Does Brave have an implementation of Multi-Account Containers? This is the ONE killer feature in Firefox that makes it impossible for me to leave for Brave completely:
For me, somewhat embarrassingly, the one killer feature is the "Send to Device" feature from firefox on iOS. Being able to send links to browser for later reviewing is super useful. Not sure why Edge or other browsers don't implement
This is a killer feature for me too. Works great between all my devices across Linux, Android, and iOS. If I see an interesting article I just ship it off to my desktop to read later instead of keeping the tab open for days on my phone.
I've unfortunately had the opposite experience with FF send, I still use it all the time (or try to) when I find links on mobile that I want to read on a big screen, or when I have an image url on my laptop that I want to send from my phone via SMS, snapshat, etc. But the delay is just unbearably long and inconsistent. Sometimes (most often when sending desktop to phone) the delay is 15 minutes or more. I've found it a lot easier to use a bookmarklet that uses DDG to generate qr codes, but that only solved sharing in one direction.
I've wondered how send could be so slow but maybe something in my setup is just killing it. More than anything though, I would love an easy way to access my phone's sharing options from my laptop (perhaps an addon button that shows a list of app intents that can receive a url/page).
This is one thing I'm hoping to hack at when I get my Librem.
I'm on Android. I use an app called Pushbullet, which mirrors notifications but also enables text and file sharing between all your devices. Sharing is instant. I also enable "open immediately on browser", meaning if I send a link from my phone to my computer browser then it'll automatically open a new tab with that link. It's pretty neat, it's really two or three taps away from any web browser tab on my mobile (open menu, hit Pushbullet shortcut; or open menu, open sharing menu, push to all devices).
I used PushBullet once and send a pornhub link to all my devices which auto played. When I say Autoplayed I mean it started to play on my work machine and I was working from home.
Never rode my bicycle quicker (public transport sucked). Fortunately my computer was on mute but still had to confess to watching certain content on a work machine to my boss. Nothing came of it but all the same.
I use the "send tab to another device" feature a lot, and it's true that sometimes it isn't fast enough to be considered real-time. Sometimes tabs appear instantly, sometimes they don't appear for minutes, and sometimes restarting the browser triggers tab reception. In any case, it's already an awesome feature.
You can share links and files with any connected device. Use it as a remote control for music players and presentations. Ring your phone from your computer to find it and more.
Chrome has had this for a few months. You're talking about right click browser bar and "send to my devices," right? Works for me from Chrome on linux and windows to android.
When you add MS Phone Companion/Link to Windows on Android you can "Send to PC" which will either load the tab in Edge (newest Edge based on Chromium), or create a notification in action center based on your choice.
Works great, though I needed to whitelist some domains on PiHole for it to function.
Not a 1-to-1 parity at this time, but Brave offers parallel profiles. You can have one running personal interests, while the other has professional interests. Each profile is able to host a unique session for Facebook, etc. Brave already prohibits cookie and data bleed-over from one domain to another.
I suspect so, but don't know the details of FPI in Firefox. We don't permit cookies and storage access by third-parties, while also blocking known bad-actors entirely. We also "farble" APIs to create noise for those who do have access. If there are any specific scenarios or questions you have in mind, I'd be happy to discuss further.
I don't think it's the same. There is a list of things that Firefox isolates per-domain here [1], it's much more than cookies. There is a Brave ticket here but not much has happened: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/1053
Would Brave's parallel profiles allow me to be signed in to 2 different AWS accounts?
I've tried this in Multi-Account Containers for Firefox and SessionBox in Chrome, and they're both pretty buggy, e.g. the console's username menu indicates I'm in account "A", but I'm seeing resources listed from account "B", or EC2 will work fine but clicking over to ECS prompt me to sign in again.
Correct; your AWS session would be scoped to your profile. You could be using your own personal account in the "Personal" profile, and your professional/corporate account in your "Work" profile.
