Hacker News Reader

Comment by melbourne_mat | Hacker News Reader

Brave has ad blocking built in - you don't need extensions.

Brave is just crypto adware, they even went so far as to automatically append crypto exchange referral codes to urls [0]

Funded by Palantir Technologies by the way [1]

Their ad rewards system analyses and modifies the original webcontent, replacing existing ads with their own (and who knows what other code they inject) [2]

Then there's their hidden tracker URL whitelist [3]

No thanks.

[0] https://twitter.com/cryptonator1337/status/12692014801055784...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/fe37ml/exclusive_b...

[2] https://brave.com/brave-launches-user-trials-for-opt-in-ads/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19129309#19129642

Edit: Nearly forgot about their partner promo headers that they can and do update on the fly https://laptop-updates.brave.com/promo/custom-headers

Don't enable ads if you do not want them. Personally I think avoiding ads is important so I don't enable them. Thus Brave acts like what Firefox should be had its organization not become so broken.

The custom ads for crypto rewards (which they've not been paying out) is probably the least concerning thing in that list.

The URL modification was silently enabled by default, and the tracker whitelist and marketing headers are not configurable at all.

Mozilla isn't what it used to be, but at least they're not acting like the Russian mob.

> replacing existing ads with their own (and who knows what other code they inject)

This is completely wrong. Brave ads are shown in OS notifications.

They have most definitely done this, I have seen it myself on Android. I'll see if I can find some more sources on this later.

Thanks for pointing that out - I feel dumb recommending Brave now

Reply on news.ycombinator.com