Brave will not add Web Integration support

mrmanager@lemmy.today to Technology@lemmy.world – 1179 points –
twitter.com

I think we need all support we can get to fight Google on this, so I welcome Brave here actually.

Use this link to avoid going to Twitter:

https://nitter.kavin.rocks/BrendanEich/status/1684561924191842304

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Firefox gang

I personally switched back to Firefox after 13 years earlier this year and was surprised just how easy it was. All my main extensions exist on Firefox and it gave me an opportunity to remove some extension bloat at the same time. Highly recommend.

Try container tabs!

They have separate sessions so you can be logged in to the same site on multiple accounts. This is extreamly useful for stuff like being logged in to github using work account and company account or other sites where you just need many accounts. Aws is another good example.

There is also temporary containers that leave no trace at all.

Containers are one of the best features Firefox has gained in recent years. They make managing multiple website accounts so much easier than trying to use multiple browsers or browser profiles. They are also useful for developers in lots of ways.

I don’t know why Mozilla doesn’t promote Containers more, they can’t even be used out of the box because they have to be enabled with an extension. It’s a far better feature than many of the other recent gimmicks like time limited colour schemes.

omg i've left my 'work' stuff on edge because of this reason but i guess i'll migrate this to firefox too 🤯

You can also use that to separate spying websites. Eg. Any site with Facebook integration will think you are logged out, but when you go to facebook.com, it's open in a different container where you are in fact logged in, cuttin on Facebook spying on third party websites.

current firefox silos cookies to the website now. other sites can't look at your cookies now and it's automatic

Oh that’s fantastic for AWS. I have a dozen chrome profiles for this type of behavior and it’s always sucked

Container Tabs sounds so useful, but fair warning to anyone else looking to check it out... I think it's kinda buggy. My sessions got all fucked up when I tried using it. I ended up removing it entirely and just going without.

I've never encountered them being buggy, but I have encountered them being confusing and frustrating, like if a site wants to use Facebook to log you in, but you have Facebook running in a separate container, so it doesn't work no matter how many times you sign in to Facebook. It's easy to have happen in you forget you're using containers.

I love Firefox but It’s not as good as chrome profiles. You can’t just have a container with Honey and whatever tracking extensions just for shopping. It’s all or nothing.

You have Firefox profiles too though.

But they are not as integrated as Chromes and requires a restart of the browser I think.

Nope. You can have multiple enabled at once. Switching the default profile will require restart. You can also make shortcuts to open specific profiles.

This, I didn't move from chrome for so long because I had my passwords stored on the google password manager, but then I started using bitwarden and I could move to Edge, and then I found a speed dial extension that could backup every dial and its properties and is available on every browser, so I moved to Firefox and it was so easy and fast. The only thing I miss is being able to make apps or shortcuts from websites that will open on their own fullscreen window, but it is not a big deal.

Yea when I started my Degoogle thing a few months back, I also switched to Firefox and it's been great.

How has your degoogle process being coming along? For Google Photos, I've just switched to Immich and it's perfect

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I switched over what probably was a small thing, but is big to me.

I like to have my tabs in a list, and google enforced the grid and kept breaking ways to put it back to list.

Once they blocked me from being able to revert, that was it.

I still use it on my work machine as I find the syncing works beautifully, important as I have need to swap between desktop and laptop occasionally, and there are other desktop features I enjoy.

But as for mobile - I am done.

I adored the fox when I used Mozilla everything back in the day, so it's like coming home.

I switched over what probably was a small thing, but is big to me.

I like to have my tabs in a list, and google enforced the grid and kept breaking ways to put it back to list.

Once they blocked me from being able to revert, that was it.

I still use it on my work machine as I find the syncing works beautifully, important as I have need to swap between desktop and laptop occasionally, and there are other desktop features I enjoy.

But as for mobile - I am done.

I adored the fox when I used Mozilla everything back in the day, so it's like coming home.

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Wait, will Firefox be immune to this whole website DRM thing Google is trying to pull? That would be awesome. Fennec on Android gang.

The issue is less about which browsers will roll this out and more about which websites will require it. How soon until we can't access banking information? Will filing taxes require this?

Oh, bummer. Got my hopes up and then dashed them quite expertly, sir. Bravo!

Well we will see. There will be a lot of demand for websites that doesn't go along with this shit. So maybe we get a web where individuals again are contributing on their own sites while big tech goes the DRM way.

The same people who today run Lemmy instances are the kind of people that are also interested in seeing that kind of a web, and can help build it. We don't do it for money.

You see it to some extent on regular sites when browsing on mobile. Like if you go to Crunchyroll on safari or brave on iOS and try to stream a video it refuses to and tells you to download the Crunchyroll app. It is capable of streaming it though, since I can do so in Safari on Android.

So imagine that but more ubiquitous which locking out specific devices or refusing to let you login in a bank account by saying please download chrome or edge to access due to requiring DRM.

Yea, but you can't read news, cause they want to remove scrapers, you can't watch youtube, since they want to block downloaders etc etc. It's a procentage game. If enough of people won't have the DRM enabled, it won't be worth for websites to use it. Not implementing it yet, means that firefox won't be contributing to the amount of users, but if high enough procentage of websites starts using it, firefox will be forced to implement this DRM or they will be killed off by browsers that support all the websites you want to browse.

What's the Firefox equivalent to:

Brave.exe --app="http://lemmy.world"

I use this a lot as I detest electron based applications. Mozilla dropped prism years ago and before that there was xulrunner and you cant open a JavaScript popup window without clicking a bookmark.

When Firefox has this very basic function perhaps I'll consider moving.

This just changes the OS chrome on a browser tab right ? I generally dislike electron apps, but when they're literally just a browser tab I'd rather just leave it in the browser.

This just changes the OS chrome on a browser tab right ?

No this just opens the website in it's own window so it looks similar to an electron app, another way to do this is to open chrome://apps, drag any bookmark to this window/tab and right click to create icons.

It does nothing to the "OS" of the browser.

Dude, "os chrome" refers to the window, as in the frame around the webpage.