Maybe; I'm not super familiar with Canvas Blocker. One thing you have to be careful with when blocking APIs is that you don't generate a negative fingerprint by your restrictions, which is every bit as effective as a positive fingerprint would be. Our farbling is pretty good, and will be getting even better later this month :)
Despite its name, Canvasblocker actually does that, it sends slightly shifted API data, not only for canvas but for most fingerprinting methods.
Nonetheless I'm happy to hear about the improvements in Brave. I've actually shifted from Firefox to Brave since I'm expecting Webkit/Blink to become a 'Linux kernel' for web technologies and thus the web.
Keep up the great work! The only true remaining nitpicks I still have with Brave (after the introduction of Sync V2) are
1. iOS Brave being based on Firefox instead of Chrome iOS (I am aware of the technical cost of switching codebase)
2. Prevent browser close on last tab close
If those two existed Brave would be perfect for me.
I'm not terribly familiar with all the features that Multi-Account Containers offer. Does SessionBox for Chrome not meet your needs for some specific reason?
There's a similar thing shipped in Chrome now called Tab Groups, you just have to enable it behind chrome://flags.
In my view it's nowhere near as nice as it is on Firefox, with site isolation (Facebook, Google, Twitter, reddit), temporary containers, and a myriad of other add-ons that improve managing them (keyboard shortcuts and transition rules are the two I use the most).
its more like Vivaldi's tab stacks or FF's Tree Tabs. With groups there are no inherent additional security mechanisms in place to prevent cross-group contamination/access. i.e., two different tab groups can access the same site data.
containers however are completely isolated from each other. i.e., two different containers have completely different sets of site data.
> no inherent additional security mechanisms in place to prevent cross-group contamination/access
Are you saying the biggest advertiser on the planet likely doesn't want to add functionality that could potentially hinder tracking for advertising purposes...?
Firefox has the containerization built in. You can use it without the extension but with worst UX.
> For advanced users: You can also enable Containers without the Multi-Account Containers extension, by changing some preferences in the Configuration Editor (about:config page). Note that you will get a better user experience by installing the extension but, if you choose not to, you can set privacy.userContext.enabled to true, privacy.userContext.ui.enabled to true and privacy.userContext.longPressBehavior to 2 in about:config.
It’s an addon from Mozilla itself that just surfaces a bit of UI for advanced controls. The actual feature is already baked in the browser, they’ve just been very conservative about exposing it to everyone.
Ironically the only time I wanted to use this feature was to separate my accounts related to my project and browser extension.
Except that the mozilla 's site does not care about your privacy. Whether you use containers or not, they automatically get your identity from the browser, and then you cannot just be logged out.
You accused them of using an oversimplification with a selective definition, and then immediately performed that exact fallacy ("people with political opinions they support").
> I guess by “all” they mean only people with political opinions they support.
You are just misinterpreting what that quote says. They think that the internet should remain a public resource that is open and accessible to all. They don't think that everything on the internet should be a public resource that is open and accessible to all as you are implying.
Do you really think that everything on the internet should be a public resource and accessible to all, even your email, bank accounts, etc?
Unfortunately part of making things "open and accessible to all" means revoking access to people who would weaponize the internet to contradict those goals.
A tolerant society means no tolerance for terrorists.
If you can effectively cast your political opponents as “terrorists” you can rationalize denying them all sorts of rights and still get to call yourself a supporter of human rights. They did a similar thing during the Iraq war.
I made a litmus test that an alarming number of people I've had recent discussions with cannot pass.
Basically it's about whether you can get them to agree with both of the following statements:
1) X-ism should not exist.
2) X-ists have a fundamental right to exist.
Point number one is perfectly reasonable as should be point two.
The really scary authoritarians flat out deny point number two, but most people will start equivocating or scream at you because you don't want to punch X-ists.
This is a growing problem that society needs to find a solution to quickly. Denial of point 2 leads to mass murder of people for thought crime. Still some people seem okay with this.
And I just want to point out before I get tons of hate that it's perfectly acceptable to give X-ists consequences for their _actions_. Not their private thoughts.
