The success of web browser Brave is a bad sign for Google – here’s why | Hacker News Reader

The success of web browser Brave is a bad sign for Google – here’s why

techradar.com

28 pointsjohncena339 comments

Brave essentially plays the advertisement business well. They advertised with speed and privacy for the majority time while not providing anything more than a adblock build into the browser.

The browser is still very crypto based and comes with their own build in add service and crypto currency.

Only very recent they started to add some fingerprint protection, its still only a very small subset of fingerprinting but it potentially blocks some approaches of it.

There is still a big question mark about the browser, because the base building block of privacy is trust and Brave has many times showen that it might not a trustworthy company with issues that only got addressed after public outrages.

Out of genuine curiosity. What does brave do that’s so privacy focused and how is it better than Firefox on this front? Is it beating Firefox at the privacy pitch somehow?

Brave’s market share seems to be siphoning off Firefox users primarily more than Chrome’s…

> Brave’s market share seems to be siphoning off Firefox users primarily more than Chrome’s…

I guess I'm one of those people.

I was on Firefox because I refused to use Chrome, but Chrome is the de facto standard whether I like it or not, so I was always open to switching to a Chromium browser that didn't suck.

I tried Vivaldi for a while, but it was obvious it was never going to grow beyond a very niche user base. I tried Brave a couple years ago and it wasn't quite ready. I tried it again last year and now it's my main browser.

Without getting into any technical talking points, there's definitely a market for "Chromium browser that cares about privacy and actually has a decent share of the market". Whatever you think about BAT or Tor support, they brought in a critical mass of early adopters.

Their fingerprint randomization works great.

But not as great as how fingerprint generalization works in a hardened Firefox[0].

[0]: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

In their own words - https://brave.com/privacy-features/

Did someone forget to mention Brave is a fork of Chromium?

That's not really relevant to the point of the article, which is talking about how privacy-centric internet services are rising in popularity, and the danger that poses to Google's business model.

It will always be relevant. This privacy centric internet service depends on Google’s coding of Chromium. Needing to maintain a significant fork or Chromium if some changes occur that are not privacy friendly will likely cost a lot of money. Vs now where they presumably keep merging in all changes of Chromium.

Hmm, I can finally agree with the chant "Go, Brendan!"

Although, any Chromium browser helps cement Google's position as the one who writes the rules, so it is with mixed feelings. Why did Mozilla have to fire Brendan Eich, again?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com