I need someone to explain to me, at length, at some point in my life the value proposition of Brave and what it brings to the table that other browsers do not.
For example, most of the key differentiators of Brave could be accomplished similarly in Firebox with a litany of extensions -- such as UBlock Origin as just one example -- or Privacy Badger if you'd like to be less 'heavy handed'.
The only other differentiator I see is the use of cryptocurrency as a way of compensating users for watching ads and the use of a crypto wallet; which if your not interested in such functionality is meaningless.
Yet I see very educated, competent, and intellegent people I've known for years be advocates and at some points "zealots" over the browser.
I would love to understand this. I'm honestly open to discussing this in good faith as I would like to understand the benefit here, and if I am somehow missing something will be the first to admit I was ignorant.
I use Brave, and for me it's really just the least bad option.
Firefox-based browsers do not support macOS automation (AppleScript/JXA). Safari lacks features/extensions. Orion/Vivaldi had bugs any time I tried them.
From the Chrimium-based browsers I tried, Brave blocks ads, supports PWAs, the crypto stuff can be turned off, and is stable. Brave does not excite me, but it's good enough.
For me the reasons for using brave for over an year now are:
- no ads, no trackers and they are transparent about it
- I can install chrome extensions
- I don’t feel like I am handing all my data to Google
- overall feels faster even with dozens for tabs open
I get that and it makes sense. What distinguishing features does it have that keeps you coming back to Brave that, say, Edge or Chrome or even Firefox doesn't bring? I ask because most of the items you listed could be accomplished in other browsers with extensions.
Just trying to find the secret sauce that keeps people coming back specifically to Brave.
I really appreciate you engaging and listing your reasons! Thank you for sharing your viewpoint and why you enjoy Brave.
> I ask because most of the items you listed could be accomplished in other browsers with extensions.
Having functionality in extensions adds friction. You'll have to remember which ones you used and install them separately when you do a new install. Also remember that Android and iOS browsers (usually) don't have extensions, so having adblock built-in is advantageous.
None of those seem like unique advantages. In fact, the only advantage there seems to be "Ad block is built in", which is still a dubious advantage at best.
You could install Brave, or you could install adblock for the browser you're already using. It doesn't seem like much of an advantage for Brave to ship with adblock built-in, given that everybody already uses a web browser.
A second spent thinking about HN karma is one too many.
>Perhaps quibbling over an upvoted comment is a pattern that tires me.
You could just simply not reply if you think I'm not engaging in good faith, as opposed to actively sabotaging the forum with pointless trolling. What's the point?
At least a year ago, Chromium-based browsers were significantly more secure than Firefox, as measured by the rate at which high severity vulnerabilities were discovered every month and the ease with which Firefox would be hacked in competitions.
The trouble with Chrome is that it is deliberately configured to maximize Google's ad revenue. The omnibar does not show you recently visited websites when you start typing something because they want you to do another Google search so they can serve you more ads. The new extension model deliberately neutered the most effective ad blockers available.
Brave is Chrome without the perverse incentives. Their developers take a security-first approach to everything, to the extent of explicitly _not_ having a centralized sync service for bookmarks, passwords, etc. They have an excellent content blocker built in, thereby doing an end-run around Chrome's new extension model. The crypto wallet and Brave ads are optional - you can disable both in the settings very easily. And since it's a Chromium variant, you can use all of the existing Chrome extensions for third party software like 1Password and the like.
Would use Firefox on the main workstation if it had better devtools, other then that it just works and has some useful features, see: Tor and ipfs integration.
Here's an exhaustive list of why I, personally, have been using Brave for years:
- vertical tabs
- maintained by more than a
single person
- support for extensions
- not owned by China
- not Firefox
- not Edge*
All the AI and crypto slop can be turned off completely, so I don't care at all about features I never see after initial install.
*Edge is fine if properly configured via GPO, which I can neither be bothered to figure out how to do under Linux nor have the patience to do on my private Windows machines. Works great at work though.
I use Brave, and I second the sentiment that it's the least bad of many bad choices. I say this as an opinionated person who has put a lot of effort into looking at alternatives. I've even spent time trying to use Epiphany and Lynx as my daily drivers.
I assume we would both already exclude the likes of Chrome, Edge, Opera, Safari, etc.
This will be a long reply though.
The TLDR is: Security is number one, so extensions are bad and built-in features are good. I hate the cryptocoin/adware/AI features but the degrading act of disabling it all is mercifully short. It also has to run on Linux, so I can't even consider browsers like Nook. Most important to me are the (1) Chrome features and (2) the Shields feature tacked on. I use profiles and shields very extensively.
The TLDR TLDR is: Shields good
---
Caveat with the below is that Brave is full of bullshit to disable, with a new piece of bullshit added every year or so. That disparaging term is not one I use lightly!
The bad aspects are made worse by the fact the CEO of Brave is a person who I generally don't trust. I've been using Brave for years with the understanding I might have to jump ship at any moment.
Onto the good things:
One of the necessary things it provides is a browser which I can use to browse the internet, including captchas. For my mileage, Firefox has been broken for me on every platform I've used it on, every time I've tried to get back into using it, for years. I've exhausted all the time I ever wish to spend trying to fix a browser. Since I could not use Firefox to browse, it was not an option for me.