>Denial of point 2 leads to mass murder of people for thought crime. Still some people seem okay with this.
You're exaggerating. We don't have a real problem with people who want to mass murder people for being X-ists. It's easy to observe the inverse, though.
The terrorists who stormed the capitol are nobody's mere "political opponents". They are hateful, violent cowards together with some innocent non-violent people tricked by propaganda, the former of whom hide behind the broader identity of conservative or Republican, precisely so that people can defend them under that umbrella as you have done. You shouldn't be helping them.
One day, people may actually need to invade the Capitol building, but it will never happen because of your eagerness to create an authoritarian state that shuts down all controversial discourse.
If we deplatformed every “violent thug” that did something people didn’t like, you would have a fraction of the rights you have today.
I believe that we passed a controversial discourse, when a certain group of people decided to ignore all reasonable arguments, to ignore sience.
This is not about shutting down all controversial discourse.
It is about "defend[ing] a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant".
Surpression shall only happen if there is no other way to defend a tolerant society cause the intolerant are working with (massiv, wide spread) violence.
I don't know who is in the position to decide when that point has come.
But one could argue that people invading the capitol is that point.(I don't think so)
What I am really worried about, is that it seems like tech companies will have to make those decisions.
In the end there will be individual persons, who make that decisons and that is very dangerous.
As I already wrote: That's exactly what I am worried about.
I do believe that tech-companies are not the right instance to make those decisions.
But: There is noone else, who is able to control the growing beast of social networks that they created.
And in parts they can not control it either. There are too many languages used, that no employee or AI understands.
In the end we are darned to watch and hope they make the correct decisions.
Google and Facebook should host whichever legal content they'd like, and we should build alternative systems that give us control over how we spend our attention and share our influence.
Worth pointing out that innocent people were shot and killed and senators were evacuated while they confirmed the election result. It isn't "something I don't like" it is "something reprehensible which cannot under any circumstances be tolerated".
Well, in the case of violence it is quite easy to pass judgement and just lock them up. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't listen to those terrorists. Even if they only talk bullshit you should at least try to understand why they became terrorists or else you will just declare more and more people as terrorists because it is the easy way out.
Feel free to listen to terrorists all you want -- I'm under no obligation to listen to people who are advocating for my torture or death, and I'm certainly not obligated to supply a platform for their views.
>A tolerant society means no tolerance for terrorists.
Ex CEO of Mozilla and current CEO of Brave has been removed from Mozilla for donating his private money to some conservative same-sex marriage organisation.
So what? Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
You can't be taken seriously as an advocate for a tolerant and accessible non-profit when you spend your salary denying people the right to get married.
Orwell wrote a nice essay on this, all the way back in 1940s, when the war was still being fought, and organizations like the British Union of Fascists were around:
"The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness."
"The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice."
"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means."
"1940 it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any technical crime. We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible quisling to go free. To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage. The general failure to see this was a bad symptom, though it is true that the agitation against Mosley’s release was partly factitious and partly a rationalisation of other discontents. But how much of the present slide towards Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the ‘anti-Fascism’ of the past ten years and the unscrupulousness it has entailed?"
(Note that the guy writing all this was a socialist who volunteered to go and literally shoot at - and be shot by - actual Fascists in the Spanish Civil War less than 10 years earlier.)
"But we should claim the right to suppress them (intolerant philosophies) if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
How relevant to our age... and this appears in a treatise by philosopher Karl Popper from 1945, who attributed the paradox to Plato's defense of "benevolent despotism"... i.e. the discussion is as old as civilisation itself!
The "paradox" of tolerance is only a paradox if you tolerate actions other than speech. If you only tolerate speech, there's no paradox - as soon as speech translates to actual harm, the hammer is brought down.
Taken out of context that quote would imply "we need even more serious censorship", but admits that deplatforming a certain world leader is a not a real solution and that these actions that should be taken:
> Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.
> Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.
> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation. [link to post on changing Facebook's timeline algorithm]
> Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
The first two are no-brainers. The third is alright, but I doubt re-weighting Facebook's timeline algorithm is going to put the genie back in the bottle. The fourth is useful but pretty generic at "do research on things".
"We need more than deplatforming" is the literal headline, and they support it in the post:
"Changing these dangerous dynamics requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms. Additional precise and specific actions must also be taken"
> Additional precise and specific actions must also be taken
Absolutely.
I see this policy stance as being no different to wanting the education system to not purport Racism; this isn't curtailing freedom of speech or any other freedom. It is purely an exercise in needing to do more than just deplatforming Racists: Not actively seek to create new ones!
I interpret the post as saying "banning people on Twitter won't solve our problem, transparency in advertising and social media algorithms will" because before your quote Mitchell (CEO of Mozilla) in the post says:
> But as reprehensible as the actions of Donald Trump are, the rampant use of the internet to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy is about more than any one personality. Donald Trump is certainly not the first politician to exploit the architecture of the internet in this way, and he won’t be the last. We need solutions that don’t start after untold damage has been done.
And then lists several possible solutions that seem quite reasonable, and we should for sure push for the first two.
PS to anyone reading this exchange, at this point our comments are longer than the original blog post, you might as well just read the original instead of our out-of-order commentary. :)
> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation. [link to post on changing Facebook's timeline algorithm]
This is great, silencing disinformation... or maybe not.
On one march friday, facebook would silence the "conspiracy theorists" claiming you should wear a mask, because our 'experts' (and american too, and WHO and many others) said, that wearing a mask for covid is useless.
Then, on the next day, our government mandated masks and gloves in every indoor location (stores,...), and facebook would silence the people claiming masks are useless.
> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation
It’s horrifying that they think this is even possible. Some of the worst political divides are over which set of facts to emphasize (children in cages vs children separated from traffickers) or are speculation on ongoing events (Russian pee tape, Trump is a Russian asset, Russia stole the election, etc).
“Amplify factual voices” just sounds like more echo chamber bullshit where you follow your politically aligned fact sources like Twitter.
> “Amplify factual voices” just sounds like more echo chamber bullshit
No, it doesn't. Facts, which are a subset of universal truths, need to clearly outweigh falsehood. For example, you'd not find schools teach conspiracy theories like "Earth is flat", or "Global Warming is a hoax" for a reason. Fringe theories that rely on absurd reasoning and have no basis in actual facts must be curtailed, and under no circumstances do those theories deserve any amplication platform, definitely not one which operates at the scale like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter.
I realise that what's a universal fact today needn't be a fact tomorrow, but we have got substantially better scientific and socio-political tools to verify and come to conclusions one way or other for many topics. It is only prudent to let fringe theories be fringe and not amplify them for more eyeballs and revenue.
Consuming nonsense does affect real people and has real world consequences.
> No, it doesn't. Facts, which are subset of universal truths, need to clearly outweigh falsehood.
Yes, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that both sides of the political spectrum base a bunch of bullshit based on sets of facts they deem important.
There is no set of facts that indicates wealth should be taxed or corporate rates should be cut. Each side trots out “facts” supporting their view but the conclusions are completely different.
So if one person says the ideal the tax rate is X% and another person says X+1% who is correct? One of them or neither? How do you decide certain things like that? Obviously at least one of them is spreading misinformation and is not a factual voice.
I wonder why Mozilla even bothers with these kinds of posts. I doubt a single person in the world cares about getting political opinions from their web browser so these kinds of posts just dirty their image.
It's even worse than that - it makes me less able to trust Mozilla because Mozilla wants to make sure they can help me decide what is true or not. That is definitely not Mozilla's job nor do they have that ability. It just tells me they're looking to help control the internet for corporations.
It's a statement in support of suppressing speech, and it's needlessly political. Mozilla leadership has mostly rested on their laurels (read: Google money) while Firefox consistently slid in market share. I've been a loyal FF user for 17 years, and this was the final straw. In the process of switching to Brave.
