I've tried helium as a chrome-based ad-blocking browser alternative and found it nice to not have to hide the crypto/AI-nonsense since it doesn't exist. Everything beyond the Crypto/AI stuff is indeed pretty damn good in Brave.

At the end of the day it's basically just a uBlock-Origin preset for chromium, but that's really all I'd want from Brave regardless.

You might like Brave Origin then. If hidable crypto integration is what keeps Brave free, I am personally content with it.

I haven't heard of it before, and the crypto ads was the reason I lost interest for Brave. I will have a look, thanks!

It's $60 for other platforms but free for Linux

https://brave.com/origin/linux/

Huh, that does look nice. Its been a long time since I used Brave last. Does it do anything beyond ad-blocking over chrome? If not I don't think I can be be bothered to switch from one ad-blocking chrome to another, just to due inertia and my lazyness.

It may be better in the shorter term, but using yet another Chromium based browser doesn't really improve the current situation with Google's browser monopoly. I'm personally using Firefox Nightly, and so far it has served me well.

but using yet another Chromium based browser doesn't really improve the current situation with Google's browser monopoly.

Not everyone wants to be a martyr/activist to change their habits and experience in order to support a political cause they don't really understand.

Most people just want the best, frictionless and most familiar experience to the product they already know and love, which often means a slick and shiny product from a monopolistic anti-consumer company.

support a political cause they don't really understand.

I'll accept this as a reasonable excuse for the non-HN crowd.

But the HN crowd should understand the cause. We've all experienced or heard stories of the IE6 monopoly days, and few of us trust Google.

And it's not much of a sacrifice to use Firefox, it's a great browser. Maybe not the best for everybody, but it is the best for some and OK for many/all. Calling yourself a martyr just because you use Firefox for political reasons seems a stretch.

I'll accept this as a reasonable excuse for the non-HN crowd.

That's who I was referring to. If you want Chrome to not be a monopoly anymore you'll need to convince gen-pop to switch not just part of HN.

And it's not much of a sacrifice to use Firefox,

It can be. A few of my most visited websites have issues on FF, and Chrome does page translation far better than FF, which is a must-have for me as I live in a foreign country. Then Chrome's "Image lens" AI search is invaluable for my hobby work.

Calling yourself a martyr just because you use Firefox for political reasons seems a stretch.

Majority of people will dump the new browser the second the find a website that doesn't work well on it. Using it despite that, IS a political statement, that not everyone will make. If you want FF to get more adoption, then you need to acknowledge its weaknesses so that it can fix them, and not bury our heads in the sand and attack its critics.

A few of my most visited websites have issues on FF

I use FF with FingerprintResist on, and many things such as WebGL outright disabled, on top of very restrictive DNS blacklist and uBlock Origin, and even despite all of that I find Firefox very usable. I can make online payments and book flights and other such things normally. I rarely, if ever, have to use a clean, stock Firefox profile or fall back to Chromium. On machine at least, Firefox gets a higher Speedometer 3.1 score than Chromium.

Using it despite that, IS a political statement, that not everyone will make.

Not necessarily. Some of us just really don't like using Chromium-based browsers due to usability issues and want to use one that works better for them.

Most people just want the best, frictionless and most familiar experience

Every time there's a thread about browsers, at least one commenter presents themselves as a self-appointed representative of "the users" and declares what the users really want.

And it's not that these self-appointed representatives are wrong, necessarily, but they tend to say one of two things: either The People want serious privacy and FOSS commitments and no AI, or they want everything smooth and don't care about privacy. And whichever one it is, it's the most obvious thing in the world, according to the person saying it.

presents themselves as a self-appointed representative and declares what the users really want

Since you're making rude false accusations like that, let me ask you, are you saying most people DON'T want "the best, frictionless and most familiar experience"?

Because I never met anyone who said they wanted a slower jankier less intuitive product than what they used before.

