Former Mozilla CEO Launches Security-Centric Browser Brave
rudy_wayne writes: Former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich has launched a new Chromium-based browser called Brave. "Brave blocks everything: initial signaling/analytics scripts that start the programmatic advertising 'dirty pipe', impression-tracking pixels, and ad-click confirmation signals," Eich wrote on the Brave site. Former Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal said in a blog post that "the web is broken," with current browser vendors unwilling to tackle the dilemma of blocking ads, while looking at alternative mechanisms for funding content. Gal said it was ironic Brave was a for-profit operation that can make money from reducing advertising.
spontaneous instances of cease fires occurring as people stand hand in hand gazing into the heavens reported world wide....?
I've looked at his offering, and it's a step in the right direction. It's not as aggressive as what I currently do using Mozilla, but again, it's better than the default.
Whenever I visit people at home, they inevitably ask me to look at their computers and I'm always horrified by the shear amount of dreck online compared to my own laptop. I leave them with no tracking, no ads, you name it. Another happy "customer".
The Web has become too much about money. Not everything needs to be about money. The last several years has seen me not trusting bloggers as much as I would if they were not in it for the money. There are still a few good tech blogs with no ads, no flogging this or that. Old school BBS, Usenet-style information trading. Always the best.
Were I a billionaire, I would give away services with no ads, no tracking, no analytics, just to undercut the monsters like Google and Microsoft to show that it doesn't have to be about the money. Apple has more money in the bank than most countries and they smile, all along letting little girls slave away in the tech sweatshops of China and elsewhere, making their wares for pennies on the dollar, yet expecting Americans to pay highway robbery prices for a device that costs less than 1/4 of the asking price to bring to market. There's a difference between making a living and making a killing. Shareholders are the moral death to any company.
Not only is Eich a bigot, but he doesn't even know how to display text without requiring JavaScript. How good can his little me too browser project be if he's that incompetent?
So, Elissa Shevinski, noted self-proclaimed feminist and author of the anti-SFBay-discrimination book Lean Out, is working as the Head of Product for a browser startup by Brendan Eich, most famous for being forced out of Mozilla for funding anti-LGBTQ views through funding efforts against CA Prop 8. This is weird.
So, the main selling point of this browser is that it will block ads, right?
The summary fails to mention that the plan is to start inserting its own ads.
You know, I hate ads as much as everybody else. But that just feels dirty to me.
From TFA: "By default Brave will insert ads only in a few standard-sized spaces."
The first mention I saw of Brave was this morning on a site, I think linked from another Slashdot article, run by the advertising industry. The insiders on that page were touting Brave to one another as a new platform that will send ads only from servers it controls. "More importantly", they said, everybody will get a share of the proceeds—Mozilla and advertisers both. It's clear that users of Brave will have no option to block the ads that appear in any way. So if you're ready to let someone else decide that certain ads are okay and you ought to see them, this is your browser. I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot fucking pole.
So let me get this straight - Brave strips ads off of websites, replaces them with those of Eich's choosing? Ha ha, fuck no.
Aren't the advertisers going to be a little bit pissed about this? This is like renting a billboard to put up your advertising, then some other guy comes down, tears down your ads and replaces them without paying.
Brave is a dumb, dumb idea. Hard to believe, but anybody looking to block advertising is not willing to replace it with other advertising. And advertisers would just need to count hits from Brave browsers to assess legal damages.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Funny how even Brendan Eich won't use Firefox and Gecko as a base when given the choice. Shit sux, yo.
What a horribly edited source article. If I'd turned that in to my school paper in 10th grade I'd have been laughed at.
We need another browser to test our pages in?
So this guy ha a different web ad plan that maybe does not involve cross site adds.
The cross site stuff is very useful for counting add views and centralizing the add serving and picking functions.
What if instead, the site you wanted to go to can directly serve you whatever add they wish.
Not served cross site, which means it would just be between you and them.
Which also means that there would be no way to account that the add was actually served.
Which means that the old system of getting paid for serving adds would not work.
So get paid for referrals instead.
If you put up an add on your site which causes the user to go to the advertizer's site, you get paid.
If the customer is unhappy that he ended up at the advertizer's site, then there should be an easy way on the advertizer's site to say so, and the original site gets negative money.
Advertizer's get much better quality referrals.
Original site folks are figuring out how to get their customers to was to go to the advertizer's sites.
This means that the advertizer's don't have to deal with adds, the folks referring customer's do this for them.
Probably won't scale allowing a small site builder can just put in a link to an add aggregator.
But it might if the small site guy just had to go to the add aggregator to get the page to serve.
He could look it over and make sure it was simple enough for how he wants to treat his customers.
This could be once per week or once per page view depending on the resources of the site builder.