I don't see anything in that post about suppressing speech—can you help me see it? The main bullet points in the article don't seem to have anything to do with suppressing speech (unless that is how you are framing the bullet point which reads: "Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation."
It starts with title "We need more than deplatforming" which means "deplatforming is good, but it's not enough".
noun: deplatforming; noun: de-platforming
the action or practice of preventing someone holding views regarded as unacceptable or offensive from contributing to a forum or debate, especially by blocking them on a particular website.
It continues with "Changing these dangerous dynamics requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms."
Blocking, silencing and removal does suppress speech.
Freedom of speech should not guarantee 'right to global reach'. People should be allowed to say what they think to an amount of people who they can have personal relationships with, their neighbors, relatively close colleagues and similar. Deplatforming should not take this away, it should just take the biggest megaphone away mankind invented to date.
Sure, in the same vein as building a dam is water suppression. It doesn't take away any right, it's about the limits of a right.
You also suppress freedom of speech indirectly when you put someone in prison, so any crime punished by imprisonment seems to be considered reason enough to justify that as well.
Saying that freedom of speech can't ever be limited is a very ideological point of view, so far away from reality that I wouldn't consider it worth debating at all.
Now there is a valid argument to be made, how decisions to deplatform a person should be made and/or how such decisions can be appealed.
> You also suppress freedom of speech indirectly when you put someone in prison
You’re confusing suppressing an individual’s ability to speak with the general notion of the free exchange of ideas. Arrest one person and free speech activists aren’t concerned, arrest everyone that says something, now they are concerned. The notion of trying to suppress topics is the problem, not the limitation of a particular individual.
> Saying that freedom of speech can't ever be limited is a very ideological point of view, so far away from reality that I wouldn't consider it worth debating at all.
You built a shitty strawman and then attacked it. Bravo. If you actually want to debate people who advocate free speech, the concern is when speech is suppressed because of the contents of the speech. Not because the person is dead, in prison, in a coma, or some other contrived crap.
> You built a shitty strawman and then attacked it.
I may just be my misunderstanding. I get the feeling in these discussions, that people think things like deplatforming, etc. are generally and always wrong and people/institutions speaking about it (such as Mozilla) are bad. If that is considered a strawman, then I am glad.
Deplatforming isn't suppression it's realising that you entities do not have to be neutral in their support and broadcast of various things. It's the question of a radical over a liberal mindset.
The Mozilla of 2004 is not the Mozilla of today. With unnecessary proselytizing/virtual signalling, implementing features antithetical to their values (Pocket integration, switching to WebExtensions), pursuing wasteful and fruitless endeavors (FirefoxOS), the company has completely strayed from its main focus: building a solid, open, and free browser. I'm still with them, but I'd be lying if I don't strongly consider moving to Brave every time they come out with actual innovative and exciting features like this.
Wow. Did not expect that from Mozilla of all places. Really disappointed as I've been a die hard Firefox user for as long as I can remember in large part because of the commitment to a free, open internet and fundamental Liberal values like free speech.
It means that Brave is implementing protocols that help circumvent censorship, while the CEO of Mozilla is saying that current censorship doesn't go far enough.
Gab has not updated Dissenter in 10 months (Windows and Linux) or more than 13 months (macOS). Without backporting or merging up to current Brave, this leaves its users horribly vulnerable to unpatched but disclosed Chromium security bugs, including full remote code execution vulns. Don't use Dissenter. My "salty" tweet was prophetic.
In terms of active development, Google is working on Blink and Apple is still working on WebKit. Every other browser depends on Google and Apple to do the heavy lifting for them.
I don't quite follow, are you saying Mozilla's structure is poor so making modifications is harder? Or perhaps that Chrome's developers did the work on IPFS and adding Tor and that you feel Brave rubber stamped them?
Mozilla has something like a $200M pa income (from Google alone). I wonder how that compares with Brave's income.
I think the person's point is that Mozilla is making a complete browser, rendering engine and all, while Brave is basically a shell of stuff on top of Chromium/Blink.