A second necessary requirement is that the browser should be available on the major desktop and mobile OSes, especially Linux. So, Orion, Nook, etc. don't count as browsers to me.
A third necessary requirement are timely security updates. Last I checked, Brave got security fixes from Chrome on a timely basis. Nice.
Then, there are a bunch of nice to haves. Brave has the Chromes profile which I use heavily (although Firefox is set to get a clone of Chrome's profiles soon-- the existing 'profiles' and 'containers' solutions were not usable alternatives.)
A second nice-to-have is telemetry - how often is my browser making requests unrelated to browsing, and to how many parties? I last checked this years ago, but I remember Brave performing well here.
The third nice thing is the Shields feature, which I've come to rely on. (If Firefox copied this wholesale, like they're doing with Chrome profiles, that would be a major improvement.) It's an easy-to-use interface to block ads and JavaScript. It works on mobile as well, which is a huge advantage.
Shields can be replicated with extensions, but I try to minimize the extensions I use. Each extension requires permissions for every site (!!!) So, if just one of these extensions developers were compromised, or the extension itself had a vulnerability, then I would be compromised too.
Funny. In my five+ decades on this planet, I seem to find the right more apt and eager to employ 'thuggish authoritarian attempts' -- akin to my time growing up in East Germany. But now being in America for over a decade it's really not much different.
WhatsApp I can buy due to the communication factor, but Instagram you're really going to have to sell me on fitting into the category of 'critical for daily functioning'.
You’re about to be in a world where your consent is totally out of the picture with Meta releasing this product and people will be recording you all the time now and sending that data directly to Meta where they can then build models about where you are, who you’re with, what you’re doing and what you are talking about and all without providing you and way to opt out other than breaking the glasses when you encounter them in public.
The alternative seems to be that the Trump admin directs the State Dept to revoke all student visas from UC Berkeley, and they lose half their student body (and a good number of faculty) overnight.
Which is, of course, flat out unacceptable on many levels.
However; it seems to me some of these institutions could band together and pool resources both legal, financial, and otherwise to give something of a stronger defense than one alone.
Rock and a hard place certainly.
But there has to be something that can be done, albeit even in the United States broken systems of law, both constitutional and otherwise, to fight off this assault. Anything other than bending the knee and enabling further assaults on higher-education and/or the US democracy.
It could be done, but I guess many these institutions think it's futile, especially given Supreme Court's recent stances. Harvard stands out and have secured a temporary win, but who knows what happens in 3 months. I am not optimistic.
I stopped believing in constitution for a while now. If the interpretation of it depends on who sits on the bench, it means it's nothing more than a piece of paper with some words on it.
All major universities public and private are heavily dependent on federal dollars in numerous ways.
The Fed has tremendous financial and regulatory power over any institution of any size.
Large corporations have been bending the knee for the same reasons. I highly doubt Tim Cook is a huge Trump fan but he was right there to kiss ass on day one. That’s because Trump could, with the stroke of a pen, decimate Apple’s business by destroying its global supply chain.
Actual conservatives and actual libertarians were warning about growing Federal power for decades and decades and they had a point. Nobody listened of course.
At Oxide, we have our own illumos (in my understanding, you're supposed to lowercase the i) distribution, discussed on HN a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39178521
I think a lot of decisions that eventually lead to the Oracle buyout were all pretty bad and Oracle itself being where good ideas go to die. As bad as MS is at extracting value out of its windows users, Oracle seems to fleece it's enterprise customers far, far worse. I don't think I would ever choose Oracle or IBM for anything.
It would be interesting to see a little more diversity in common operating systems in the wild though. Linux has pretty much taken over the server space, and iOS/Android have split the more common usage outside that, with what's left of desktop still mostly Windows.
I still think there's opportunity for something like Flutter as a cross-platform library that actually works with multiple backing languages.
It still is, but at this point I'm not sure why anyone would pick it over Linux for something new. All the killer Solaris features (ZFS, dtrace, zones, SMF) have good enough Linux equivalents (OpenZFS, eBPF, containers, systemd) and I'm not aware of any usecases where illumos outperforms Linux anymore.
OpenIndiana also has the problem that every commercial illumos user is using it for some niche purpose (networking infrastructure, storage appliance, that sort of thing) so it's basically up to a few unpaid volunteers working in their free time to adapt it for general desktop use. I'm not sure what the state of stuff like audio support or accelerated graphics looks like if you're on modern hardware.
Solaris was the development OS for Oracle for years. I presume that's now shifted to their own linux distro but for many years that was the case, to the point that if you were a serious Oracle customer you ran it on Solaris (and Sun hardware) because all the bug fixes and updates came out first for that platform.
So from that standpoint it makes sense that they acquired it. They probably just didn't care about any non-Oracle users.
Not doing another major release of doesn't exactly rule out keeping it as the reference platform for their core database product.
I guess my question - I honestly have no idea and it's been years since I paid attention to Oracle or Sun's inner workings - is whether they're still developing SPARC hardware? The Google seems to say no, they've abandoned that... so I'm inclined to agree with you guys now.