So yes, it's like a browser tab with a hidden url bar. Amazing.

Well TiL some programming terminology.

Thanks

I would recommend this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-firefox/

It adds support for PWA in Firefox. I use it because Firefox dropped native support for PWA in Firefox.

I used this for awhile but it's more of a framework that requires vcredist and a local install of pwaforff binary to work around the short comings of mozilla pulling the plumbing out of the browser.

It's a good workaround can have it's issues when one part receives an update that the rest isn't aware of.

You can use ferdium for that. I also made a profile, that has hidden all possible buttons and I made links to open website in that cut down profile. You can also use user.js to make it really slick.

I use brave and this is built in and still gives me the protections offered by Brave.

What protections does this offer?

Additionally I see mention of electron in the code!!!!!!!!!

Ferdium is based on electron. But it actually uses it to render websites. It's slick and handy. When talking about profiles, I mean in Firefox, which will grand you all the protections you need. If you need to add addons or change settings, with the user.js config, you will need to type about:setthings or about:addons rathet then cluck on a few buttons, but if all you use it for is just a few sites working in a single window, it's fine.

Sorry but the less electron in my life the better.

I see no need for ferdium if you have a good browser. It's just something else picking up more mozilla shortfalls.

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https://nitter.net/BrendanEich/status/1684561924191842304

Nitter link.

Also, the Chromium forks need to get onboard. I think Opera doesn't care about ads either so it will likely go against it but Microsoft will definitely add it to Edge.

Use Firefox :)

I really hope Microsoft sees the light. Edge is the best browser for my productivity. Can't work without their implementation of vertical tabs and tab groups.

Every so often I try it out on firefox and any option is just still not ideal.

As long as websites/advertisers see their visitors as using a Chromium based browser they will continue to target for Chromium, regardless of whatever front facing UI is used.

The inherent problem is Google has an outsized voice in Chromium's developmental trajectory, and any major changes to Chromium will have downstream impacts, whether in actual implemented feature sets or forks making continued modifications on top.

The best way to protest is to not use a Chromium browser. Switching from Chrome to another Chromium browser is at best a side grade; everyone using Chromium is subject to Google's whimsy.

Pragmatically it doesn't matter if Microsoft chooses not to implement it; as long as Edge is on Chromium, Google can leverage this to continue to bully the web to their own devices.

Their business model is replacing ads with ads they get paid for. Obviously they aren't going to like Google making that harder.

Brendan Eich is an asshole deep in the Conspiracy Victim Complex too. I like Brave search as an alternative to Google but I'm still using Firefox

He also had to leave Mozilla in 2014 due to opposition to same-sex marriage.

Have you given Ecosia a shot? I find it better than Brave's search, with the side-effect of not having a shithole CEO.

Ecosia "tree planting" is bullshit though. They only raise funds towards the statutory goal when you click ads, so if you have an ad blocker in your browser or purposefully skip over sponsored search results then they don't make money towards the tree planting programme.

You may be right but I have been using Brave on iOS simply because you can’t just install Firefox and uBlock, and since I reconfigured the new tab page I haven’t seen any ads anywhere at all.

From now on, any browser that refuses to implement Google‘s evil shit should be worth a look.

Came here to say this; this was the main reason I had to switch off of Firefox.

And also you can turn off or disable a lot of the “questionable” content Brave has so it is pretty tame, if not, like Firefox.

Why not stick with Safari with the Adblock extension and all the others that are available?

Because this way, instead of two apps it’s just one and with better control over content blocking.

But every browser on iOS is just a wrapper around safari... So you're still just using safari plus another app

At least there is a big (ish?) player in the Chromium-sphere pushing back against this.

The more browsers that don't initially support this, the slower adoption by web sites will be. If enough of the browser market share remains incompatibe, and if we're lucky, maybe this technology won't stick.

I don't agree with Brave's business model, and the shady stuff they did, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Had been using Brave for 4 years. Switched from it to Firefox after the Google DRM news came out. Firefox is awesome!

I never liked Brave. The whole "allow ads to get awards" thing doesn't sit right with me. The only adblockers that do that are the ones that are in bed with the ad companies. Firefox with UBlock Origin and NoScript is all you need.

(I mean, there are other good addons for privacy as well, but it's easy to go down a rabbit hole and next thing you know you have 30 different extensions installed and websites are breaking. Then you have to start disabling things one-by-one until you find the culprit. Setting your security settings in FF to "Strict" and using those two addons should be good enough without going overboard.)

Edit: only thing that sucks about Firefox is that it still doesn't support HDR and RTX Video Super Resolution yet, so in the meantime I use the "Open in Chromium" browser extension when I'm watching videos on YouTube, so that they display properly with all the enhancements.

I like NoScript exactly for the rabbit hole it opens! Now I'm very aware of what scripts are running on which pages! Actively blocking blatant ad scripts & data scraping scripts makes me feel good.

I've been able to sidestep the entire rat race between ublock and Twitch trying to force ads thanks to NoScript. I block amazon-adsystem.com through NoScript, and I haven't seen a single ad on Twitch in over a decade.

I'm an avid YouTube watcher on Firefox. What does HDR and RTX Video Super Resolution do?

HDR is High Dynamic Range. Makes your monitor more colorful and realistic, closer to what you see in real life. Bright scenes are brighter, colors are more vibrant and accurate (for example, you can actually see teal properly with an HDR monitor, which normal monitors can't display accurately). Requires a compatible monitor. You would know if you had one cause most people don't spend extra money on a display unless they know/care about this feature.

RTX Video Super Resolution uses AI to sharpen and upscale lower resolution video. It's useful for watching 1080p videos on a 4K monitor. Or for watching 720p videos at 1080-quality because your internet sucks and can't handle 1080p. Requires an Nvidia RTX graphics card (again, you would know if you had one cause they're expensive and meant for PC gamers).

Basically I'm complaining about features that only enthusiasts care about, but Chrome supports them so why not Firefox too?

Sounds pretty cool! Why is this done at browser level and not at window manager level?

Beats me. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ That is a good point. Why isn't this shit done at the window manager level? Fucking Microsoft. Wish I could switch to Linux but it doesn't even support HDR at all.