So how was my statement wrong when I said what people want?

either The People want serious privacy and FOSS commitments

Most people don't care about privacy and FOSS, otherwise Google wouldn't be one of the most valuable companies in the world with some of the most popular products.

To clarify, by "most people" I mean most people in absolute terms, like the ones you when you touch grass, not just those from your HN/tech bubble, those are not "most people".

One person's "rude" is another person's request to tether claims to objective reality in some tractable way, even if it's just a report of plausible enough anecdotal experience.

Because I never met anyone who said they wanted a slower jankier less intuitive product than what they used before.

Well someone's having big feelings, but this is a straw man, speed and privacy don't have to be mutually exclusive and in practice they aren't for the most part. Users who are casual enough that ad tech telemetry and privacy are mysterious words to them are also not people who are going to note the 0.1% difference in performance that you claim they're prioritizing. Belligerently repeating a just so story based on a flawed framing of trade-offs faced by users doesn't make it more true.

Most people don't care about privacy and FOSS

Again, this is a just so story, and I think it's just something weird about the vernacular of HN that people are comfortable making claims like this or thinking they can be leveraged to make authoritative judgments. But one person's trust me bro is as good as anothers, and I don't even think it's right that people really are trading privacy for performance and any sort of margin that significant enough to really be noticed. And frankly, if they do notice a performance difference, it's probably because they don't have ad block and if they don't have ad block it's probably because they're using Chrome.

Google actually maintains their market share through a combination of strong user experience and an utterly dominant position as a distributor. Chrome is the default browser on over a billion devices and is advertised and deeply integrated into the ecosystem of the world's most used website. I've said it a million times but if it was just about the inherent quality of the product then Opera would have conquered the world back in 2012.

This mechanism is well understood pretty much anytime software monopolies face legal scrutiny. Microsoft wanted people to believe that Internet explorer was just that much better than the competition, and Google probably wanted the world to believe its search was so much better, which is why it had to be the default option for Apple devices in Europe. But if that was an organic manifestation of consumer preference, it wouldn't have to be maintained with billion dollar arrangements, or hostile ecosystem lockout that came under legal scrutiny.

Since you're making rude false accusations like that, let me ask you, are you saying most people DON'T want "the best, frictionless and most familiar experience"?

People want frictionless and familiar experience. But they also want tools where they are not the product (either by having their data sold, or being fed ads, or being captured by enshittificating services because alternative services cannot compete due to artificial barriers, ...). (edit: and I'm not saying that Chromium does that, just showing that "what people want" is not so simplistic)

Can you prove me that this other statement is incorrect? Are you saying that most people DON'T want to not be abused by their tools?

Of course not. The problem is not that your sentence is not true, it is that your sentence is loaded: you just provide one obvious sentence saying "most people love having the benefices of this product", but totally ignore that 1) this product also has disadvantages that people don't like, 2) alternative products provide other set of benefices and disadvantages.

I personally agree with the previous comment: these "most people" arguments are usually very poor, and it does not reflect very well on people who make them. (the fact that "best, frictionless and familiar experiences" is an advantage can be a good point to bring to the conversation, but it is way less simplistic than that (what is "best", what is "familiar", did people did not want browser tabs because it was not familiar, is a monopolistic situation as with IE6 at the time really "frictionless" when it allowed IE6 to not progress or fix bugs, is "open in 0.62 seconds" being better than "open in 0.75 seconds" really matter for the majority of people, ...) and this discussion can easily done in a better way than with the poor "most people want" argument)

Can you prove me that this other statement is incorrect?

I already did before: Google.

Are you saying that most people DON'T want to not be abused by their tools?

Firsty, most people don't consider themselves as "being abused" when they use Google Chrome instead of FF, otherwise they wouldn't use it voluntarily in such great numbers. That's just a hill HN and techies love to die on that not representative of the majority.

Secondly, most people (outside of tech) either don't even know they are the product, or they don't even care. See facebook, instagram, X, etc as proof.

