Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Spivak 538 days ago
You're scraping the paint off with how far you're dragging the goalposts.

Brave has a weird crypto thing, it's on not by default, it's not pushed on you, I don't even know how to turn it on.

Firefox right now today has ads in the URL bar. I'm using Waterfox to avoid all Mozilla's garbage but Brave is up near the top of least shitty.
1 comments
satvikpendem 538 days ago
Up near the top? It literally had a controversies section on Wikipedia due to all these shady things it did, with cryptocurrency and others, I am not sure how worse it can get [0]. I'll take URL ads any day of the week compared to the kinds of things Brave pulled over the years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Brave_(web_browse...

link
Spivak 538 days ago
The list for Firefox over the years would warrant a whole page on Wikipedia. Browser choices are a who's who of who's debased themselves the fewest number of times trying to squeeze money out of a free product. The current state of Brave is better than the current state of Firefox right now.
link
satvikpendem 538 days ago
I simply don't understand how you could think that about Brave yet in the same breath say that Firefox is worse, what exactly is worse about Firefox than hiding a literally cryptocurrency scam token in the browser itself?
link
Spivak 538 days ago
Brave today: Here's a free browser with no ads, built-in adblock and user-respecting defaults. If you want there's also this crypto thing you can try. No pressure, most people don't. We also have an ad supported search engine as our default.

Firefox today: Here's a free browser with ads on the new tab page, ads in the url bar, ads in Pocket, ads for our VPN service, and we let advertisers collect your data same as Chrome with "privacy preservation ad measurement" and you have to turn all of that off. We have an ad supported search engine by default. We also redirect your DNS queries to a third party "for your privacy."

I think people want Firefox to be better than it is in practice because of the historical good will they've built up over the years. I wish they were better too.

link
satvikpendem 537 days ago
Personally I'd much rather have a non-Chromium browser with some unintrusive ads than one with cryptocurrency, perhaps that is where our differences lie. And anyway, with Chromium being upstream with Manifest v3, who knows how long Brave can keep up its adblocking capabilities?
link