Recent Windows 10 and Windows 11 support auto HDR, You can enable HDR in the display settings, and it works for pretty much everything. I've never noticed that Firefox lacks native HDR support, because Windows does compensate. The only time it doesn't is when older games use exclusive fullscreen mode, and then auto-HDR still works as long as I tell them to run in a window and use borderless windowed mode.

it doesn't even support HDR at all.

That'd explain why I had had never heard about it, lol. Hopefully the Wayland folks are working on it.

When Google chrome was released in 2008, I read about it in a tech magazine and it described how much it’s going to be spying on you. I was immediately put off by it, and decided not to install it. At the time I wondered why would anyone ever install this junk. Oh boy, was I in for a surprise! Pretty much everyone installed it, and within the next 10 years chrome had become the most popular browser.

Obviously, I never switched from FF.

Imagine if everyone started using a browser made by an advertising company, such that they pretty much had complete control of the way we use and view the web.

Better yet, imagine a social gathering place where people are encouraged to share everything about themselves, but the place is actually tun by an advertising company. Oh what, that actually happened.

Made the same switch on my phone recently.

Make sure to install plugins like ublock origin. Firefox still supports this and a few other plugins on mobile, like Bitwarden etc.

Yep, ublock being available was the thing that made the change possible. Just wish I had my multi account containers but I can live without that on my phone.

The DRM will be so interwoven into the core engine that they won't be able to remove it. chromium is a sinking ship

Time to switch to Firefox as the base.

Amen. I'm just waiting for them to screw everything up and I'll follow along.

t. Currently using Brave

Just use Firefox. I already like it better than brave personally.

It really isn't though. I also started using Firefox recently and I miss tab groups on mobile as well as on my PC. Yes, there is the simple tab groups add-on, but it just doesn't compare.
Brave is also easier to set up ad-blocking, because it comes with ad-block enabled and script-blocking two clicks away.

Don't get me wrong, I will continue to use FF, but Brave has some features, FF does not have (yet).

Tab groups is the biggest thing I'm missing after I made the switch the other week. I'm used to having loads of tabs open, so not being able to easily minimize the ones I'm currently using is annoying to say the least.

One plus is containers. Only opening Meta sites in their own container, same with Google/Youtube is pretty neat.

Tab groups and container tabs are the two things I want. Tab groups I'm missing a lot. The extension is not available on mobile.

Remembered one more thing; in Firefox I can only have 31 tabs open before the scroll bar appears. In Chrome it's closer to 90-100! That's kinda huge imo.

If you go to the about:config page you can edit browser.tabs.tabMinWidth down to 50 (default is 76) which lets you fit a bit more
If you want more than that it's possible by editing the userchrome:
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/zda0ov/can_i_get_below_50_tab_width/
Modifying userchrome is admittedly difficult if you're not a developer.. but not out of reach if you're able to follow a guide.

I did set the tabMinWidth first, but the result was... lackluster... to say the least (I like having ~50-100 tabs per window....). However, I JUST found out about userChrome.css before you wrote, and also found code that worked for it!

For anyone else interested:

Guide on creating the userChrome.css file: https://www.userchrome.org/how-create-userchrome-css.html

Code that should be added to the file: .tabbrowser-tab { min-width: 1em !important; clip-width: 1em !important; }

time to return using bookmarks, at least those can be categorized much better

Oh I hate bookmarks for that purpose, I already have too many as is. Found a way to make the tabs even smaller though, so not having a scroll bar for them will be very nice!

I moved from FF to Brave but I'm currently testing Vivaldi, I quite like it.

I found FF on mobile to be flakey.

Some sites don't adhere to standards, it's like old IE all over again. You go to load the site on FF and some check form doesn't work. This happens on 3 sites that I have to use.

I left chrome for FF. Used it almost exclusively for a few years, it's good enough. Recently it got some needed boosts via Microsoft not screwing them.

About 6 months ago I started working with IPFS a lot. Brave baked in support and it's pretty good, so I use brave as my primary and FF as my secondary. I was using some tools to sync bookmarks, but now I just pop into FF and import from brave every now and then.

Brave is better and anti-fingerprinting, if someone is going to sell my data, I think I'd rather give it to brave than google.

Vivaldi is my default browser, but isnt it chromium though?

The more that use Chromiun, the more likely WEI will be rolled out and the death of ad blockers comes quicker.

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No need to wait, Firefox is already a strong competitor (in terms of features, not market share). Adblock on Firefox mobile makes mobile sites so much easier to use.

I don't know how people navigate the internet without adblock on mobile. Each website is a nightmare with the majority of the screen being ads.

Yeah, ff mobile may be complete garbage UX/security wise, but its the only usable mobile browser IMO, simply because of ublock support.

What makes Firefox on mobile complete garbage security wise? Genuinely curious.

According to the GrapheneOS docs

Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android.

Apparently Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker than chromium and it is currently much more vulnerable to exploitation.

Oh that's right. I read the same thing some time ago and had completely forgotten. Thanks for bringing it up.

I guess you could argue that having ublock is a pretty big deal for security though. Regardless I won't consider an alternative unless it offers ublock, even if ux or security is better - happy to sacrifice convenience for privacy and usability.

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It might be interwoven, but at the end there are three interfaces:

  1. the headers or tags that trigger it to be enabled for a website
  2. the API towards the attester
  3. the headers that are added to subsequent call to include the verdict of the attester

It should be enough to disable/sabotage nr. 1. If not, you can sabotage nr. 2 so it simply doesn't attest shit. And finally you can suppress adding the verdict to the responses.

If the actual "fingerprinting" or whatever else is in there is still intact doesn't matter if you just don't trigger it.

Of course webservers would simply deny serving brave then. But it's still a good move. The more browsers get "denied", the easier it will be to make a case against websites for some kind of discrimination.

God I hope so, Google's definitely in that "Live long enough to become the villain" camp of the infamous dichotomy (is that the right word) offered from that line from Dark Knight.

Chromium is open source. Brave can just fork it.