Billions of people use non-Google web browsers every day. Monopoly does not mean "company or product I don't like".

Like?

Edge, chrome, chromium, brave, vivaldi, opera... its all just rebadged chromium.

There's chrome, Firefox, safari.

Look at how many iPhones have been sold. They use Safari as the default browser.

Is there something in Firefox's license that prevents forking? Why does it seems like all of these browser are always Chromium forks and we never see Firefox forks go mainstream?

There are Firefox forks out there. LibreWolf, Pale Moon, and WaterFox are the bet known. Unsure which, if any, are still active.

using yet another Chromium based browser doesn't really improve the current situation with Google's browser monopoly

It's not a monopoly if you can build your own with it. This is like saying glibc is a monopoly.

Also been using Brave for a while. All the crypto stuff needs to be turned off but besides that for me, it's just better Chrome. Firefox always felt slower to me, Safari is just a weird kid from the neighborhood I could never get to like. I LOVED Arc. I think its a near perfect browser, but lack of proper mobile browser and Browser Company dropping Arc in favor of the new rebranded Arc with AI just left me with distrust. Brave just works, I can use it on all my devices, OSes, I can have uBlock Origin on it and vertical tabs. I don't really need anything else at this point.

I LOVED Arc.

I assume you've heard of it, but just in case you haven't: you should try Zen! It's basically Arc, but based on Firefox, open source and, more importantly, actively maintained.

https://zen-browser.app

I had some messing around to do up front, like hiding all the crypto and AI nonsense...

Switching to Brave from Firefox due to AI and ethical concerns seems like a lateral move at best if being generous.

I'd like to switch friends and family over to brave, but trying to avoid ads that might confuse them was kind of the point...so....

Right, I felt the same thing. Switching to Brave because Firefox "isn't ethical enough" is like switching to McDonald's because the farmer's market produce isn't organic enough.

I got fed up with ads in search results and invasive tracking from Google.

I've switched fully to Meta's Muse for all of my research going forward.

You got fed up with invasive tracking so you switched to a Meta product?

I think they're joking.

Just as a counterpoint, I switched to Brave because Firefox no longer holds the technical or moral high ground. Brave is an open-source browser which makes it different from Chrome and Vivaldi. Brave is a privacy-focused browser. Brave is the only browser that is open source and also lets me pay for it so I can have a clean, uncluttered, fast experience. Brave is the only chromium-based browser that I'm aware of that continues to support Manifest V2 for UBlock Origin, which is critical for my use case.

Mozilla has been distracted by a million shiny things around them. They've been mismanaged almost criminally and they have changed their terms of service to be much less privacy-oriented than they used to be.

In my humble opinion, Brave gets far too much hate on this site and is actually the best browser made today in terms of open source availability, a focus on privacy and empowerment of the end user, while maximizing site compatibility.

Brave is a privacy-focused browser.

Isn't Brave's main source of revenue serving you ads based on information collected about you from while using their browser?

It still amazes me that in California if someone donates to anti-gay marriage initiative they can be openly called "absolute scumbag" and people just roll with it. It's called having political views.

"having political views" is not an escape hatch for denying the humanity of other people.

Opposing gay marriage is not denying the humanity of gay people. I'm not even opposed to gay marriage, but hyperbolic language like yours only hurts discussions, it never ever helps.

In a previous generation, the deserving target of eyerolls and groans was people who both-sidesed an issue. In part because it was shallow, and part because it was just a weaponized way of talking where you get to be political under superficial the guise of neutrality. Asking an audience to believe it is just not respecting the intelligence of your audience.

I think the version of that for our generation is the person who says "Gosh let's not talk politics" about obviously political things when doing so is clearly just to shield preferred targets from criticism. Of course it's not always that, and you can never prove it in any particular instance, which is why it's such convenient phrasing. But it gets eye-rolls for a reason.

