What... Is the appeal of brave ? I hear it has crypto and shit but why not install Firefox with ubo and be done with it?
I feel the "cool" factor of brave is silly as they are just fueling chromium. Why don't these chromium forks base on Firefox instead and do some leg work with the benefit of helping the internet as a whole ? I hear someone said on hn a long time ago, building on ff is a pita. Well guess what, Firefox folk do nightly builds of a boat load of versions and flavours and shit. Why can't you change a theme and call it a day?
1) There is an integrated ad blocker. It's very convenient because I don't have to worry about adblocking plugin is bought out and is compromised, I don't have to figure out if my uBlock is supposed to be "origin" or not, or if I should go for adGuard or something else. There is no risk of adblocking breaking because of the changes in plugin API.
2) Integrated optional ad network that by default distributes money based on your web usage, but gives you control over spending your ad income. This is the coolest thing about Brave and I really wish it would succeed, but, unfortunately, it's very unlikely without very wide adoption and I just don't see that happening
3) Not developed by Mozilla. That's nice since I can't ethically support them.
1) uBlock Origin has been around and without selling out for 6-7 years now. You don't have to worry that the plugin is bought out but you do have to worry that the browser is. You don't have to figure out which adblocker to use, because there is only one right answer. And it takes barely thirty seconds of effort.
I have no opinion about 2.
3 is fair, but I have similar objections about Brendan Eich.
1. Actual features like tab groups which Firefox killed.
2. Likelihood to actually add features. Firefox used to have unique features I liked a lot, like keyword searches synced via bookmarks, but this is set for deprecation and was removed from mobile. I don't remember when Firefox last gave me a new feature.
3. Adblocking on mobile while not being Firefox, which is interestingly rare.
4. Not being developed by Mozilla. Mozilla's increasingly vehement about woke political activism, and after the tech companies booted Orange Man out of the Internet, Mozilla came out in no uncertain terms saying that they'd like politically partisan platforms to decide what I see on the net. I'd used them for years and promptly noped the fuck out. The organization may be for privacy, but they don't seem to care about other important things, or rather care about them the wrong way. I want my browser maker to make a good tool, not to tell me what to think. Mozilla feels more interested in the latter than the former.
5. Brave focuses on building an alternative foothold on the web, not just providing a browser. A lot of the other browsers' footprint comes from associated web and hardware platforms and the resulting integration conveniences. Brave has a big focus on independent revenue streams, which I like a lot even if I'm not really a fan of the crypto stuff.
Firefox lacks that to a large degree. They do have Pocket, which is good, but their userbase is essentially hostile to Pocket because they have some idiotic pipe dream about a donation-funded, pure and moral FOSS project. Meanwhile Firefox the company is moralistic, not moral, and funded by Google.
It's definitely better privacy wise than Edge. Edge is really good, but sadly uses hardware based browser IDs and doesn't offer end to end encryption for all categories of synced data, and their start page is very chatty. Plus I think they default to having search suggestions on and sending the strokes to Bing.
Brave's browser ID is more ephemeral, it's not hardware based and doesn't persist across restarts, search suggestions are off by default and the default engine is DDG/Brave, and their sync service is end to end encrypted.
Edge is a good product, but not if you like wearing tinfoil hats. If privacy is no object, Edge is probably the best.
You use brave on mobile for background playing YouTube? If you are on android, do you know newpipe exists? Or for vanilla youtuber users, there is vanced.
About mobile adblocking, doesn't Firefox android have ubo and a few more addons?
As someone who wouldn't mind if Mozilla post Eich can die under a metadata drone strike (doubly so for google) and will still use my FF fork and avoid chrome/chromium based browsers like the plague, brave, seems like they are willing to build in support for decentralized (to me at least) and p2p web directly into the browser (rather than leave it up to potentially less performant 3rd party extensions which may be ok, but not ideal in ff) than all the crap I have to compile out of ff occasionally.
See Brendan's response to me last week[0], which I think comes down to feature set they want to support rather than do all the work it would require to build that in servo now (they went from gecko [no public info on this] -> electron -> and now chromium. they would have to migrate from chromium -> servo).
I wish they did, and just cared less about all the other features that were missing from gecko (but that's just be being selfish and not wanting to build out native stuff myself lol)
cool. so an excel sheet decided google to be the clear winner in present feature comparison set and instead of helping the community in bridging the gap, they decide to go with the flow. cool. i am fine with my ff