I don't have a ton of nostalgia left for Sun stuff, but still... what a waste.
Their core reference platform moved from SPARC to Linux + X86 almost a decade ago. They pushed Exadata down everyone's throat at the time with their "it'd be too bad if we have to audit you unless you buy this new hardware" approach.
I'm endlessly surprised that Oracle has enough customers to support them. I was familiar with the reasoning a long time ago but so many of those same users have moved on to SQL Server or open source stuff.
Yeah, except it exists since 2015, and while it is great that macOS is getting them, which I am perfectly aware of, it isn't what I meant as "Sadly it is still years away on ARM and x86, Linux and BSD systems.", because it isn't neither a Linux system, nor a regular BSD.
Apple OSes don't count for the BSD group I was talking about, because they only took whatever NeXT felt like back at the time, and there have been very few updates other than those required for UNIX certification.
While on Linux, you might be tempted to point out Android, however NDK alone hardly makes it a GNU/Linux system.
And DTrace. And NFS/NIS. And SunRPC. And OpenOffice (sort of - they bought the company that made it and then open sourced it). And... you get the idea.
That's what I loved about Sun, really. They strive for a leadership role in the UNIX world by actually leading, instead of just trying to dominate. No company is perfect, but Sun was better than most.
I was sad to see them go, but with Windows NT taking over corporate and Linux taking over networking, they just didn't have a place. They kept pushing "The network is the computer" at a time when PCs were cheap. If only they'd held out until the cloud craze hit...
I'm really disappointed that Solaris picked a "let's screw Linux" license, relegating some otherwise interesting technologies to only run on Solaris, on permissive OSes like BSD, and on systems that don't care about license compliance.
There was nothing about screwing anyone involved in the choice of the license. The license had to be something all the copyright and license holders were prepared to accept (and getting them to accept CDDL was hard enough, not everyone did hence the few closed components).
Our belief was that Linux would be unlikely (and unwise as the overall system architecture is sufficiently different that it would be hard to port) to take the code. We expected - and encouraged - the concepts to be taken (as with the slab memory allocator).
It's not hard to find Linux users shit-talking Solaris - or "Slowaris" as it was known at the time. Just browse the Slashdot archives.
Reaching feature parity and taking Solaris' market share was an often cited goal by people in the Linux community, and one they achieved.
That said, I don't remember much actual hate directed at Sun in the way that Microsoft got. As far as companies go, Sun was a better member of the UNIX community than most.
This has got to be the most user-blind self-imposed preference in a modern operating system outside of Microsoft's BS.
If you're going to use an OSS operating system, the control of what is placed on the system should be inherently with the user. If the developer has a question if a new package should be added or is required, throw a prompt and ask -- with a default to not use application containers and the default packaging system.
I’m sorry, I don’t think this is on Musk or xAI. IMO it is on Telegram. Only Telegram has the obligation to know what their users want and look out for their own users. It’s not unreasonable for Grok to want to have more users.
Who knows how much they’ll make off the data they obtain from users and chat history data, but in this day and age, no one gets paid to integrate AI, they pay for it which means there is clearly some other goal. And I can tell you there is a reason he didn’t make this offer to Signal instead, where they wouldn’t have access to any chat history, and that it would mean xAI (at this point which looks more like a data harvesting company) becoming a “partner” would normally allow data to be handed over. In this case, however, that isn’t necessary since lTelegram’s privacy policy is basically, “we can use your data for whatever we want”, including selling it for 300 million and claiming it is the payment to integrate AI.
Are you claiming it's a stupid business decision, or something else? Because they must be thinking that there is a profit to be made somewhere, either through training data or brand exposure to Telegram's 1 billion users.
Or Musk just want to say “hey, we growed in users by x%” this year so that he can keep pretending being in the race, for some street cred', like the way he pays some progamer in Asia to boost his PoE2 account.
That's quite a viable possibility, I don't get why you're getting downed.
Grok is indeed trailing the race and could use extra numbers. It doesn't matter to their bottom line (or their ad campaigns) if these numbers come from a flat rate agreement with Telegram.
If anything, Telegram should have bargained for more.
As someone who straddles two fields (CS and Healthcare) and has careers/degrees in both -- the grass isn't always greener on the other side.
This could be said about most jobs in the 21st century these days in any career field given. That's a culture shift and business management/organization practice change that isn't likely to happen anytime soon.
Oh I'm not saying we have it worse. But there are jobs where time spent is more proportional to productive output, so working half the time for half the money is a fair deal.
For example, most of the key differentiators of Brave could be accomplished similarly in Firebox with a litany of extensions -- such as UBlock Origin as just one example -- or Privacy Badger if you'd like to be less 'heavy handed'.
The only other differentiator I see is the use of cryptocurrency as a way of compensating users for watching ads and the use of a crypto wallet; which if your not interested in such functionality is meaningless.
Yet I see very educated, competent, and intellegent people I've known for years be advocates and at some points "zealots" over the browser.
I would love to understand this. I'm honestly open to discussing this in good faith as I would like to understand the benefit here, and if I am somehow missing something will be the first to admit I was ignorant.