There was a famous court case where the gay widow had no legal rights over their dying partners medical care, that is a pronounced human right that a heterosexual couple has over a gay couple that has been defined and why the opposition actually hurts people in ways many have not considered.

Having the opinion that there should be restaurants, stores, and bathrooms only for white people was an acceptable, mainstream political view during my father's lifetime. Expressing that opinion now would make you a social pariah. If you donated money in support of that cause today you'd probably be fair game for being openly called an "absolute scumbag" almost universally.

How that analogy compares to being against same-sex marriage is going to vary from person to person, but times change, as does what is considered just political views vs a civil rights issue.

It always surprises me that people can't take a step back and understand that objecting to today's progress is like objecting to women voting, or interracial marriage. You're just signing up to be mad your whole life and to be seen as a historical curiosity.

The majority of the voters was on his side. 52.24% voted yes and there was a 79.42% voter turn out. A huge number of Californians agreed with him at the time. This is quite a bit different than segregation today since acceptance of gay marriage was quite a bit lower and it was a newer issue than segregation.

Someone who derides someone else who donates to causes they find disgusting is also a political view. You're just talking about two people with political views.

disagreeing with someone is a political view, debasing them for it is ideological

I will help the creation of and donate to an anti-maga bill that bans magas from existing eg jailing them if they express maga views. Its called having political views. I hope you won't complaint.

This is a little off-topic, but the article calls it out specifically, accusing Brendan Eich of being an "absolute scumbag" Aren't we past performative displays of outrage over this?

He, like 52% of voting Californians, in 2008, opposed gay marriage. This was a different time: there were various arguments about "civil unions", concern from religious groups, worries about slippery slopes, etc., but we are passed that now -- he no longer holds this belief, and time has proven those concerns to be ill founded. Nobody should be held in indefinite contempt for political positions they once held. If we can forgive Barack Obama for opposing gay marriage, then we can forgive Brendan Eich. You can say that you like his work without having to have endless caveats about how you don't agree with a political position he took twenty years ago that even he no longer advocates.

You can say that you like his work without having to have endless caveats about how you don't agree with a political position he took twenty years ago that *even he no longer believes*.

Not according to the public record.

I updated the comment to say that "... he no longer advocates". In the public record, to be clear, his total contribution to the discourse was a financial disclosure of a donation. We have literally no idea if he has made further donations, either in favor of or against this or any other policy (because smaller donations are anonymous) and he has refused to speak publicly about anything related to this, except to offer general support for "inclusiveness".

But this comment is of a type that I feel we have moved past. Ideological purity tests were always awful. If you want someone to set policy for how marriage should be considered in some context, then Eich is probably not the person to ask to do this.

But on technical matters unrelated to this I fail to see how it has any bearing at all, because his positions (based on indirect evidence) were not outlandish or out of the mainstream at the time.

I don't disagree that it's a pretty sharp left turn for this (kind of muddled in general) blog post; I was pretty narrowly focused on the ahistorical notion that Eich had recanted in the intervening years.

That being said, I find it odd that you think no one can sincerely hold the position that someone's bigotry was/is abhorrent, however mainstream it was when they were putting money behind it (which is about as direct a piece of evidence that you can get).

The author mentions that he tried Vivaldi. Vivaldi is the spiritual successor to the original Opera browser (not the Opera browser you get today, which is crap). Opera was for power users, and the same goes for Vivaldi today. I can see that there's a learning curve, and it takes some time to get used to. But overall, it's a no-nonsense, fully featured workhorse that I use as my main browser. It has built-in ad blocking, mouse gestures, sync between devices, pane tiling, and a myriad of other nice little features I miss when using any other browser. Bonus points: Vivaldi on Android recently added support for Chrome extensions. It's not for everyone, but I suggest giving it a try.

Brave is the only Chromium browser recommended by Privacy Guides which is why I chose it. It has a good update schedule and I never have problems with ads.

Once I set it up, it's been just a clean, ad-free browser. Based on Little Snitch, which is free on Linux, like Brave Origin, Brave has a clean list of default connections.

