency and bugginess of ads is what prompted me to install first AdBlock and then Brave in the first place. I have no problem with viewing ads or supporting content publishers; I do have a problem when the sheer weight of all the ads and trackers they include on their page means I'm waiting 10+ seconds for the page to load and there's a good chance of it locking up entirely. If the damn ad networks would just follow best practices regarding efficient & robust JS serving I wouldn't block them, but they don't, so I do.
See https://medium.com/@robleathern/carriers-are-making-more-fro... and https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost... for more information.
I’m not familiar with Vivaldi, but DDG has a different business model because it’s self imposed limitations on user data that has privacy sensitivity.
And Brave is quite different as it eschews ads altogether and rather uses its Basic Attention Token for users to directly find sites and take a cut [0]. This method requires no user data and is really different that Chrome that requires extensive user personal data to maintain its desired profit margins.
* DDG is a search engine that doesn't track its users. It kinda sorta emulates Google's look-and-feel, but so does Bing and Wolfram Alpha and search.yahoo.com and everyone else.
* Vivaldi is yet another Chromium-based browser, for the microscopic niche of Opera fans who feel that Opera "went mainstream". If it's parasitic to base a browser on Chromium, then Chrome itself is a parasite for forking off KDE's WebKit.
Are you arguing that using privacy concerns as a marketing tool, to compete for a slice of Google's monopoly, makes one a "parasite"? Because not only is that a poor argument in the abstract, it doesn't even apply as Vivaldi doesn't really promote itself on privacy grounds.
I think that they will tend to behave better as small companies. Most large companies started off as small companies doing good things. But you should probably accept that if they become dominant players, you will have to jump ship again at some point.
I don't know about "paranoia". Google, Facebook, etc. can gather a lot of information and perform very sophisticated analysis on it, and aside from what we know they do with it, they can accidentally leak it, get compromised, or just flat-out get more evil in what they can and will do with it as time goes on.
Users' right to block is well supported by web standards and case law. Adding a separate, direct to creator funding option is not parasitism, it is found money for creators.
To see someone here call our opt-in (meaning that each user consents without duress) anonymous micro-contributions and (coming up fast) private ads model layered on top such a name tells me that person has confused host and parasite, or is working for one of the parasites.
It was never a given that your browser should become a blind and passive servant to surveillance super-companies either wholly or partly dependent on ads, but such companies did capture arguably 3 of the top 4 browsers.
Now is the time for users to push back, whether by Brave if you like it, a blocker such as uBO on a browser that doesn't track you by default (perhaps when "logged in"; whatever), or another method that works for you. I hope those who have not yet will give Brave a try. https://brave.com/download-dev for the chromium-extensions-ready new version.
True, but replacing ads you don't get compensated for with ads you do, is.
No point repeating something you heard a while ago from the NAA when they wrote a "Cease and Desist" letter to us that did not contain those words (because we weren't doing anything to cease or desist). All our opt-in models require consent.
User-private ads go in user-owned channels (notifications and tabs), not in publisher inventory, if the user opts in. User gets 70%.
I think it works like this: (1) Brave Browser submits its transactions to a Brave server to exchange a BAT for an Anonize ballot (anonize.org), (2) each ballot has the name of a site you visited randomly added by the browser with probability proportional to the frequency of site visits, and (3) the ballots are sent to a Brave server. Key here is that the token and ballot submissions are sent directly (e.g. not through a proxy or Tor). In addition, I believe the ballots may be submitted as a batch (i.e. at one point in time). Therefore, it is easy for Brave to see your votes for your visited websites, all coming at once, all from your IP address. That IP address may well be the same one used to exchange the BAT for ballots as well.
There are additional problems regarding visits to unusual and identifying websites that I feel like Brave hasn't begun to consider, either. Suppose that every and only time that Brave receives a ballot for your personal website, they also receive a ballot for some unpopular and sensitive website. They can then conclude that the owner of the website also visits that sensitive site.
These problems must be addressed before Brave can be considered seriously by privacy-conscious users.