"Just" fork it. Right.

It's a massive undertaking to maintain a fork of something that large and continue pulling in patches of later developments.

Not to say that Brave doesn't have the resources to do so - I really don't know their scale - but this notion of "just fork" gets thrown around a lot with these kinds of scenarios. It's an idealistic view and the noble goal of open source software, but in practical and pragmatic terms it doesn't always win, because it takes time and effort and resources that may not just be available.

Did you read the tweet from Brendan Eich linked in the OP? According to him, Brave already is a fork, and he provides a link to a (surprisingly) extensive list of things that are removed / disabled from chromium on their browser.

This is correct - any “Chromium-based” browser is literally a fork unless it’s completely unchanged from upstream (even rebranding and changing the logo and name would require maintaining a fork).

Sure. And the further a fork diverges from upstream the more difficult maintenance becomes. My point is that relying on the open source model to fork projects making hostile changes only works so long as the community is actually able to maintain the fork(s), and so long as those forks actually have a reasonable chance of being adopted. It's equally important, if not even more important, to try to ensure these large projects steer in consumer friendly directions than to react and fork to try to remove anti-consumer features.

Google has enough market and mind share that they can push this and it's a real risk of becoming an anti-consumer standard regardless of any attempts to maintain a fork.

So what do I think we, as a body of users of the Internet, should do? Simple. Stop using Google Chrome and any other Chromium based browsers. Google has the ability to push these changes and make them defacto standards (and later, codified standards) because we collectively give them the power to by using Chromium downstreams.

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That may be true, but it's a fork where I doubt any company has the capability to do the engine development needed to be totally independent from Google. There is a reason Apple and Mozilla are the only two alternative engines left. It costs a lot to develop a browser

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"Don't like it? Just fork it!" is the software equivalent of "Are you sad? Just be happy!"

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What do you mean Brave "can" fork it? It's already a fork.

Yes, and Brave employs software developers that do this sort of thing as a primary task of their job.

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I believe someone will make a patch and add a big WEI on/off switch. It's open-source, hey!

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Brave have started their marketing spree to try and distract from their most recent controversy. Like clockwork, every time they do something controversial they start marketing to drum up new users.

Just a reminder that Brendan Eich who founded Brave was ousted from Mozilla for being a homophobic piece of shit.

Brave is the edgelord of browsers.

Don't forget that he inflicted the blight that is JavaScript upon the world.

JS is one of the most fun programming languages ever created; how dare you slander its great name.

sure mate, just tell me the result of the following without trying it out.

0 && 1 && false

If I remember correctly, 0 and 1 are considered falsy and truthy respectively, so it should be falsy and truthy and false which I believe would return false.

Tried it out to double-check, and the type of the first in the sequence is what ultimately is returned. It would still function the same way if you used it in a conditional, due to truthy/falsy values.

yes, that is a solid logic, one that I also applied and expected to be the result.

that is until a Vue component started complaining that I am passing in a number for a prop that expects a boolean.

turns out the result of that code is actually: 0, because javascript

of course if you flip it and try

false && 0 && 1

then you get false, because that's what you really want in a language, where && behaves differently depending on what is on what side.

I was incorrect; the first part of my answer was my initial guess, in which I thought a boolean was returned; this is not explicitly the case. I checked and found what you were saying in the second part of my answer.

You could use strict equality operators in a conditional to verify types before the main condition, or use Typescript if that's your thing. Types are cool and great and important for a lot of scenarios (used them both in Java and Python), but I rarely run into issues with the script-level stuff I make in JavaScript.

Brendan Eich who founded Brave was ousted from Mozilla for being a homophobic piece of shit.

He was ousted because he donated 1000$ to a political project that he personally supported, which yes, was banning of homosexual marriage.

I specify that, even if I shouldn't, the project in question is not something I agree with. Yet firing him and continuing to attack him years after (like you're doing here) over opinions he kept personal (he didn't bring it to Mozilla nor did he comment openly about this opinion) is a little shocking to me.

Let's say you personally supported a wildly unpopular, some might call bigoted, societal change, say drug criminalization in states that legalized it. As long as you just not exposed this in your professional life, how would you feel if your work fired you over it and if people kept bashing you (without knowing anything about you) and your future professional endeavors for the rest of your life?

We should probably just chill out on that part.

Let me translate your comment with equivalent wording that reveals it's true nature.

Imagine being caught calling for the eradication of jews in private and then being fired and called an anti-semite for the rest of your life. Even though you didn't bring this into your workplace and then companies being reluctant to hire you.

also your drug criminalization is an entire load of false equivalence bollocks, drug criminalization is a far more complex issue than Gay Marriage, or rather whether we should treat people equally. There are very valid arguments for certain drugs to be criminalized that are way too easy to abuse and kill people with, like fentanyl and I say that as someone that's a supporter of full drug decriminalization.

Not to mention there are levels to drug criminalization, there is a difference if you have a gram of drug on you or a metric fuck ton.

There is no version of treating LGBT+ as just somewhat less equal that's morally defensible.

also your drug criminalization is an entire load of false equivalence bollocks, drug criminalization is a far more complex issue than Gay Marriage, or rather whether we should treat people equally. There are very valid arguments for certain drugs to be criminalized that are way too easy to abuse and kill people with, like fentanyl and I say that as someone that’s a supporter of full drug decriminalization.

Sorry english is not my first language, so that wasn't clear. By drugs, I meant cannabis here, well I don't know the details in the US but "soft drugs" that's being de-criminalized there. Not other kinds of drugs. Though that was just an example to make people realize that expressing unpopular opinions, as long as they're not illegal, should not lead to firing people and insulting them for life.

Also, you're the one exposing false equivalences with your godwin point. Being against marriage of homosexual people is not at all akin to mass murder. And the action of calling for the eradication of any people is (rightly to me) illegal in any case.

There is no version of treating LGBT+ as just somewhat less equal that’s morally defensible.

