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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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."