Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by RandomBacon 2482 days ago
They need a killer feature.

Firefox used to be the only better alternative to IE.

Then Chrome came along and it used to be the best at tabs and resources.

Then Brave came along with automatic ad-blocking.

Firefox needs to match the competition and surpass it. What would the next killer feature be?

4 comments

> Then Brave came along with automatic ad-blocking.

I don't think I will ever use Brave due to how it "blocks ads" I think the industry should be doing the job of Brave which is to ensure ads aren't infested with bad code. No ad server should serve arbitrary JS that hasn't been tested and secured. If it costs money to ensure this then they should charge more for ads. If an ad infests machines, the ad company should be liable, and they should really go after the person who paid for the ad too.

I will never use Brave because they're replacing ads with their own and making money doing it. uBlock Origin on FF is better and not scummy like Brave.

People shouldn't break the law, but until that never happens, I will do what I can to protect myself.

You are misinformed. Brave does not "[replace] ads with their own" and we never have. We are working with publishers to do private/anonymous ads which pay them 70% and the user 15% of gross revenue, but these are not out yet.

We already pay users 70% of revenue for ads that go in the user's own space, not in any publisher slot.

Whether user or publisher ads, in Brave neither kind uses any tracking. Matching is done locally against an objective (same for all users in a region on a given day) catalog; views and clicks confirmed using a Privacy Pass like "blind signature" protocol. No user identifier or linkability among events on any server, even ours.

If you acted on incorrect information, I hope you'll stop repeating it and give Brave a try. Thanks.

For me, the killer feature is multi-account containers. Unfortunately, the support for them isn't great.
Mozilla, please oh please have Firefox Sync support Multi-account containers. I have way too many settings and redirects configured with MAC and Cookie Auto-Delete to work with MAC that I dread having to switch to another computer.
Privacy!

Rethink the whole thing from the ground up with privacy in mind. This includes transparency to whats going on under the hood, an integration of important plugins (your average video downloading plugin is likely siphoning all kinds of information), sandboxing, privacy-aware defaults, and banning and blacklisting a whole lot of known crap!

The mainstream user doesn't care about privacy. Speed has always been paramount.
For some reason I read that as "Piracy!" Got my mind running in a rather different direction. lol
Unfortunately, to most of the adtech and copyright lobby, those two things are always going to go together.
On mobile people need to know that uBlock Origin works the same as on the desktop.