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Comment by axaxs | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Hear, hear. The block chain stuff is for the birds, IMO. And I don't do the VPN stuff. Not google, but still chromium , with ad-blocking is fantastic.

How is Brave better than Chromium with uBlock Origin, in this case?

Not a ton of difference on desktop. You can sync without logging in, I guess, but that's pretty minor. However, I require that my mobile and desktop sync, and as far as I can tell you can't ad block Chrome on mobile.

Brave's adblocker is all native code, so it's a bit more memory/CPU friendly than uBlock Origin. There's also some enhancements like CNAME uncloaking[1], which only otherwise works in uBlock Origin on Firefox because Chromium doesn't expose the required DNS API support for extensions.

[1] https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/

CNAME cloaking is only the first of many possible mitigations. CNAME flattening would be the next likely angle of attack.

Advertisers can very well get websites to run "cloud functions" at the edge (with Fastly, Cloudflare, Netlify, Vercel, AWS Lambda etc) under the first-party domain, and the content blockers (native or not) will be none the wiser. This is similar to how content blockers struggle to block ads served from first-party domains on YouTube and other Facebook properties.

Exhibit A: https://github.com/samkelleher/cloudflare-worker-google-anal...

Of course, adblocking has always been and will always be a game of cat-and-mouse.

Interesting link. I will say though, Brave's been aggressively pushing for an end to third-party cookies, and if websites are increasingly forced to run first-party analytics as a counter-measure, that is still a major win for the internet as a whole.

Yeah, what I do now on my ff fork is just use no script by default… would be great if i decided to add a function in the dom module that just stripped out all script tags, indexed them in a list, displayed that list in the UI, then another function to process a whitelist to allow specific script tags for… just haven't implemented it yet cause no script is enough for me but im perpetually tempted just from the performance boost.

Same for ad blocking but I have native mitigations with browser meta data spoofing on every http request (which of course gets unmasked if you log into sites, but its always funny to get a warning email from google when I check gmail occasionally).

Brave works on mobile and supports ad blocking I've never tried it on desktop but on mobile it offers the performance of Chrome without the ads.

Did you compare it to Bromite?

I'm being nit picky, but I keep seeing people write that they "don't like ads", which seems silly because nobody likes ads, of course.

I knew a guy that was reading every evening in bed the paper ads he received in his mailbox.

I lost track of him about 10 or 15 years ago, but I wouldn't be surprised to know that he has a mobile infested with ads!

> I keep seeing people write that they "don't like ads", which seems silly because nobody likes ads, of course.

I actually do like some ads. I have money, and I like to buy cool and interesting things. Occasionally, ads tell me about a new thing or service I'd never heard of. Those are ads that I'm really glad I saw. When they're respectfully informing me of things I might actually be interested in, then I don't mind them.

When I don't like ads is when they slow the page load down by 100x. When I don't like ads is when they have malicious exploits of my browser to install malware on my computer. When I don't like ads is when they auto-play video or put intrusive obnoxious things all over the screen. (Seriously, does anyone respond to those kinds of ads?) When I don't like ads is when they chase me around the internet trying to get me to buy the thing that I just bought.

Using Brave, I see the static ads, and I get to choose to see ads through the Brave network or not. At the moment, I don't mind the Brave network ads -- they're mostly for crypto, which I don't care about; but they're not obnoxious and I know I can turn them off. And occasionally they're for things I might actually be interested in, like chess or electronics.

Right now only 2 of the sites I visit regularly are signed up to be Brave content creators; when this reaches a critical mass, I'll probably start putting in $10-20 per month specifically to support them. At that point, maybe I'll disable the Brave netork ads... or maybe I won't.

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