Never defended the guy's opinions, I just find comments here a little bit (euphemism) extreme.

how are you not defending him? you are literally making arguments in his defense or in the defense of someone like him, trying to get people to empathize with him for having an "unpopular opinion"

so if you think mass murders are a bit of a stretch (it really isn't if you know anything about fascism) let's say he donated to a political group whose goal is to make interracial marriage illegal, do you still think you need to make comments about how that's "just an unpopular opinion"?

Being against marriage of homosexual people is not at all akin to mass murder.

How do you think genocides start?

Nah it's fair to keep hassling people who have done bad things to society like that. I hope that all the Jan. 6th traitors have a similar permanent status of being hassled about it too.

I get it, but not giving them any kind of an out means they will be permanent enemies even if they do change their mind about wanting a Trump coup. But on the other hand, it's hard to tell if someone really changes or just realizes they should pretend they've changed to make their life easier and bide their time for the right time to come back out.

I just know that I have some views now that are polar opposites of what I believed when I was younger.

There are unpopular personal views, and then there is advocating to politically oppress human beings. That's a hard bright line that disqualifies someone from all civil affairs among decent people.

From his lack of response on the topic it’s clear he still supports that position (being anti-gay marriage). He was ousted in part because Mozilla is supposed to be and open and inclusive place to work, hard to do that when your boss doesn’t believe you should be allowed to marry.

Furthermore he proved his lack of morals and character by starting a crypto browser. This guy isn’t worth defending.

Jobs fire people ALL THE TIME over personally held beliefs or things they say/do outside of work. We can argue that’s not right but as long as it happens to the rank and file I think it appropriate to at least try to hold C-level to the same standards. If it helps you sleep at night I’m almost sure he would have survived the backlash at any company that wasn’t like Mozilla, lord knows C-level came get away with murder most places.

He was ousted in part because Mozilla is supposed to be and open and inclusive place to work,

So by "open and inclusive" that means "everyone has to have the personal opinions, even when they don't bring any of those opinions to the company?"

To clarify, I think gay people should be allowed to marry. I don't agree with the supposed position Brendan Eich has. I say "supposed" because you haven't provided any proof that this is his position.

Here's 2 great questions you should answer:

  1. Should Muslims be allowed to work at Mozilla?

Islam is very anti-gay, and if you've met any Muslim immigrants, I have, they don't think the gays should marry either. Among, uh, other things. Depending on age and where they're from.

  1. Should you be penalized/reprimanded/fired by your employer for having opinions they don't agree with?

Let's say this: you work for a Pakistani Muslim and in a workplace that's predominantly Middle Eastern and North African. He doesn't believe in gay marriage, you do. You donate like $50 to some LGBTQIA+ organization. Should your boss fire you?

Or let's be less controversial: you want to legalize all drugs and donate to a candidate who thinks the same. Your employer had a family member who died of a heroin overdose, and they're pretty anti-drug. Should they fire you?

Or lastly: you're a Republican. Your boss is a registered Democrat. Neither of you talk politics at work and you get along well and you do your job. Should they fire you?

hard to do that when your boss doesn’t believe you should be allowed to marry.

Was Brendan Rich going out of his way to tell any gay people at Mozilla he thinks they shouldn't marry? Was he bullying gay subordinates? If he was, yea, he should absolutely be fired. If not, it doesn't make sense to me for an employer to fire you for personal opinions you hold that don't effect your day-to-day job.

Fire the Muslims too if they take any public actions to oppress others, I say.

Sure, I don't disagree. But you can't fire them simply because Islam isn't pro-gay.

But I need proof that Eich was going out of his way to specifically oppress the gays, not a "well obviously" or tangential claim. If he simply donated to some Republican who later turned out later to actually be anti-gay marriage, who's to say Eich didn't know they had that position?

And we don't even know if Eich is against gay marriage, no one here has shown proof of that. Should I assume you're possibly Islamaphobic because of your comment? I don't think I should.

We can't assume people's positions based on nothing tangible. It comes off as obnoxious mind reading. In fairness, the internet created these mind reading games all political sides do, because it gets attention and likes. If someone truly holds a disagreeable opinion, you should be able to sufficiently counter it. Granted, that's a whole different think when we're talking about being in the workplace.

Believing in oppressing other people's rights is not the same as actually taking an action to take those rights away.

Advocating those beliefs is! If he wasn't doing that, no one would know about it

Look, a well thought out argument that really shows the hypocrisy of people now a days. Of course no one is going to respond.

Jobs fire people ALL THE TIME over personally held beliefs or things they say/do outside of work

I thankfully (at least in my opinion) live in a country where this is illegal and it does seem well-enforced (I live in France). I understand this can and does happen in the US, but I still find it shocking enough for me to comment on it. The firing of Brendan Eich had a pretty big backlash so I'm not the only one.

Furthermore he proved his lack of morals and character by starting a crypto browser. This guy isn’t worth defending.

I do not use brave either because I'm not comfortable with the philosophy and whole crypto thing, but using that as a proof to "the lack of morals and character" of Brendan Eich is a big shortcut to take IMO. Ironically that quoted parts also sounds like something I normally would more likely hear from someone at the opposite side of the political spectrum - from what I guessed is your political affiliation - but I digress and my guess may be completely wrong (in any case, I don't care much, I just thought it may help me to make you get my point).


Then to make things clear, I'm not against boycotting companies due to the personal actions of someone you vehemently disagree with, I'm against the idea of insulting publicly both him and the projects he's affiliated with every time his name comes up. This is the very annoying and toxic part.

Furthermore he proved his lack of morals and character by starting a crypto browser. This guy isn’t worth defending.

I wish you had that level of moral integrity when it comes to working with companies that are banked by institutions that ravage and pillage the working class.

Brendan is quick to act when it comes to $$$$.. and anti LGBT law

Can you expand on the LGBT comment? I'm looking for a new browser and an anti LGBT organization would be a deal breaker for me.

Brendan Eich is vocally against gay marriage, it's not a secret. Also Brave is fuckin SKETCHY. They've always come up with "creative" ways of making money, sometimes inserting affiliate links into their users' searches, sometimes selling their data, other times getting into weird crypto schemes.

