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Brave is interesting because its users fall for the 'VPN' fallacy.
Rather than having your traffic logged by your local ISP, bound by the laws of the land and all the privacy regulations in your country, you send all your traffic through a third party based in a foreign country with no oversight whatsoever.
Or - with browsers - rather than install and configure Firefox to disable the (very limited) telemetry and configure ad blockers etc, you install a chromium derivative with all the Google pieces replaced with a different flavour of mystery sauce. You're still having all the analytics captured, it just goes to somebody with far less scrutiny than Google.
Brave is interesting because some non-users have a complete misinformed idea of what people actually use it for. Brave is one of the best things to happen to the web and actually has a chance at saving the web.
Brave allows me to easily donate money to creators. I currently fund the internet to the tune of $10/month using Brave. Someday that will be $100/month.
Brave removes ads "pre-render" so it is the fastest experience one can get. Other ad-blockers remove them after they have already loaded via JavaScript. Brave does this natively.
Brave has features to let users watch ads and earn currency, I don't use that at all. But some do, and it is consensual and fine for them.
Brave has an option called "Private w/Tor" and that is what yabones is claiming that "its users fall for the VPN fallacy". Which may be true for a small percentage but yabones is making a sweeping generalization here by implying "all users", which is not even close to true. I don't even use Private w/Tor mode. I don't consider anything truly private on the web and nobody else should either.
Brave is one of the best things to happen to the web as the web has become swamped with tracking and ads. Brave does remove all those by default.
>Rather than having your traffic logged by your local ISP, bound by the laws of the land and all the privacy regulations in your country
US ISPs:
- Were given retroactive immunity for their participation in illegal domestic spying.
- Often operate in a duopoly, caring not at all about their reputation.
- Routinely engage in shady practices like DNS hijacking.
>Rather than having your traffic logged by your local ISP, bound by the laws of the land and all the privacy regulations in your country, you send all your traffic through a third party based in a foreign country with no oversight whatsoever.
which is precisely the point because one of the most popular use cases of VPNs is to send copyright infringement letters to /dev/null.
Every single time when VPNs come up there's people talking about all the pitfalls of VPNs when the vast majority of people just want to get past geo-restrictions or avoid being sued for torrenting.
If you’re in Australia, no fallacy imo, government mandated data retention laws in place. I believe started that very few gov departments could see this data but has increased over time to the point I believe is accessible for some civil cases and to organisations [0], so please don’t dismiss VPN privacy use case as it is very applicable for some. I don’t use Brave and there are a lot of problematic VPN providers which makes it complicated for those who want to use them.
[0] https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/02/25/data-retention-scheme-a...
> Rather than having your traffic logged by your local ISP, bound by the laws of the land and all the privacy regulations in your country
That's nice if you live in one of those countries. Some countries have very little privacy regulations for data collected by ISPs; others actually mandate collection and storage of data.
That's not why I use Brave lol.
At this point:
I use Chrome for one Metamask HD sequence
I use Firefox for another Metamask HD sequence
I use Brave for another Metamask HD sequence
Funny to say this, but I use so many browsers mostly for accounting purposes.
I wish there was a good wallet that maintained multiple HD paths and assisted in other best practices.
I rarely use the Tor feature which is the VPN "fallacy". It's a widely successful anonymity network w/ no relation to Brave. If you have issue w/ Tor, then dont use Tor.
This comment is just irresponsible.
>Different flavour of mystery sauce
There's no "mystery sauce". It's completely open-source.
>You're still having all the analytics captured, it just goes to somebody with far less scrutiny than Google.
Brave's completely open about its analytics, and they're designed specially to be privacy-preserving. (No, it's not some naive "anonymous identifier".)
https://brave.com/privacy-preserving-product-analytics-p3a/
And you can also turn them completely off.
> with no oversight whatsoever.
for many of us who grew up in 'third world' (and/or 'developing') economies, this is not in any way better to "heavily regulated". I expect that people from very corrupt ex-soviet states will agree with this sentiment.
I'm still not sure what the VPN fallacy is, and I'm asking genuinely trying to understand.
If someone goes into private mode (and tor becomes enabled) and visits a site, wouldn't the owners of that site have less information on that person than if they visited from their own IP address?
What exactly is the fallacy here?
You may overestimate some people, for example myself. I don't like firefox, and I don't like ads. Brave is superb for that use case.
> Rather than having your traffic logged by your local ISP, bound by the laws of the land and all the privacy regulations in your country
That's only fallacy if you think I'm using VPN because I care about who has my browsing data.
I really couldn't care less. I'm using it because my country blocks certain websites and Netflix doesn't have Arrested Development or West Wing licenses for it.
