The mistake was getting caught? Eich’s initial response was that was intentional and ethical. Until it went viral and his view evolved. Granted, I’m not too keen to give him or Brave much benefit of doubt.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me and everyone over reacted so they took it off.
Hold what data? The affiliate ID?
> 1/ We made a mistake, we're correcting
[0] https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1269313200127795201
It's the same thing as when FireFox adds it's referral code when going to Google Search, I believe that's most of their revenue...
TLDR: the bug was the referral code was being added in the autocomplete. It should have only been added to the exact affiliate address, such as "binance.us".
OP said "Mistake was getting caught" which to me implies that he is using the word "mistake" to reduce accountability rather than increase it. I think it's the latter: he's using the word "mistake" to take responsibility for having made a decision his users disagree with (whether or not it's objectively bad, I think is a moot point given the backlash from users).
Same clarification he makes in this tweet:
"I think you used "mistake" where you meant "accident". I never said it was accidental. We were treating it like a search query (which all big browsers do tag with an affiliate id to get paid from by the search provider). But a valid domain name is not a search query. Fixing."
https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1269421487011713030?s...
The browser injecting a referrer header seems less transparent than it being in the link, no?