Every time somebody catches them doing something sketchy, they put out a big "OOPS SORRY THAT WAS AN ACCIDENT" statement, and their fanboys just forgive them and act like it's no big deal. Then they troll Reddit (and now Lemmy) blindly repeating how great and privacy-focused Brave is.

The only browser worth your time is Firefox. If you insist on sticking with a Chromium-based browser (which is most of them, including Brave), then Arc is pretty damn cool.

Woah when were they caught selling user data, that would be a huge blow to them as a privacy focused browser that I've somehow never heard of.

The only thing I really found, based on a Google search, is that they sold copyrighted data to train AI models. Still bad, but for completely different reasons and that's a bigger fish than just brave.

But maybe I didn't find what the other commenter was thinking of.

Lol so it literally never happened. I guess it's true that the biggest source of misinformation is random people on the internet.

This right here. I am generally very open to new browsers and frankly I am okay with Edge and even chrome as long as their parent companies are open about what data they collect and how they use it. I just do not get the same thing with Brave, and the crypto link injection was the final nail for me. Their fan boys are a weird base.

Check the section labeled "Appointment to CEO and resignation" on Eich's Wikipedia entry. He also expressed some COVID doubting nonsense during the pandemic. To my knowledge Brave doesn't have an official stance on any of this, but it's not a good look when the CEO does (or at least, did in the recent past).

With his position back then Brendan could make an impact making the world less hateful place to be yet he chose not to by supporting ban on gay marriage.

After the backlash he stepped down, he started a startup company that make web browser which is now known as Brave (brave choice of name for unapologetic homophobic).

Checkout waterfox, no complaints here after like 6 years; they even added a feature I requested within a week of the request.

Nothing related to Brave, and Mozilla has been going downhill since the departure of Brendan.

If by what you mean by Mozilla going downhill is losing marketshare.

  1. it's most likely because Google promoting Chrome whenever you visit google.

  2. Also add to that bad business decision they have made for example buying Pocket.

  3. Those at Mozilla helm i think is always bad. Brendan with his homophobia, Mitchell Baker with her salary rise while firing employees.

Brendan homophobia didn't contribute it. Big high salary Mozilla CEO and chop some good projects as Servo did.

I don't get all the hate Brave gets. I understand that techies have some issues, but for me as a user I have nothing bad to say. Ads are blocked everywhere, including YouTube. There's an option to use tor...

If you don't like the crypto options don't use them. I always thought crypto was bunk, but I wish I bought a bunch of bitcoin when I first heard of it.

I don't like it because it's a chrome derivative. Sure, they use Chromium and can edit some things. But at the end of the day, they use the Chrome javascript engine and render the HTML/CSS however Google wants to. Therefore Google more or less defines how that browser represents the web. If Google wants to implement or not implement some web standard, Brave has to follow along whether they like it or not.

I want less power in Google'a hands, not more.

The chrome javascript engine? V8 you mean? That's used in Node, it basically powers most, if not all, of the modern web lol

Good point, I had forgotten node uses v8. It's powering servers that run node, sure. Not every website uses node. Lemmy I think is rust backend and kbin uses PHP.

But I mean browser specific rendering. They all follow ECMAScript standard but there are things outside of it. In the past __proto__, a way to get an object's prototype, only worked in Spidermonkey. Or how the ECMAScript doesn't specific what order the elements in a for...in loop shows up. Today these are little minor things

They aren't particularly important right now (besides hunting weird bugs) because Google follows the standards more or less. But give Google 100% control and you will start seeing dark patterns slip into the javascript itself

The FE can, and probably, still uses node

Anyway I agree with the sentiment, I use Firefox myself (actually at work I test just against Firefox lol)

Node is far from the most popular. Majority of websites run on PHP.

Hence the modern. Most modern websites nowadays don't use php anymore, at least for their FE

Laravel is modern enough. If you're talking bleeding edge web dev, that's actually on elixir with Phoenix

Not sure how you count how "modern" something is considering PHP still has new versions and cut lots of releases

at least for their FE

People totally still just output html from PHP in modern websites, not everything is react

I think it's largely because of Brendan Eich not supporting gay marriage. The browser itself seems fine to me also.

As a normal browser user:

The browser works fine, although with time they kept adding more and more stuff that I had to disable. I could deal with it, but it's not a browser I'd recommend to most of my friends.

After a few years using Chrome and then Brave, I moved back to Firefox. Not as polished, but works fine for me.

As a Brave Rewards/Creators user:

I simply don't trust them anymore.

I used it for a while to make some money with my site. Some people used Brave (like me), so since they were blocking ads, I confirmed my site so I could get some of the automated donations the browser sends to the top sites people visited that month. I received a few payments, had everything confirmed, paid taxes on the revenue... all 100% legit, never tried to game the system or anything like that. It wasn't much, but helped with running costs.

One day I couldn't login to see my balance, but ignored it and forgot about it. Then they sent me an email asking me how I was making that money, to which I replied. Months went by without any reply... until I forced the issue. Then they banned my account without providing any reasons or a way to appeal. My site was still verified, so I assume I was still receiving donations, which I could not access. The site continued to be displayed as "verified" even after them banned me... I have no idea if they sent the donations back to the senders. I actually had to ask them to un-verify the site if they were going to keep my account banned.

The way they dealt with it was bad and receiving donations to a banned account is shady as fuck. I wouldn't use the word "hate", but I just can't trust them.

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I prefer Firefox and Librewolf because they are less dependent on Google. But I never disliked Brave. I have it as a second browser. I think the issue people have with them is that they are also fundamentally an ad company.

Look, nothing lasts forever. For now, I think brave is a decent alternative to Chrome if people don't want to leave Chromium.

I use iridium as my secondary browser for things that break on firefox !

Props to Brendan! Firefox and Brave are have put their foot down. Now they need our support. I'm hoping that nobody here is using Chrome (or anything else Google for that matter). We the users are what gave Google their power. We wanted free shit and look where that landed us. Time to turn things around.

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I don't understand.

There's loads of people for whom 3 or 4 sites make up 99% of "the web", and those sites will just stop working for people using browsers without WEI support.