Does Brave really capture all the analytics that Chome does? I find that claim surprising.
Not everyone is perpetually stationary. IP geolocation amounts to city-level coarse location, and accessing a service over time basically shares with them your travel habits: at which dates and times are you in which places?
Using a VPN is a good way to obscure that information. Not every website you visit or app you use needs to know that you're in city X on Monday and Tuesday evenings, and city Y the rest of the week. That's pretty sensitive stuff for a lot of people.
We don't replace Google's account based tracking with anything of the kind. See https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
In completely unrelated code paths, all open source, we have timing-channel blinded, few bits per answer, automated survey questions that tell us, e.g., how many people reset default search to a different engine (but nothing more). See https://brave.com/privacy-preserving-product-analytics-p3a/.
I'm not sure why you wrote what you wrote. Assumption? It makes an ass of u and umption, to quote Samuel L. Jackson's character from "The Long Kiss Goodnight" :-/.
I use it because it blocks ads and it isn't Google Chrome, meaning no forced logins, not much BS except for the rewards which I disabled and hidden. I can also block scripts with two taps. Didn't know it had a VPN. On the desktop I use FF, on mobile the UI is quite underwhelming.
Brave is interesting because it's taking a firehose to the current ad-tech system, and anyone who's spent time working in ad-tech understands it's is a towering inferno of fraud and abuse.
Some don't like Brave's approach of an alternative, opt-in ads / rewards system because in their view everything crypto-related or ads-supported is scammy. That's an understandable perception: a significant number of crypto enthusiasts appear to be scammers pumping pyramid schemes, and we've already established the ad-tech industry is a towering inferno.
But technically I think you have to concede Brave's on-device ad relevance model is a better way (and the only conscionable one) to run an ad system that delivers relevant ads to interested users, and even directly reward them for their attention. If you think ad-supported anything is a non-starter, then you'd just never enable Brave Rewards, or use another browser (although they're entangled in the current ad-tech system so...)
What you say about 'VPN fallacy' makes little sense.
By default Brave is the most aggressive in blocking trackers, adware, and spyware compared to Firefox and Google — and this is actually a problem for Brave.
Follow their web-compat issues on Github [1] to see the kind of things they're dealing with (an example of the very problematic and kind-of-unresolvable issues that come up include the Duolingo issue [2]).
Users can disable shields on a per-site basis to deal with these things, but it's an open question as to whether this kind of friction will increase or decrease, and whether it's a barrier to larger adoption.
There is no question though that the Brave team have the most commitment to privacy compared to Firefox and, of course, Google.
Your statement that the Google spyware Brave has removed in their Chromium derivative has been replaced by some mystery sauce is based on...?
I do find it curious that whenever this little challenger brand pops up on HN there's a predictable surge of hot take / bad take commentary which aggressively tries to paint a picture of Brave as anything but a plucky challenger brand full of technologists who are expending a lot of energy on privacy, security, and moving browsers forward.
The accounts trying to shop a myth of Brave as a low-rent scam operation will inevitably find buyers for various reasons, but you'd hope technologists in the main will do their research and ignore, or even become curious as to what is driving this continued negative opinion-shaping...
I did mine, and I fell for Brave due to a desire to opt-out of the worst of ad-tech surveillance, get a faster browser, and participate in a novel attempt to bootstrap a frictionless crypto / tipping / payment economy. Not all of these novel ideas will work, but they're worth exploring.
For now Brave's been a dream, and when I accidentally use another open test browser for normal browsing, I'm taken back to a gross dystopia of a web experience.
Use Firefox, people. Brave is shady as hell. I'll use Chrome or Edge long before I use Brave.
I switched from Chrome to Firefox two years ago.
But last week I swiched to Brave, because Firefox simply couldn't deliver the performance I need for all the heavy weight web apps I use (Cloud9, VSCode, Gravit Designer, Slack, Asana).
Brave is overall pretty snappy and I only got problems with Recaptcha, which wants me to do a ridiculous amount of tests.
I don’t think I’m alone as a Brave user when I say that the crypto stuff and some of their default settings aren’t the greatest, but overall still provides a compelling solution to multiple problems. So while it’s not a perfect product, and the crypto stuff still weirds me out, I find it to be the best option for my personal use case. I get chromium and it’s large library of extensions, as well as having it be decoupled from Google, and some decent Adblock and tracker blocking built in. On the downside, because of the crypto stuff, I feel like I need to double check the news a few times a year to make sure they haven’t made it mandatory, or done anything shady. Overall I’m happy with Brave, and glad to see it growing.