The success of the browser is going to be in the success of the developer tools... Thats how you get businesses using and hiring for it. Safari and Chrome have damn good built-in inspections and tools. If he isn't going to compete there then his "idea" might as well be a browser plugin instead of a browser.
The most important thing I see out of all of this is that he isn't using Gecko, despite his very long history with that technology.
He's also not using Servo, the browser engine Mozilla is working on to eventually replace Gecko.
I think this says a huge amount about the sorry state of Mozilla's offerings today.
Users of Firefox already know what I'm talking about. They know how much slower Firefox feels than Chrome, Edge, Safari, and browsers using other engines. They know how Firefox uses more memory. They know how Firefox suffers from bugs that haven't been fixed even after many years.
It's truly sad what has happened to Mozilla's products. They've shot themselves in the foot by going off on stupid tangents like Firefox OS, Persona, and especially Rust and Servo.
Rust and Servo are leading Mozilla down a dead end trail. They're a twin example of software rewrites gone bad.
Rust is basically trying to rewrite C++, but hasn't done a very good job. The syntax is no better, and sometimes much worse. Its approach to resource management is harder to understand and use practically than C++'s. There's only one Rust implementation, and it's buggy and slow. The Rust community is way too focused on social justice and censorship. They even have a moderation squad, for crying out loud! It took them ages to get a 1.0 release out, and it isn't good at all. Then there's the fact that C++ has continued to evolve and get better, along with having multiple excellent implementations.
Servo is written in Rust, so that helps explain why it's a failure so far, too. When I tried it recently, it gave me what I'd consider an experience similar to IE 3, which dates back to 1996. Servo has a huge amount of catching up to do. The entire situation is not encouraging at all.
Mozilla should end the Rust and Servo projects now, along with Firefox OS and their other failed initiatives. They need to get back to focusing on Gecko and Firefox. They need to restore Firefox's UI to the usable Firefox 3.6 approach. They need to migrate Gecko to C++14, and prepare for the use of C++17 instead of switching to Rust. They need to fix Gecko's performance issues. They need to fix the longstanding bugs.
Right now there are at least a few remaining users of Firefox and Gecko, although their number is dropping. There are basically no users of Servo. Mozilla's only hope for salvation is to win back the Firefox users they've alienated over the past few years. I fear that if they don't do that, then they will slide into irrelevancy. That won't be good for them, and it won't be good for the web either.
Okay, we have how fucking many Chrome clones out there?
And Mozilla has essentially given up, begun slobbing the Google knob, and is in the process of mutating from an independent browser with some of the widest plugin support extant into a Chromezilla?
So, we're down to Edge and Chrome now. Both with shitty, mickey-mouse plugin support.
Fucking great...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I'll have to give it a try.
Just as long as he's not making money off my web activity that will wind up supporting this thing where blacks can marry white women. I demand traditional marriage! Next thing you know, goats will want to marry white women!
You don't. Developers who are dependent on ad revenue have a conflict of interest. It's basically impossible for them to make good browsers.
There are only two solutions: 1) accept that you'll have a shockingly shitty browser, or 2) remove the conflict of interest, by having ads not be your revenue.
No, people who test pages aren't looking for browsers. You probably don't care about how well a browser serves users. That wouldn't be on the radar for people in your line of work.
This is about the other 99.98% of people. Users need another browser, because the existing ones are shitty and do absolutely stupid-crazy things like load and execute scripts which have blatantly user-hostile intent (even if sandboxed in such a manner that the dorks say its intent is irrelevant because it's not able to harm you, because they redefine "harm" to not include a bunch of crazy things, such as sucking up bandwidth, surveilling, and showing ads). So in that respect, hell yes we need more browsers.
Every software project .. every thing .. has a master. If the master whom it serves, whose interests it advances at the cost of all adversaries, isn't you, then that's the wrong software for you to be using. It's pretty fucking simple when you look at it that way.
I was shocked when Doctorow, normally not an evil person, suggested that a robot car might need to decide to kill its occupants in exchange for saving other lives. That is wrong. Your car should be willing to dismember and slowly grind up a million innocent babies if doing that saves you from breaking a finger nail. No, I'm not saying go kill babies. You're not really likely to end up with such a conflict. But hell yes, all your tools should treat you as an absolute god. (Because it is going to try to treat someone like a god. Why not the user? Tell me who it should be killing babies for, if not you.)
Everything is like that. All software I select, is judged on that basis: serve the user (I don't always get what I want, but at least I'm looking for the right things). And it's not crazy or impractical. It makes things easiest and also optimizes performance. Anything else is what's crazy. All that nonsense is how you people ended up in a world of Apple and Microsoft and Google: your very own adversaries, whom you fund!