I just don't really see how a browser could be viable in the future without WEI support.

And that's exactly the point. WEI makes it a world where big tech decides if they are going to support a competing browser, a competing operating system like Linux, or plugins against ads. They can also force you to have any number of plugins installed, from their choosing.

It destroys the free web completely.

Yes but why is eich saying this? It would be the end of brave surely.

Wether it is the end for brave or not we don't know (judging by the core users of Brave and FF I highly doubt that it will just be the end of Brave or Firefox)

I'm fairly certain that it will split the web apart even more. Then we have the "totally safe and totally not monitored" adinfested buzzweb. We have the chinese walled garden web. And ofc the darkweb (e.g. tor and onion-sites). And the new addition will be the gray-web or something because "ya JusT cAn'T be SuRe" (completely disregarding that the current APIs are really just about all that's needed. Imo someone running a website has in their own interest and in their own responsibility to secure their site and servers. WEI is a cheap stupid cop out at best for security concerns and "you WILL be looking at our fucking ads, you fucking data slave" at worst.

I just don't see how a browser could be viable if it wasn't compatible with say Google/ twitter.

I use brave search. If Twitter implements this thing, I guess I'll stop using it completely

My goodness me.

Of course it will be possible to avoid use of any WEI sites, but I think it will be much more difficult than you think. What about internet banking, or government websites, or stack overflow.

We both know that you'll end up using Brave where you can, and some other browser with WEI support.

This is my take too - Google Search and YouTube especially which are owned by Google.

Even if Chrome had like 5% market share, surely they could just push this anyway? While the Chromium monopoly is partially to blame for this, I'd argue the centralisation of the web is as well.

Sure, "Google Search is useless now, you can't find what you want!", but the vast, vast majority of people still and continue to use it, and nothing will change that most likely.

Google search isn't useless. It's getting worse but still Google is the best search. For a lot of general searches, Duckduckgo and Kagi have been sufficient for me. "What year did WW2 end" "what is the population of Crimea" "north Korean famine 1990s"

But for example I had a picture of a specific motor an employee sent me that I had to find a replacement for online. It's a niche motor we use for a large air compressor. All I had was some model / serial numbers. I tried plugging in different variations of the numbers and "motor" into both Duckduckgo and Kagi with no luck.

On Google, the first result was a PDF of a Honda motor guide that had every single niche Honda motor and I was able to find the model name of the exact motor I needed, which allowed me to find a viable replacement on Ebay.

It hurts me to say it, but the other web searches still haven't reached total parity with Google. I use Duckduckgo as my primary and then when it doesn't find me what I need, I go to Google.

I would use Kagi but after it couldn't find me the engine, I stopped paying my monthly subscription. Until then I was happy with it, but if I'm paying for a service and it isn't any better than the free options..

That's why you can add !g to your search query when you didn't find anything on Brave or DDG

Thanks for the tip, that sounds more convenient than opening Google in a new tab

You could use a SearX instance. It includes google's results.

For what it's worth I'm not saying that - it's just a common argument I've seen online lately in these spaces. I don't actually know if it's true because I don't use Google Search.

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You can use Startpage to do a Google search by proxy. Startpage passes your search query to Google and returns the results to you without having to use Google directly.

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Google needs to be broken up. Honestly most tech companies do as they have consolidated way too much

Yeah reall I have seen people complain about google search followed by them using google. Neeva was a paid search engine that recently shut down. In theor fairwell message they explained getting people to pay for it was easy but the hardest part was explaing how to change search engines or what the difference between search engine and a broswer

If Google wanted to push it with only 5% of their userbase wouldn't they be saying goodbye to 95% of their users. I don't think even Google is that insane.

No, because what is the chance people will give up YouTube?

Not very high, I'd say!

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How about having the WEI configurable just for particular sites, bit like FoxyProxy.

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Surely a browser with a market share 2% that of Chrome's (not total!) doing this will change anything. Surely when Google implements this and your bank and government websites start requiring your browser be "secure" users aren't going to just switch back to chrome where "everything just works".

Crazy how Chrome took off so much over default browsers like Safari and Edge. Is it because it is also taking into account Chrome on Android and Chromebooks that come as default? Or are that many normal people going out of their way to install chrome.

Well it used to be good, even non techy users knew that IE sucked and when their "computer-whizkid" nephew recommended Chrome it was genuinely faster and leaner than competition. And I've almost forgot the fact that they've advertised chrome (maybe they still do) on the main Google page that gets like billions of pageviews.

Because about 10 years ago, those Safari/IE weren't 1. as smooth/simple as Chrome and 2. everyone on the internet bar the tech nerds were pushing for Chrome. Firefox was viewed in the same light as Linux in my circles.

It was a meme that the only use IE had was to download Chrome. It's not that crazy when you realise the power of word-of-mouth and the meeting the general population's needs for simplicity and google-search integration/features

everyone on the internet bar the tech nerds were pushing for Chrome

Even the tech nerds were pushing for Chrome. IE was the monolithic shitstain that cursed web developers with its anti-competitive behavior (see Netscape vs. Microsoft, for example). Firefox, for as awesome as it was to have an major open-source browser on the landscape, was a slow and bloated beast 15-20 years ago.

And then Chrome came along and touted their multi-threaded, isolated memory model. Some of us were angry that another OSS fork was fracturing development with Firefox, but Chrome was just the better option at the time.

Now? IE is dead and buried, replaced with a rarely used Edge. Chrome is now the slow-moving bloatware. And Firefox is the better, more optimized browser.

It's funny what happens in 20 years.

then Chrome came along and touted their multi-threaded, isolated memory model

And the idea that one tab could crash but the rest of your browser still functioned was pretty revolutionary. I remember being impressed at the idea and using chrome for that alone. All it took was one page with misbehaving JavaScript to cripple your entire web browser back then until the browser offered you to stop the offending script.

Don't care, still won't use out of principle.

