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Comment by petre | Hacker News Reader

I use it currently but do not care about rewards and other nonsense features, just about ads getting blocked.

To counter all those throwaway accounts created to praise Brave, I have to say that I have no intention to use it because it's based on Chromium. Single-culture is bad even if your intentions are good. I never used Chrome either and have lived through ups and downs of Mozilla since 2002 when I ditched IE6.

I wish Firefox tech was easier to integrate into other browsers, so that we could have a more balanced ecosystem.

When the SDK is released [1], there's no reason why a plugin to support BAT couldn't be implemented.

[1]: https://www.cnet.com/news/braves-privacy-focused-ads-to-spre...

I don't want to accuse anyone of astroturfing, but the comments in this thread seem to be eerily positive and very marketing-y. Maybe it's my skepticism of everything crypto-related being incredibly biased one way or another.

Disclaimer: I’ve been using/testing Brave for the last few years. I've seen it evolve from what was basically a proof of concept running in Electron to what it is today.

I believe if you care to do some research, you'll see that the Brave team has put in the work to be taken seriously.

I get why people are skeptical, especially in this day and age. But the concept for Brave and disrupting the surveillance capitalism known as ad tech goes back to 2013; Brave is not a johnny-come-lately thing[1].

This was started by Brendan Eich, the same guy who created JavaScipt and who started Mozilla which gave us Firefox; it's not like he's someone who doesn't understand how this stuff works.

[1]: https://basicattentiontoken.org/the-road-to-brave-one-dot-ze...

Every potentially unpleasant Brave feature is easy to disable (and often by-default disabled). Is is very good at ad-filtering, snappy and responsive, stable, can be audited (opensource)... and the underlying ways to provide for creators/publishers (and also people liking/needing advertising) are clever and disruptive.

Brave is worth a try.

I'm not paid for this (and there is no 'conflict of interest').

For whatever reason firefox seems to actively sabotage any attempts to reuse their technology. The one area where people were reusing it, mozjs has been nothing but heartaches for everyone involved because they literally break part of their API's with every release. Back a couple years ago they changed the library bindings from C to C++ basically forcing all their users to write their own shims even if they were C based projects.

This is likely a large part of why they are losing, I remember showing people how it was possible to create a web browser with a couple clicks and a line or three of code using the IE activeX component in delphi around ~2000. Back then it was possible to do similar things with KHTML.

So instead of a nicely structured project its got layers of crap, even in the build system where you have to dig through python wrappers around automake, etc just to figure out simple things where some options are in one place and others are in another depending on whether they bothered to convert one part of the project or not.

i checked some of the accounts - they don't seem throwaway.

it might be that some people are excited that somebody is trying something different on the web

This was the weirdest part of my experience trying Brave–it doesn't block all ads. So for me moving from Firefox to Brave presented more ads to me. I couldn't find any documentation on how to actually block all ads similar to uBlock Origin.

I can't think of any ads that Brave hasn't blocked for me.

In fact, more often than not the issue is that Brave is blocking too much and breaks some sites. Ironically, this includes the identity verification service (Netverify) used by their wallet partner (Uphold).

Reddit.

Brave blocks 3rd party ads, i.e. ads served off-site. Reddit is one of the few sites to make the effort to host all their ad tech themselves.

Ehh... Is Brave who decides what ads I will see?

Switching to a privacy-centric browser and seeing more ads was unexpected for myself and I would guess other as well.

You can presumably install whatever additional blockers you were using in a different browser in Brave if their built-in blocking (which I've found to be VERY effective) is not enough for you.

I was unable to find an open source ad blocker for Brave, and the Brave community was less then helpful when I was confused as why I was seeing ads when the homepage for Brave talks multiple times about ad blocking without ever mentioning it is partial blocking.

Does uBlock Origin not count?

I'm also not sure I would qualify Brave's ad blocking as "partial". It blocks all 3rd party ads and tracking by default, AFAIK. But it's not as opinionated about 1st party as some other plugins are (presumably to avoid false positives).

In this case yes, Brave's POV is that ads that are hosted and powered by the publisher you chose to read are in fact OK. Brave isn't anti-ads so much as it's anti-cross site tracking and ad serving.

Thank you and that does make sense, but I don’t believe there is as clean a line between 1st and 3rd party ads as others perhaps. A first party ad can still track and share your data.

Same, I couldn't get used to Firefox, it just felt too slow, even the new version. Brave feels just like Chrome, but with less Google. I love it.

That is why I use Chromium. There is a lot you can configure with Chrome policies as well.

As far as I can tell, recent builds of Chromium have broken Google login in ways that not-chrome-at-all browsers still work? I have to log into my gmail in incognito now or it just 500s when the site tries to eat my browser.

Yep this is why I switched from Chromium to Brave. Chromium started autologging me into gmail accounts.

There is an option/preference/policy to disable it.

The final straw for me was when I had it turned off and the latest chromium released turned it back on.

That's such a dark pattern. I remember having my Keep notes uploaded to Google servers because they turned the sync back on after an update.

Haven't experienced this at all. Have you filed a bug report or been able to replicate on multiple computers?

Same. For me it combines the best of Chrome (speed) with the best of Firefox (privacy). In fact I'd argue it's like having "privacy.resistfingerprinting" on, but without as many sites breaking.

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