The type of people who are into decentralizing the internet are also usually against a single company (google) controlling the rendering engine of most users.
If you're talking about typical user of the average web browser, they care about IPFS as much as they care about the rendering engine - i.e. not at all.
> against a single company (google) controlling the rendering engine of most users
That isn’t really applicable here though. That’s kinda like claiming we should be against Linux because it runs all the web servers. There is a difference between centralization and standardization.
There is a difference, and all the html rendering code being written by google is centralization not standardization.
I don't think the linux comparison makes any sense for this situation. Linux has very little to do with the web experience, where the rendering engine is the core of it. Linus's ability to change world wide web standards on a whim is close to non existent. Google is literally replacing the WWW network stack (a good change mind you, but nonetheless demonstrates the level of power)
I am that person. I moved away from Brave because its still chrome/chromium based. I am also not confident in their "blockchain" advertising model and don't trust they are actually any less private with my data than chrome/chromium.
It would be cool to see IPFS integrated and enabled by default on all browsers. I doubt Google would ever take the leap, but maybe Mozilla would. I also have doubt that Microsoft would but they would be more willing than Google. Anyways, I hope this can happen before Mozilla's market share shrinks more.
You don't have to participate in the advertising bits of Brave; those are optional. But, they're a privacy-centric way to generate rewards which can be passively contributed to your favorite sites, sustaining their content creation.
Perhaps more of interest would be an independent, third-party review and comparison. Trinity College's School of Computer Science and Statistics did a comparative review of Chrome, Brave, Edge, Firefox, Yandex, and Safari. They found that Brave was the "most private" in terms of phoning home. You can [read their review online](https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf).
Always happy to discuss any specific concerns you may have.
Thanks for this clarification. I use Brave less because I am actually afraid to install extensions, because addition phoning to Google. Or how does Brave handle that?
The evidence is in, and I'm sure you're right about the typical users. But the discriminating ones know better. The difference is how much it's using you.
Those that care enough about privacy to use TOR and IPFS likely care very much about using a browser made by Google. De-googling Chrome is like removing telemetry from Windows 10 over installing and running Linux: For some it's great while others wont touch it no matter how much work is put into making it "safe" (and IMHO Chrome variants are at most "safe").
Brave takes an existing browser (Chromium) and adds some extra features to the UI and networking stack.
Modern web browsers are incredibly complex pieces of software. The overwhelming majority of code in Brave's repository is shared with Chromium. What Brave's developers do and what Mozilla's developers do are not comparable.
You’re either saying: Mozilla can’t afford to hire another set of developers to add IPFS, Firefox is too poorly written for this to be reasonably done, or Mozilla doesn’t actually care about the decentralized web to even try.
None of the reasons really sheds a good like on Mozilla.
Some of us believe that the client-server model has led us to the current situation, ruled by internet giants. A future where people are less reliant on giants is within our reach, the biggest hurdle is making it available to the masses.
Hopefully uptake by non-mainstream browsers like Brave will increase the exposure, attract developers, increase the network and get us closer to having IPFS, Hypercore or some other protocol available to the mainstream, whether that be in Firefox or by some other means.
Besides, you could argue that browsers have added plenty of fad technologies over the past few years, DRM comes to mind.
> IPFS, Hypercore or some other protocol available to the mainstream, whether that be in Firefox or by some other means
TIL about hypercore! Looks like an interesting concept based on append-only logs. It reminds me of this work being done at VMware: https://github.com/vmware/node-replication
> It is easier for Brave to deliver new features when the biggest work is done by Chrome team.
Do you think Mozilla will ever switch to chromium? It is the linux of the web - would be nice if they could finally focus and stop dressing up their dead horse.
I've been using Firefox since its inception, and was a Netscape user before that. I _briefly_ tried Chrome, but swiftly returned to Firefox.
Half my extensions are still broken on Firefox Android. I've been using Firefox desktop on my PinePhone off-and-on and not only do all of my extensions work, but it's snappy and has a superior UX. I can actually access and manage my bookmarks with a sane interface.