We use ANONIZE2 based on https://anonize.org/ to blind ourselves to your history. Can’t be evil > Don’t be evil. We see only zero-knowledge proofs that say how many votes go to sites or YouTube or Twitch accounts. These proofs do not link to user id or to ine another (so no fingerprint by clustering). They go over an IP address masking service to our accounting server, while your monthly budget goes in a single token transaction.
Note Google and other ad tech powers do track your history. Logging into Chrome even gives your history over for ad targeting. Blendle, Flattrplus, other such services also see your history. But we do not.
Why is this required?
oh, and it removes site ads and inserts it’s own. then it holds the forums hostage to get into its own ads model.
To your second part, I won't be doing any of that ad replacement (consent or not, just like I don't with my Chromium-based browser with native ad blocking).
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Brave.com&sort=byDate&dateRang...
However, I think a fundamental issue arises if you are going to pay people to see ads: What if someone forks Brave, and creates a browser which blocks all Brave ads, while pretending to click on them?
Neither of the two solutions I can think of are pleasant ones: you either need to somehow verify that that ads are viewed by a human (i.e. CAPTCHAs), or use DRM-like mechanisms to hide a token in Brave’s brinary, so that only “honest” browsers can get paid.
What Brave offers that's far better than today's joke of an antifraud system for ads is as follows: 1/ integrity-checked open source native code, which cannot be fooled by other JS on page; 2/ looking at all the sensors, even the ones without web APIs, to check humanity.
(1) requires SGX or ARM equivalent, widespread on mobile. JS by contrast cannot be sure of anything unless the antifraud script knows it runs first, and publishers cannot guarantee this in general or easily.
(2) is a material advantage over JS, which has only some but not all sensor APIs.
For more on the joke of antifraud adtech today, please see https://www.slideshare.net/augustinefou/state-of-digital-ad-... and https://twitter.com/acfou's other work.
How is this appealing?
The privacy things also really disturbs me.
I don't mind seeing an ad and you getting paid for it when I read the latest changes to the HPV guidance from the FDA for example, but I don't want multiple evil places like "addthis" "add-to-'any" and the likes to be creating some kind of profile and selling it.
The newspaper ads did not tell others that I read the "whatever article" in the paper.
I also can not stand moving ads. SO many really good articles are ruined by animated gifs/mp4s jumping for attention. It saddens me, and likely the authors of really good long form articles, I think from the Atlantic and NYTImes recently I was taken out of the feeling and captivating moments of articles to look at the moving distractions next to them many times.
This not only made articles take twice as long to read, but made them much less impactful, and harder to remember.
These are some of the reasons I posted a while back (http://www.ideasandwritings.com/2016/adblock-into-fairblock/ ) the desire to have an ad-blocker with some 2 way communication so I could have settings that block all third party ads, and moving ads, but would gladly accept static self served ads from sites that had reasonable privacy policies.
I would take it further and offer up some extra data points to those ads the were guaranteed secure so you could make more money and "i could get awesome ads relative to me" - I imagine many others would be happy to offer city, sex, and age for example, if privacy was controlled by "reputable publisher on list here" for example.
For these reasons I seriously applaud this project. It's not perfect, but it seems to be the closest to what I wrote about some time ago - and I think it's a huge jump in the right direction.
I applaud all the attempts, ad blockers, micro payments, different models for payments and attention - lets try everything and find what works for different people.
So glad to see publishers jumping on board to get some ad revenue from those who would choose to block privacy stealing, possible malware sending ads. Now if we can fine tune it a bit more I'd love to see some back and forth discussion between my browser and the ad server. (no alcohol ads, yes to tech, static only please, male, etc)
Heck I might actually click and buy to support more if the ads get better, not just more attention stealing which seems to be the race to the outrageous that clickbait and such is going.
Maybe this will start to force some changes.
If the page author writes <body id="ads"> ... , normal browsers will show you the content of the <body>, while Brave will show you nothing (in 0.001 seconds) :D
Personally, I think that using browsers, which add / remove / rewrite (i.e. censor) the web content for you, is quite dangerous. If it rewrites the Google Search results once in a while, or rewrites some part of the news, you would not even notice.