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Comment by MrOwnPut | Hacker News Reader

All browsers deal in advertising, it's the only way to make money on a free product.

And if you don't want the JS that Eich created to run in your browser, you can turn it off... most people like to run sandboxed code instead of installing native programs.

Mozilla makes most of their money from Google Search referrals.

Chrome was entirely built to put more eyeballs on Google ads and track you.

There's a lot more privacy features built into Brave than there are in other browsers. It's user oriented, not adtech oriented.

Of Brave, Chrome, and Firefox, who has the built in ad blocker?

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> All browsers deal in advertising, it's the only way to make money on a free product.

That's a pretty confidently wrong statement.

You're aware of Wikipedia, right? More directly relevant: Konqueror?

And as is typical of HN, you seem to be unaware that people might be motivated by things other than money. Browsers are a large enough undertaking that you need some money to make one sustainably, but when money isn't your primary motivation it turns out you can do quite a bit with less.

> There's a lot more privacy features built into Brave than there are in other browsers. It's user oriented, not adtech oriented.

Brave is literally adtech. They sell ads.

You got pedantic instead of replying to my overall point.

To take a step back, which browser do you use? Did it come with an ad blocker?

Do you apply these same standards to all browsers and fiercely challenge them like Brave, let's say... Firefox?

I'm challenging the claim that Brave is somehow better, when in fact it's a step back.

> Do you apply these same standards to all browsers and fiercely challenge them like Brave, let's say... Firefox?

Firefox doesn't claim that they're trying to address the problem of ads on the internet, so no, I don't challenge Firefox's false claims. See how that works?

https://imgur.com/a/p4CVBHb

"Power and privacy to the people. No need to dig into your security settings. Fierce privacy is our default."

- Firefox on a recent update. You know, a browser that defaults to Google search and having search suggestions on. I know I'd have a couple privacy settings to change.

> All browsers deal in advertising, it's the only way to make money on a free product.

I don't want my browser to be a "product". If we didn't have people pushing for exponentially increasing complexity because they want the web to be an app platform then we could have browsers developed by individuals or groups in their free time.

But even if you insist on full time developers, there are alternative funding methods. Donations & grants being the most appropriate for something that benefits the general public.

> And if you don't want the JS that Eich created to run in your browser, you can turn it off... most people like to run sandboxed code instead of installing native programs.

The problem isn't being able to run sandboxed programs vs. native programs, the problem is that things that are supposed to be documents can run "sandboxed" programs where the sandbox is leaky and getting more leaks addded because perfect sandboxing is not what you want for applications that are supposed to be usable and therefore need to interact with the outside world.

Pointing at other browsers and pretending that them being ad-funded and/or also doing bad things makes any thing Brave does better is ridiculous.

If the EU was interested in privacy instead of violating privacy (privacy can be the "right to be left alone", e.g. not be harassed by door-to-door salespeople, cookie popups, etc.) it would have either fully funded Firefox or forked Firefox and fully funded it a long time ago.

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