I don't get this. Why would anyone willingly use a browser that is designed to serve you targeted advertising, when you can simply block all ads with a hosts file + adblock + noscript + etc? You're simply replacing one nuisance and security risk with another.
I have no guilt about blocking all forms of advertisement on the web, because content providers cannot assure me that such advertising does not pose a threat to my computer's security or to my personal privacy. End of argument. They're welcome to not serve me content for the choice I make, and I accept not being able to access that content. I have every right to choose which data I am being served, and they have every right to decide they would rather serve me nothing. But the notion of baking advertising into the browser itself, and passing that off as being secure and in the best interest of the user, would be laughable if it were not so obviously a deliberate attempt at deception.
Could you compile something similar using standard Linux builds and/or repositories?
Leave out the crap sort of thing.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Has ads. Do not want. [close tab, carry on]
Everybody know how buggy is Chrome as one of the most security bug web browser (after IE of course) and he want to create a browser more secure from the one with the MOST BUGs ever. Check this out: http://tech.slashdot.org/story... Please make more sense and just use firefox and make a new version.
If it was "brave" it would *allow* everything and deal with it.
Unless he called it Brave for other reasons, like: he consulted a witch for help, used a spell to transform Firefox into a bear. Now he must act to undo the spell before its effects become permanent.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
A security browser based on a browser developed by the data mining company, Google?? Pass.
I largely agree with you, except
Rust is basically trying to rewrite C++, but hasn't done a very good job. The syntax is no better, and sometimes much worse.
Rust's goal isn't to re-write C++, it's to create a safe language with strict guarantees about resources and memory use. They chose to use a syntax and keywords very similar to C++ as design choice, just as Java and C# did.
Its approach to resource management is harder to understand and use practically than C++'s. There's only one Rust implementation, and it's buggy and slow.
Correctness is usually harder than playing fast and loose. Look at const-correctness in C++ and how "difficult" that was prior to some of the C++11 changes. Rusts performance is also not that bad (especially when you compare apples/apples with C++ code that includes manual resource safety checks), and has been steadily getting better.
It took them ages to get a 1.0 release out
This is hardly valid criticism. It used to be a badge of pride in the F/OSS world of waiting for a 1.0 release that was ready and not just "the first release".
But yes, Mozilla needs to get their shit together when it comes to Firefox, and screwing around with the UI is not the answer. They really need to go back to the core principles that they used when Firefox was still Phoenix. Cut the crap, focus on standards and performance, give control to the users.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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That in order to sign up for the beta I had to disable Ghostery and uBlock for the pop-up to display properly.
Too bad
I'm actually very happy with Firefox these days. I have a fairly new MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM, SSD and performance on the browser is fine. It may be that older machines or those with lower configurations don't run as well but anything mid-range or high-end within the last two years should run Firefox just fine.
If BRAVE can stop that slashdot fork called slashdot beta and its pus-ridden auto-refresh then BRAVO
There's always hosts files and/or firewalls to block the ads. Yes it can be done. Opera used to be a pay for browser with ads in the free model of it. I monitored where the ads were served from (many tools will do this, ones like wireshare &/or NirSoft's many great free tools also) and stopped them with my hosts file (firewalls are another option if they decide to serve them up by IP address, which also can be reverse dns resolved to a corresponding host-domain name also & vice a versa).
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For what it's worth, Brendan has claimed they are working on a micropayment model as well that would allow a user to turn off ads in exchange making small payments to websites visited.
It's really cool project in the abstract -- let people choose to pay not to see ads or choose to see ads that don't track them, but I don't see how it could possibly work in practice since it doesn't seem like it will be possible for Brave to negotiate ad display payments with every site on the internet.
Can gay people use this, or is for straight people only?
... that the fellow's site has doubleclick and google analytics built-in. No problem for most of us, no doubt (that's what "untrusted" is for), but, still... weird.
So, Brendan Eich gets finally his revenge against Mozilla. Good to see that he has not given up after he was humiliated by the mob which made him in the end resign from his CEO Mozilla job shortly after he was voted for becoming CEO.
Pretty sure that lots of people who do not agree what Mozilla has become will take the opportunity to switch to Brave to damage Mozilla Firefox. I do not think that Brave will be really successful, because the concept that the browser removes ads and adds his own one's instead sucks like hell, but it will still survive because of those earlier mentioned "protest voters".
Good luck Brendan and happily fighting Mozilla, these days a Chrome clone company and political correct nightmare. Good luck fighting Mozilla which betrayed advanced users for their plan to support Chrome users only by removing all features which are not 100% compatible with the most common lowest denominator.
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It fixes DNS' security issues & stops tracking @ webpage + DNS levels via 1 file you NATIVELY have!
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