What principle are you referring to? (Serious question)

There are 3 possibilities:

  • brave has crypto stuff
  • brave is based on chromium
  • brave is selling data breaking the licenses

Also, I've seen accusations of blatant homophobia been thrown around against the founder, haven't looked into that though so no idea how accurate that is

What people are referring to in that regard is how, in 2011, Brendan Eich (who later founded Brave Software) stepped down as CEO of Mozilla, 11 days after his appointment to said position, after it came out he had donated $1000 dollars to the campaign for California Proposition 8 in 2008, a proposed state constitutional amendment seeking to ban same-sex marriage. Prop 8 wound up passing, although it was overturned a few years after the fact in court.

Here's an article from when Eich stepped down about the whole ordeal.

crypto is the future

chromium is more secure

licenses shouldn't exist

I just don’t trust Brave very much. They’re doing ok now but eventually they’ve got to make some money. Their approach means they have to invest significant effort to porting fixes in chromium over to their forked version, and they can’t drop behind or they’ll have at least security issues. I’m not sure how sustainable it is.

Brave is awesome on iOS where it will block YT ads! However, for regular desktop usage I've been using Firefox for the better part of 2 decades. Never really weaned off it actually.

Especially with the sync option, they are the perfect alternative to Chrome or any of the other commercial initiatives.

Brave has had my respect. Today, Brave earned my appreciation.

Isn't this just marketing? Brave and Vivaldi they already need to spoof chrome user agent or they get blocked in too many websites "you need chrome to enter"

If for example YouTube requires this scummy web attestation then they can say "only supported browsers can login" and there will be no choice because chrome is the biggest share

Yeah. I don't really see how a browser could just refuse to implement this. The few sites that make up 99% of the web for most people would just stop working.

Brave users remind me of Joe Rogan bros. I wonder what that Venn diagram looks like.

Isn't Brave doing this because they have their own way that they sell ads for coins?

I don't entirely approve, I think. But if it helps fight Google's domination of the market, fine.

I use it.. I don't agree to ads so I don't get coins. which is great because I don't want coins, I just want no ads.

Does this mean anything, I mean they can just prevent us accessing to site. And even though this is something we dont wish many websites are going to implement web integrity; which lead us to being forced to use a browser compatible with web integrity if we want to use web.

I know there are always alternatives to services that are probably going to implement web integrity(mainly referring big techs' services) but we all sometimes use their services in some cases.

Just don't use Chrome, don't use websites that lock you out, complain to support

As @mosiacmango suggested many websites use adsense, it is easy for you to say just dont use them but some of them cant be replaced and dont forget you wont be able to use an alternative frontend. Even if you are not using I believe many of us are using at least some of those services that will implement web integrity or uses google ads

Blocking adsense is NON-NEGOTIABLE

All google has to do is make this web DRM mandatory for websites to use its advertising engine Adsense, and suddenly a majority of the internet may refuse your browser. There are apparently about 56 million sites using Adsense. Here is a list of the top 1k by traffic. All of these could be blocked, along with 56 million more.

Yes, it means a lot.

By "does this mean anything" I referred to "Brave does not support web integrity" or else I am well aware of the impact that web integrity will make

Idk Brave is not a browser, but some crypto processig application. It tries to be more than browser, but I only need browser, so I am not going to use it.

Firefox seem to do the job just fine. <3

Have you used it? If you don't want you won't really notice anything crypto outside of the "new tab" screen. Not pushing anything onto the user while browsing. I'm not sure what people are talking about. Yes, you can have wallet there and make an insignificant amount of money by allowing their ads.

Have you used it?

Yes, I used it and switched to Firefox. Brave had just too much of a "HEY IT'S CRYPTO HERE" sort of UI elements to the point that this whole browser seemed like trash to me.

So I just switched to Firefox and been using it for the past ~1 year or so. Also their fiasco with overwritten URLs so they can make money really helped to push me away.

I’m not sure what people are talking about.

To me it's just the principle of the thing. A browser replacing ads with it's own is just... weird. The idea of being paid to be advertised to just makes me feel yuck.

The thing that comes up over and over is that all the weird stuff is opt-in. "It's just like firefox, but it has an opt-in homeless person puncher, just in case you ever want that."

Ordinarily I try to be as "you do you" as I can, but the thing that kinda rubs me the wrong way about Brave is that there's so many people so loyal to what seems to me to be a bit weird.

Why not be loyal if they dont force anything upon you? The homeless person puncher is very far from accurate comparison. I see 0 ads and pay no money for it

I think you're missing my point.

I use Firefox, don't see any ads, and don't pay any money.

What is the point of brave?

You can just turn the crypto stuff off, and the nice thing is when you turn it off it actually respects your decision and actually turns off

Yet they still don't switch to Gecko 🤦, despite Firefox being faster than chrome these days

I love Firefox, but I'm very skeptical of these results. I want to see them repeated elsewhere.

That's really not an easy switch to make. It's not as simple as replacing blink with gecko. If it was, we would see many more gecko based browsers.

Partially it's a license problem. The MPL around gecko is much closer to the GPL than the BSD license that that Chromium blink uses, and thus it's much less appealing for commercial products to use it.

Bold claim for a chromium-based browser.

Not really. It's easy to see exactly where the code is for a new feature by reading the commit history. It shows more or less exactly what to cut out.

And that's easy to do right now.

But that's permanent, unfixable, and potentially ever-increasing tech debt they are taking on.

How easy will it be to do when it's an old feature?

"Permanent, unfixable, and potentially ever-increasing tech debt" is just a description of maintaining a web browser. Using Chromium is still orders of magnitude less work then starting from scratch.

If you use brave or any chromium browser you’re both an idiot and part of the problem.

Anytime someone proudly says they use brave, I know they’re an idiot and not credible on anything tech related

Why?

75% just being a gatekeeper of browsers

25% because monopolies are bad

thats my best guess at least. It is a legitimate point; it is horrible, cocky phrasing.

50% monopolies are bad, by using any chrome based browser you're contributing to googles ability to monopolize the web. 50% because it's for cringe cypto-edgelords and that nonsense, all from a Tech Bro ousted at mozilla for being homophobic.

I use Firefox for that reason, but I won't insult people for not doing it. Brave is still better than chrome.

nitter.net also works