from Hacker News

Brave Isn't Bad

by smnthermes on 12/25/19, 1:03 AM with 120 comments

• by colordrops on 12/25/19, 5:03 AM

  The comments in this thread are ironic considering the content of the post.

  Brave exposes controls for all of its privacy and crypto features and you can easily opt in or out of anything that concerns you, making it a great choice for privacy.

  It really smacks of hypocrisy that everyone is all for multitude of open source solutions, except when it comes to browsers. Mozilla has made many misteps regarding privacy and I've never seen attacks like this. To say that browser wars are political is an understatement.

  Even assuming the worst, that being that Brave is trying to track you and build an ad network rivaling Google, that still seems in sum total a good thing. Google has gone down a dark path completely unchecked with their unimaginable omniscience and ad revenue, and I welcome an attack on their monopoly.

• by thenewnewguy on 12/25/19, 4:19 AM

  > But Brave has a backdoor!

  > No it doesn't. Brave is open source and there has been no backdoor ever found. Many people claim that Brave being able to use custom HTTP headers are a backdoor but this isn't true. HTTP headers are allowed as per RFC 7231. See Brendan Eich's response to this.

  This has got to be a joke, right? Nobody's claiming that Brave 'using custom HTTP headers' is not allowed in the HTTP spec, the problem is that Brave downloads a list of headers to inject into requests for specific websites.

  I'm not sure I'd call this a "backdoor", but considering it cannot (to my knowledge) be disabled it at least deserves a conversation. Trying to minimize the complaint with "it's allowed in the HTTP spec" is insane.

• by throwGuardian on 12/25/19, 5:17 AM

  Disclaimer: not associated with brave in any way.

  Facts:

  1. Brave's tracking degree is little to none, compared to Google/Microsoft(edge).

  2. Brave is the only browser that splits ad revenue with the user, and pays creators a higher percentage, compared to the AdSenses of the world. On top of that, brave ads aren't distracting, are generally of high quality and non intrusive to the browsing experience.

  I've personally earned more than $50 in aggregate this year using brave, and tipped a 100% of that to sites and content I consume often. Both the creators and I are happy costumers of brave.

• by liamcardenas on 12/25/19, 2:43 AM

  > But Brave is based on Chromium!

  > Chromium is open source and all Google tracking can easily be disabled. Brave strips out all of this by default. Remember that Chromium is not the same as Chrome.

  Sorry, but this is not a satisfactory explanation to me. Brave is marketed as the pro-decentralization/good web citizen browser. Yet, it uses Chromium, which contributes to Google’s dominance over the web — pushing developers to further neglect Firefox and other browsers as a target.

  Also, where is Brave’s innovation? I see none. Instead, I support Mozilla.

• by arkanciscan on 12/25/19, 3:19 AM

  > they use Google by default

  I currently use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine because Brave's Private mode uses it by default. I had heard of DDG before, but I assumed that Google was better. When I saw that it really works just as well, I decided to switch.

• by upofadown on 12/25/19, 1:32 PM

  I am unable to use any Chrome/Chromium based browser due to one stupid and trivial characteristic. When you spawn a new session of Chrome/Chromium the resulting window/tab steals focus. That means that if you do so from some sort of terminal based program you are pointlessly left sitting there with the cursor still in the terminal window but with the focus on the browser window. If you were hoping to spawn more than one new browser session (say from a RSS reader), well, you are not doing that.

  Firefox has an obscure option that can be used to turn off this obnoxious behaviour. So I must use Firefox.

• by johnpowell on 12/25/19, 3:32 AM

  https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/adshero_1.png

  That is a image from:

  https://brave.com/brave-ads-waitlist/

  Notice the page is about the Grammys and the ad is about the Grammys. This is important.

  So Brave strips the ads from my site and inserts their own as (even more annoying system notifications). And they are relevant to the page so now my visitors might think I was the dick that triggered a notification that must be dismissed.

  And If I want a cut I have to sign up for some rando cryptocurrency company, the bastions of ethics and security.

  Please Brave. Use a unique user agent string so I can just block people using your browser. And I don't care if people block ads, I do too. But when you get desperate and start showing ads for dildos on my site discussing cross-cut table-saw blades I'm not going to be a happy camper.

• by yellow_lead on 12/25/19, 2:42 AM

  > But Brave whitelists Facebook and Twitter trackers!

  > This is only partly true. Brave whitelists some Facebook and Twitter trackers because blocking them outright would break buttons on some websites (e.g. the Facebook like buttons). Brave is meant to be easy to use, breaking a lot of websites is not easy to use. Brave was never meant to be a max privacy solution.

  > The whitelist is now optional and can easily be disabled in the settings.

  Opt out features like this don't respect your privacy.

• by buboard on 12/25/19, 6:23 PM

  Brave is the most disruptive thing to happen on the web in 15 years. The discussion about tracking is almost irrelevant - adblocking is the bait that brave uses which will take us from google's web to a web where every visitor can directly pay the creator to read anything on the web. It's almost comical to watch HN melting against brave because it's threatening the profits of their bosses. I personally hope the best for them and i 'll be doing my best to promote it.

• by mindfulhack on 12/25/19, 3:05 AM

  This had the effect of making me realise Brave is not the answer. If you don't mind some UI inferiority, Firefox is the answer.

• by brobinson on 12/25/19, 3:22 AM

  Does Brave still fail fingerprinting tests in a comically bad fashion? Last time I looked at Brave, it appeared to be pretty bad for privacy fingerprinting-wise compared to Firefox and (surprisingly) Chrome.

• by saagarjha on 12/25/19, 5:59 AM

  > Their home page (their website, not the browser's home page) contains analytics because they want to see what type of users are using their service, how many etc. Analytics are used virtually everywhere and are a nice way to gain information about how much traffic your website is recieving. Additionally, Brave's tracker blocker blocks this tracker anyway.

  Then why have it? Just because “everyone is doing it, so we should too, even though it’s antithetical to our goals”?

• by te_chris on 12/25/19, 2:39 AM

  Just use Firefox. The fact that these posts are even needed says everything about the choice you’re making.

• by Simon_says on 12/25/19, 2:46 AM

  Ads in and of themselves are bad, even without tracking. My time and attention are the only truly limited resources I have. Hijacking those to make me desire things I don’t need reduces my quality of life. Secondarily, ads corrupt every media outlet they touch. To hell with all of them.

• by onyva on 12/25/19, 8:36 PM

  Basically every reasoning they give for why Brave is not as bad as it seems, seems to demonstrate exactly that point. Literally. Starting with “they clearly state in their privacy policy that their ads do not track you”. Great. Sure. Argument won decidedly.

• by SimplePotato on 12/25/19, 4:26 PM

  Any developers out there, using it day to day?

• by nif2ee on 12/25/19, 2:42 AM

  If I am going to use Chrome/Chromium then I am just going to use Chrome/Chromium and spend 10 more seconds and install ublock. No reason to use a themed Chromium by a company that literally announces itself to investors (among which Peter Thiel who has obviously personal issues with Google founders) as an advertising platform with a cryptoscam if it didn't work.