Every, and I do mean EVERY, time Brave hits the front page people like to crap on them
... and yet they keep growing.
The more interesting conversation to have is if the growth is linear or early exponential.
Brave recently became my default browser, but I personally don't care for the crypto stuff.
The current iOS beta allows users to sync their bookmarks with Windows and iOS privately, and it's what convinced me to switch. I didn't need to create an account with my email address, or install iCloud...just scan a QR code.
I wish they'd fix the captcha problem though, a lot of sites that use ReCaptcha think Brave browser users are bots (due to the security).
The one feature I wish any other browser would do as well as Chrome is on-the-fly translation. I think Microsoft Edge does this using Bing Translate but I guess as none of the other browser makers have a translation service they can use they instead rely on a wonky extension that uses Google Translate which isn't anywhere near as smooth as the built-in translate in Chrome (naturally).
If anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear them as it is the only thing keeping me on Chrome these days.
Interesting that a browser designed to block analytics has built in analytics. Is this enabled by default?
The opt-in ads are a bunch of shady crypto-currency things, but I love it. I've actually been making like ~$5/month from ads consistently for almost a year now.
Brave is the only browser on iOS that lets me turn off javascript on a per-site basis. VERY useful.
(If you're aware of others, I'm all ears.)
Can someone enlighten me on why does literally everyone use Chromium as the engine for their browser? Why does Firefox not have anything comparable to Chromium/Node/Electron? Is Chrome's JS engine that superior or what?
Recommend Vivaldi (https://vivaldi.com) as an alternative to Brave. Same Chromium based browser, but without any of the crypto stuff and has a lot of nice built-in features. Works on PC/Mac/Linux/Phone.
I trouble wrapping my mind with the anti-Chromium sentiment. Isn’t monopoly a good thing if it’s an open source monopoly? I don’t seem anyone complaining about the Android monopoly for example or the Linux kernel monopoly.
If you work on brave and are reading this... can you stop showing random Crypto banners over nytimes.com and the like? It's very tacky
It’s my daily driver. I’m happy with it. Out of the box, the web is useable. Can’t say the same for any other browser I’ve tried, other than DuckDuckGo on iOS.
I recently moved away from datahogger chrome. Google is throwing me captcha every single time I use Brave browser, but same thing does not happen when using Safari browser. Why is that?
Been using Brave as my main browser for several months now. It's great.
I quit using Brave when I found out they injected their own referal codes in websites without my permission.
The HN crowd seems to really push Firefox. I would love to get an honest opinion on Opera. It's a chromium fork and the biggest criticism just seems to be that it is now owned by a chinese-based consortium. It has just been the most seamless and capable browser I've found with constant innovation.
The software is fine, but the BAT ecosystem disturbs me. As someone who has been involved in the affiliate space, accepting a token issued by an ad network seems like a terrible idea. Separation of concerns is important in this case.
Instead of the ad network facing the consequences of chargebacks, unfulfilled obligations, fraud and abuse, everyone holding the token will be on the hook. With all of the horrible things that go on in the ad/affiliate industry experienced publishers should be wary of this.
Also, as an expat the KYC stuff has generally been insurmountable. Hard to square that with the privacy angle.
However, I do look forward to innovation in this space. Brave/BAT has issues, but at least they're doing something.
I use Brave but mostly because it's fast and blocks lots of ads.
I've been using Brave most of this year and really like it.
The killer feature for me is that it lets you disable scripts for individual websites or 'Allow scripts once'. This basically makes most paywall news sites readable.
Weird how the affiliate scandal didn't break their neck.
- Uses far less phone battery.
- Blocks abuses of web technology, mainly advertising tricks.
- Almost identical to Chrome now but not part of the Google monolith.
- Use Tor w/ 1 click.
Disclosure: I'm invested in $BAT, the browser's native token
Don't be too proud. Many users just because it gives a false promises of free cryptos. Not because of search and replace chrome version.
Chrome+ublock is the best way.
Last I heard there were ways to farm BAT so be careful investing in it.
the agency provides :)
I was originally sceptical of Brave but now it is my main browser
>"Malware Passes 20M Monthly Active Users and 7M Daily Active Users"
I dropped Firefox for brave because Firefox dropped support for massive amounts of simple power user features like RSS while claiming they were all “too hard to maintain”. Meanwhile they put massive amounts of time and effort into trying to be a chrome look-alike which adds zero value.
I can't even say why I don't want to use it without being downvoted into oblivion. I'm sure there are many wonderful people who use and develop it without going out and being a nuisance, but the fans I encounter the most are horrible. That's not an association I want, and nothing the browser offers is compelling to me.