While Firefox may be considering shipping Brave shields for ad block, wouldn't Brave be more opposing to Google's monopoly considering it blocks their business model? Firefox is funded by Google and has bad privacy by default. It connects to Google servers when you first set it up.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47697870

The LibreWolf browser, and if need be the IronFox browser for Android, should have been installed and analyzed in parallel with Brave by the OP, then I'd accept that a proper analysis was begun.

I am not trying to spread FUD, but at the edge of my consciousness, I remember privacyguides getting some flak for some reason. Looking it up now, there's a lot of posts on reddit accusing them of putting affiliates on the site instead of actual private software.

Looking at it briefly, their software choices seem mostly sane to me. Not a lot of FOSS, but a lot of non-technical people don't know how to setup FOSS to begin with. Can't really get mad at a site recommending Signal and Syncthing and local LLMs.

I haven't seen privacyguides mentioned since being on HN, and I trust this site more than others. What are people's opinions on it?

I knew the "elephant in the room" section of the article was coming before I started reading... but then it wasn't even about the right thing! The other different, bigger, angrier, elephant in the room is about Brave being YACB (Yet Another Chromium Browser). A browser built on the Chromium project is riding on top of that elephant trying to tell it where to go.

I think Google created a "moat" in terms of hyperaccelerating browser development with disproportionate firepower that nobody else could keep up with. And one potential non-terrible use of AI might be diminishing that moat and with it Google's ability to steer the whole web into their ecosystem. So if you want to be an optimist maybe that's a silver lining that will grow with time.

It may be YACB, but that is precisely why it works for the author. Chromium browsers have the best compatibility because that is what is tested for. If it were any other way, then this post wouldn't exist.

Unfortunately, by switching to YACB, the user is effectively making Firefox less relevant.

So if you want it to be relevant, you actually do have to use it. Otherwise you can just as well give up and not care at all about the browser monopoly.

I was like you once. I still care - but Mozilla just insists on sabotaging themselves, and it's too far gone now. Honestly at this point I'm just waiting for Mozilla to implode, so something better can rise from its ashes.

A Phoenix, if you will...

If anyone is reading this and sees compatibility as their primary reason for staying with a Chromium browser: I have been using Firefox as my main browser for many years now, and I can count on one hand the number of times where I've been hit by compatibility issues.

The big one is anything to do with video calling — things often work but not as well, or you can voice call but not use video, or something like that. Most of the time the call works well enough, or I use a native app anyway, in which case this isn't a problem, but I suspect this is the thing people are most likely to run into in practice.

The other one is WebUSB, which is useful for certain tools that flash hardware (e.g. keyboards) from the browser. This is rarer, but I still have Chrome around so I can still use these tools. And mostly there's another option anyway, it's just that WebUSB makes things more convenient.

I have heard people complain about Cloudflare, but I've never noticed this. I suspect this is less to do with Chrome/Firefox, and more to do with privacy settings that Firefox makes more accessible. But again, I've never had an issue with Cloudflare myself, so I can't say much about this.

Other than that, I genuinely can't think of the last time I wanted to use a website but couldn't because of Firefox. And even in the above situations, it's rare that I actually run into issues, it's just something I'm aware of as a possible cause if something happens. Most of the time things work perfectly well.

I'd assume that isn't the elephant in the room since Vivaldi is also YACB

It would be the elephant in the room for both Brave and Vivaldi (though the author is not wrong that Vivaldi doesn't seem to to have captured the old Opera magic). The article is at least partially juxtaposing Brave against Firefox.

It's okay, soon everybody will switch to their own vibe-coded browsers, right?

(https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender this looks so dead...)

I'm excited for ladybird to reach alpha

No thank you, I prefer supporting creators who respect human rights

Fair enough. Which browser are you currently using?

Iceweasel

And you are certain that its maintainers comply with your requirements?

