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Comment by dimitrios1 | Hacker News Reader

There's another angle here I think you are missing

> If you can't tolerate Firefox because of Mozilla's problems, how can you possibly stomach Chrome/Chromium with Google at the wheel?

It's because it's not enough to be wrong about something (according to certain people), but you must be punished for being wrong. And narcissists can't handle a company not being "100% right" so they punish them by going to their competitors, with no regard if their competitor is objectively worse for their causes. The intent is to cause harm to get your own way.

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How about Brave as a Chromium-based alternative to Firefox that isn't worse for the cause?

That would require nuanced discussion. We can't have that! (Kidding aside, I happily use Brave because I find Firefox borderline unusable, but also find Google's tactics unpalatable.)

The larger issue is there shouldn't be a war. There should be as many browsers as people have the hearts desire to create, and it shouldn't matter because they all follow the same standards.

However, in the real world, we've seen the noble goal of open standards get tarnished by the same bullying corporatist tactics. What we need is open and democratic standards, not just a few voices in the room running the show.

This post touches on the 'other' issue with Firefox - the various user unfriendly features that cause friction when using it. I want to love Firefox, but my time is valuable and using Brave instead saves time and frustrations, vs Firefox.

I'm pretty sure these subtle but numerous usability issues are on purpose from up high, because the usability could be fixed so easily. Still Google isn't paying 95% of Mozilla's and Moz's executives bills for them to beat Chrome, but rather to provide a lightning rod for monopoly concerns. From Google's point of view it's a bonus that it wastes the time of the market segment that cares about open systems!

But browsers are by nature an engineering project several level divorced from hardware. There is no natural law demanding that they have to be democratic. Ultimately somebody has to foot the bill for their development time. C++ developers are not exactly a scarce commodity yet you don't see any major governments willing to fund browser development despite it being a critical piece of infrastructure. "Professional services" companies like IBM, Deloitte, Oracle, Accenture, get paid hundreds of millions to billions a year to build CRUD software for the public sector. Maybe it is time to redirect some of those funding to more useful purposes.

Agreed -- Brave takes all those proprietary APIs for things like bookmark synchronization and does them in a distributed way without hitting third party servers. This is the way forward. I have 10 devices on my sync chain and it works great!

Can you install extensions on Brave for Android?

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