[demxzy]

Firefox is looking more like a very good insurance policy going forward privacy-wise. I would like to see more open source browsers though. It feels like we are getting nearer and nearer to browser mono cultures with all the chromium clones. Maybe Ms can release edge as an opensource app with it being far behind in adoption.

[Klathmon]

I believe the Edge team is actively working on open sourcing the whole browser. They have already open-sourced the JS engine behind it [0], and they worked on some integrations with other things (IIRC there was an experiment with node using the chakra engine instead of V8).

I'm with you though, I really hope this opens back up into an all out competition between 3 or more big players. And I think firefox is in a great position to take up the "top" spot in terms of security, performance, and resource usage. They have been "paying their dues" for a while now working on that stuff, and it's starting to pay off. And if they gambled right, they might just have an architecture that is overall better than Chrome's, who will be stuck with the cruft they've slowly built up over the years.

[0] https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore

[stochastic_monk]

I’m seeing more webpages entirely break on Firefox recently. I tend to reach for Vivaldi when I need to try a different browser, as it’s Chromium without all the tracking.

[mattnumbers]

Yes, on newer versions, this can happen when Tracking Protection is enabled. This feature causes things like CAPTCHA and other third-party scripts to break. When this occurs, look for a shield icon in the URL bar to the left of the green TLS padlock. Click it and disable Tracking Protection. This has fixed every site issue I've seen so far.

[GnwbZHiU]

There's also Brave browser by Brendan Eich. It's still very young and have issues, but it's getting better over time.

[rolandog]

I've enjoyed using the Brave browser so far (less than a week).

I'm excited to try out the BAT payments feature! For those out of the loop, like I was a week ago, it's a way to pay what you want per month, divided proportionally by the time spent per site between the sites you visited, as a way of trying to compensate the publishers and creators for your ad blocking.

You use a crypto currency called Basic Attention Token (BAT).

If anyone has any questions about the setup process, I'd be happy to help.

As a side note: I live in Mexico, but I was happy to be able to fund a wallet and not be region-blocked for once.

[tannhaeuser]

Before using Brave, you should consider if you value their business model as ethical (I don't). What they do is filter-out ads and replace them with ads of their customers.

[BrendanEich]

No, we do not. We talked about this model in 2016 but without specifying publishers as consenting partners -- which was implicit and is the only way we might do such third-party ad slot filling in Brave (work under way with partners, e.g., Dow Jones Media Group). The ad slot owner, in this case the publisher, gets 70%; the user gets 15%.

We would not replace ads on page without both user and publisher consent.

We are focused first on user-private ads that go in the user's inventory (notification channel and private tab), paying the user in tokens which then flow by default to the user's top sites and creators on YouTube, Twitch, etc. These ads involve no publisher at all so we pay the user 70%. In either case: 1/ ad "inventory" owner gets 70%, way above the programmatic norm of 40% or much lower due to fraud; 2/ user gets at least as much as we do. HTH.

[user812]

No they filter out ads.

Then they give everyone the opportunity to use a Patreon-Style support or view Ads, optionally.

Why isn't it ethical to target big Ad-Tech middle men like Google and Facebook and increase efficiency and privacy at the same time?

[lern_too_spel]

The publishers didn't agree to it. Brave is not allowed to unilaterally dictate terms. If I'm going to steal from publishers, nobody should benefit, especially not some smarmy browser vendor. Similarly, if I'm going to pirate, I'm not going to pay some piracy middleman who makes up some cryptocurrency to send to the content creators.

Of Firefox, Chrome, and Brave; Brave is by far the worst browser of the bunch. It's not even pretending not to be evil, let alone trying and failing like the others.

[user812]

But that's essentially was Google is doing: dictating things unilaterally.

And that's also how the web was founded. No one agreed to anything. People just started to build.

If there isn't a law against it, they are allowed to do it.

Everyone who uploads free content on the web without a paywall essentially says "take it and display it however you like".

Besides that, Brave is essentially building a sustainable model in favor of publishers. They will be very thankful.

It is ad-blocker without an alternative model that is problematic for publishers, not Brave. So I don't see why anyone besides Ad-Tech has a problem with Brave.

You conveniently ignore that most publishers desparately want to see a new model succeed, because Google and Facebook take too much of a share of the publishers. Brave takes less then Google et al., so publishers get more. That's why publishers like the Guardian are already on board.

Brave isn't free of problems, but arguing from a moral perspective isn't legitimate. So where does your hostility come from? Do you work for some big ad-tech company?

[lern_too_spel]

> But that's essentially was Google is doing: dictating things unilaterally

Nonsense. The publishers agreed to sell their inventory to Google, just as the movie studios agreed to license their content to Netflix or sell it on DVD.

Everything else from your post stems from this fundamental misunderstanding about how publishers monetize their content.

> That's why publishers like the Guardian are already on board.

Then it's ethical for Brave to monetize The Guardian's content. It is not ethical for it to monetize everybody else's. The same with a piracy service. If a piracy service resells content it has an agreement from the owner to resell, that's kosher. It doesn't mean that it also gets to resell everybody else's content.

> Do you work for some big ad-tech company?

No. I'm just not stupid enough to accept Eich's stupid output.

[tannhaeuser]

> arguing from a moral perspective isn't legitimate

Not the one you're responding to, but to say his/her reasoning isn't "legitimate" is a bit rich when the GP (me) was about ethics. I'm with you on Google/Fb getting all the ad spent, but I don't think another middleman and wannabe monopoly such as Patreon is going to solve it. I might be in the minority here, but I think its fair publishers get their clicks for their content-based, non-tracking ads; we need to drive tracking, targeting and other third-party crap out of the web under privacy regulations, though, because that's what breaks the feedback of ad spend to publishers/creators (apart from causing the general race-to-the-bottom trend).