Yes

EDIT: Yes to the reply repeat comment as well. Lose the FUD. I have been in the scene for years, and I have researched and sourced carefully.

You might be amoral, some of us give a fsck.

What's the story?

I originally had an comment about how the creators did support human rights but then I did more reading. While Kling is trying to be neutral with respect to this particular project, his (personal) politics outside of the project would have placed him in the extreme far right a decade ago (by U.S. standards, so ever further right by European standards).

A browser built on the Chromium project is riding on top of that elephant trying to tell it where to go.

You can give away all the insanely expensive base software to build a browser and you'll still get blamed for not encouraging enough competition.

Chromium being open-source is a red herring here. The web is not an application, it is a protocol between clients and servers. Google has immense influence on both sides of that protocol, and regularly attempts to use that influence in an anticompetitive way. Chromium being open source just means you can fork the client, but that gives you essentially no influence over the web as a protocol; if Google wants to take the web in a direction that your fork doesn't agree with (e.g. adding new APIs that you don't want to support or getting rid of APIs that you do), then you're out of luck regardless of your ability to compile the code.

What are the two sides of the protocol?

"Yes yes yes. Brave was founded by an absolute scumbag."

The linked source cites: "...a 2008 donation of $1,000 to California Proposition 8, which called for the banning of same-sex marriage in California, and donations in the amount of $2,100 to Proposition 8 supporter Tom McClintock between 2008 and 2010."

I assume Brendan Eich was already relatively wealthy at the time and that these donations represented a modest fraction of his income. Whatever happened to some nuance in public discourse? How do people who condemn someone’s character so categorically over donations made roughly 18 years ago function in a workplace with diverse opinions,...

... or for that matter, navigate society?

a 2008 donation of $1,000 to California Proposition 8

The woke/cancel culture crowd (none of whom knew him personally) went after him with a vengeance in 2014, but there were LGBT and LGBT-allied co-workers of his at the time who were aghast at the outrage. Here are three examples I could find online just now [0][1][2]

[0] https://subfictional.com/on-brendan-eich-as-ceo-of-mozilla/

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150202162458/http://words.tofu...

[2] https://medium.com/@__davidflanagan/for-the-record-7645a4bf8...

Tbf opposing gay marriage is quite an extreme opinion in much of the developed world. I suspect Eich's position on the matter is tied to his Roman Catholic faith, so although he showed a certain level of remorse in 2014, he never actually came out in support of gay marriage. He then later spread misinformation about mask-wearing during COVID, including suggestions that people could die from wearing a mask.

I don't think it's fair to call it "extreme". Small minority in some countries, minority in most and about half of the population in some is imo a fair assessment. Even in USA it looks more like 70-30 if I am reading the polls correctly.

Prop 8, the anti-gay-marriage proposition that Eich donated money to support, passed with 52% of the vote.

Eich never clarified his position (nor did he retract it nor apologize) so we have literally no idea what aspect of this he supported along with 52% of the population of California.

Brave has the best filter lists built into a blocker. Between Bypass Paywalls Clean Filters and Brave Experimental Adblock rules for blocking twitch.tv ads, it's just the best option for most people.

Giving away Brave Origin for free on Linux is just the cherry on top.

I won't be using Brave until it is built and packaged by a mainstream Linux distribution, following a process I can trust. I absolutely do not trust Brave's binaries. The company has a history of deceiving users (it was caught injecting affiliate links) and is openly hostile to forks, very ironically. The fact that it comes bundled with crapware is concerning enough.

The elephant in the room

It's been 12 years and people are still making a fuss about a dude spending 8k(!) on politics some disagree with.

Incredible. I wish we'd hold other people in higher positions to such a standard.

Not agreeing with Eich, but it's interesting that he is the one who gets so much hate for Prop 8, being kicked out of Mozilla for it, even though it passed in California with 7 million votes.

The true elephant in the room is that this guy gave us freaking JavaScript!