And yet even desktop is sullied. Each major version tries to hide my bookmarks, or something equally egregious, and Mozilla frequently abuses my trust by promoting products and services through privileged channels.
Same boat. I've used Firefox in spite of countless boneheaded decisions by Mozilla leadership, because underneath all that mismanagement, the product was solid. They started trying to mimic Chrome rather than be their own browser, and it was all over. The final straw for me was with their recent divisive political statement in opposition to free speech.
I too have recently departed the Firefox evangelism train after a great many years promoting the browser to all of my friends and family. The org has become far too disdainful of users. The constant UI/UX regressions are awful for people who just want their browser to work (ie. the vast majority of users), and management are more interested in political posturing than browser development.
It was all after Snowdens leaks. Mozilla promised to de-fork Tor browser, move Tor into private browsing. They kept repeating this for years and years.
They even started a bunch of Tor nodes to collect some metrics. It looks like they are removing their blog posts about it
They were very vocal about how web is broken, needs more Tor and IPFS for everything to allow more free speech for disadvantage. Today they promote unregulated censorship, banning and shadow-banning public channels. You will find many posts about it between 2014 and 2018.
You're referring to a bug from June of 2020, which was patched within a couple days of discovery, IIRC. An issue which had no privacy or security impact. Details in our blog on the subject: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/. Happy to answer any questions you may have.
It's on by default. If I had a complaint about Brave, is that it's a bit "noisy" by default. I'd like more customization options on setup so that there's less customization I have to do once the browser is installed.
We have quite a few engineers whose roots lie within, or have passed through, Mozilla. We even have several engineers and team members who pioneered much of the Web at Netscape and prior :)
Are you sure you want to participate in a discussion badmouthing Mozilla? You're not directly saying those things, but you are taking part in the dialog. That sort of behavior makes me pretty angry about Brave.
Focus on Brave. You have nothing to do with Mozilla.
I think its a little extreme to call this bad mouthing. People switch jobs. It does not reflect negatively on firefox that some of their employees now work at other companies in the same space. That is how jobs work - its not a life long commitment.
Not to mention Brave was co-founded by the former CEO of Mozilla and one of the influential people of the Netscape days, Brendan Eich. So it's only logical that a portion of Brave devs are former Mozilla/Netscape people.
I'm not bad-mouthing anybody; somebody wondered if we have engineers on staff who worked at Mozilla. We do. I'm proud of the history represented in our staff. They are the ones who pioneered much of this industry. And they are the ones who spun-up the browser wars again, rescuing the Web from IE. Mozilla will always be given credit for the wonderful work they have done, and continue to do, for the Web.
Partly, also as a user interested in the future of software we depend on, and also the "kremlinology" of the thing. True or no, it's Eich's assertion that Mozilla is top-heavy, and they certainly haven't been able to keep up with the Chrome variants technically. Long term, the interest is whether Mozilla's vs Brave's approach will give a viable browser alternative, with incentives aligned with the user, at least relatively speaking, vs. chrome.
I think you're misunderstanding what he's saying, I took it as a mark of pride that they have former Mozilla devs because Mozilla can honestly be called an internet pioneer responsible for much of the web we know today.
Boycott Firefox, Switch to Brave, my browser had Bittorrent support 16 years ago
In 2005, Elinks browser had built-in Torrent support.
In 2021, Firefox still does not have built-in Torrent support.
In 2021, Brave has built-in Torrent support.
Why Firefox has not focussed on decentralisation and uncensorability for the last 16 years?
Maybe because they work for their grand masters (Google and other GAFAMs) who want power, and don't want decentralization?
As much as I feel that Firefox isn't delivering, Brave just extends a browser engine monopoly which is dangerous for the web. Google can decide to change a fundamental part and suddenly 90% of all users will have it because they use the same browser engine.
I would've embraced brave had it written its own browser engine or simply picked something non-google.
