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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.
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.
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.
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?
Equally bigoted are the people who couldn't handle his views.
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!
Good thing he is not, nor ever was, intolerant.
"There is not a scintilla of evidence that he has ever discriminated against a single gay person at Mozilla" - Dissents Of The Day. The Dish.
The only bigotry here is the bigotry you and your ilk seem so willing to project on others.
And I would submit that intolerance of intolerance is also intolerance. People have a right to their views, even if they are moronic, stupid, dangerous, whatever. Society has become far too obsessed with fairness, everyone on a level playing field, whatever. It's a sickness. As long as people don't harm others physically, steal, kill, or maim, let people be. If enough people can swing a vote one way, hey, the mob rules. It will swing the other way -- that's what pendulums do.
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.
LGBT: "What we do outside of the office is no business of yours and should have no affect on our employment"
Eich: "OK I'm going to take some of my own personal money and put it towards a cause I believe in"
LGBT: "What? It's against us? He's not fit to be a CEO!"
Democracy only works if people are allowed to have an opinion, speak freely, and not fear losing their job because of a donation to a cause that even Obama supported at the time.
Equally bigoted are the people who couldn't handle Adolf Hitler's views.
Adolf Hitler had every right to his views, and every right to express them, to participate in the political process. He did not have the right to use force to impose those views on others when those avenues didn't work out.
Eich was not the one that used force on others in his story. He participated in the political process to support views he had every right to hold, and every right to express. There's no evidence he ever discriminated against a gay person at Mozilla.
"Tolerance" means to accept the right of people you disagree with to exist in society, and to not try to kill them or force them out. Eich was tolerant - not accepting, which is a higher bar, but tolerant. His opponents were intolerant, and forced him out.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Hitler tried to exterminate an entire people, citing the dangers of the International Jewish Conspiracy and siding with Italian Fascism for its success in defeating International Jewery.
Slave owners restricted people from education. They also supported a legal system allowing the murder of an entire race of people, so long as another race of people did the murdering. They disenfranchised this group, restricting their civil rights as a whole not just by eliminating the burden of due process, but also by allowing atrocities against them ranging from cruel and unusual punishment to simply rendering judgment (with or without due process) for free speech if that speech offended another race of people.
Rapists physically brutalize people and force them into sexual submission.
Eich funded a campaign seeking to prevent State legal recognition of a social union.
Have you fought for legal polygamy? Have you demanded the IRS allow men to marry multiple women, and women to marry multiple men, and each to marry each other? Have you lobbied Congress to make marriage to animals legal, or are the Welsh beneath your morals?
Society makes two types of delineations: the concrete and the arbitrary. Our concrete delineations show a real victim, real harm, and real reasoning: we stop threats such as murder, assault, and theft, because a person carrying these actions out brings harm to others. We make other, arbitrary delineations, like age-of-consent (why does it range from 14-18 depending on state?), legal drinking age, drug laws, and alcohol laws.
If you think Eich is a terrible person for not supporting the state recognition of a legal union between two people, then you are a terrible person for not supporting the rights of parents to give their teenagers liquor, or for people with weird sexual deviant behavior to own horses.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
A CEO job is a special kind. The CEO serves as the public face of a company, and as such needs to reflect the values of that company - at least to the extent that the customers of the company don't revolt. That's what happened here. Mozilla fans didn't like his bigotry and, since Mozilla is as much a political movement as a product, that mattered to its survival. He didn't get fired for his views, he got fired for alienating his customers, and in turn, losing the confidence of his board.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Pfft, what is this "democracy" of which you speak? We lost that when people decided that shaming and silencing was a splendid little strategy. These days, calling someone a bigot merely translates into, "'Shut up or I'll harass your boss until he fires you," and when someone says they "want a conversation," they really mean, "Shut up and agree with everything I say."
I'm outside the system because I don't have any social biases. I have my own internal responses and subsequent avoidance behavior; but avoidance just means keeping myself out of meaningful contact with things I avoid. I don't smoke (anything), but I don't lobby for banning cigarettes and marijuana because it's not particularly my problem if someone else is smoking.
I also don't fuck animals, but it's not particularly my problem if some dude 5 miles away is keeping horses because his wife likes sucking them off. That's their business, as long as the horse isn't being emotionally tormented by the activity.
I don't form social attachments. I don't have an impulse to cling to a group view of how the world needs to operate and then attack others for offending my morality. Things are disgusting, but not inherently wrong; other things are harmful to others, create unwilling victims, and thus are inherently wrong. If someone dragged me into their obscene farm sex orgy, that would be a problem.
You're inside the system. You try to associate with others, think from their perspective, and protect them from ideals which distress them. To do this, you take those ideals into yourself, and become distressed by them. Other ideals are meaningless to you. You look at polygamy in Utah and claim there's something wrong with *those* people, and they shouldn't be allowed to do that, or at least that it's not important and there's no civil rights crisis because marrying 6 people is against the law and they should know better. They're not *your* social group, and nobody in your social group really has any emotional investment in the cause for polygamy.
Who is the victim, but the man arrested for doing what only affects him and his willing participants?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Equally bigoted are the people who couldn't handle his views.
It wasn't his views that drew ire, it was his actions. You have to intentionally mislead people to make your point, that's not very solid footing for you.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
And I would submit that intolerance of intolerance is also intolerance.
That's just doublespeak. If someone attacks you and you are forced to defend yourself with violence, then yeah, it's violence. Violence in defence of violence is also violence. Doesn't mean it is necessary the wrong reaction or immoral in any way.
As long as people don't harm others
Eich gave money to a fund that was trying to deny basic rights to gay people, doing them harm. Naturally, this upset many people, and is the textbook definition of bigotry. In reaction, people who were upset decided they would no longer be willing to do business with this person. That's fine, his views are not a protected attribute over which he has no control, they are something he decided upon and can freely change at will.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You misrepresent the position, making a straw man.
LGBT people should be able to express themselves at work, just like everyone else. Photos of partners on their desks, time off to care for them when they are ill, being open in the same way straight people are free to be in so many little ways.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
He participated in the political process. That's how adults who cannot agree settle disputes. You fight the metaphorical good fight in the campaign, and you accept the result of the election. You're only argument is that you disagree with him.
You won, get over it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.