Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

I'd been really loving Brave and using it as my daily driver for a few months now, until that I noticed that little "Brave Ads" icon at the end of the address bar. That's when I realized their entire business model is just in the usurpation of existing Google ad revenue, dressed up with "privacy concerns" for the good PR. This sent me on a journey to find a really solid, free, Chromium based browser that is totally de-Googled, which seems absolutely impossible. I've tacitly settled on Vivaldi, but it's just impossible to really know if they are trustworthy as a company in the long run. Ultimately I feel like I can only trust a browser who's entire build process is open source at this point.

Honest question. Why not Firefox? What are your concerns with it?

I've tried over and over for decades to like Firefox, but I just don't. I can't say it's a rational decision entirely. But beyond that, I just think that Mozilla's motives can't really be trusted at face value with the amount of revenue they have these days, and their whole profile sync service. It just comes down to incentives, and any company which collects any kind of data has the incentive to profit at our expense regardless of ideology. Especially where people's salaries could depend on it.

What about the profile sync service can't be trusted?

It's end-to-end encrypted. Mozilla doesn't have the keys.

What about the whole profile sync service? It's designed to be privacy preserving by encrypting everything locally with a key only you have. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/

Have you checked out Ungoogled Chromium? Link to their GitHub: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

Is Mozilla run that lean even with >$500M in revenue?

Firefox runs worse than chrome still, and it doesn't work well at all on my 2 core 2015 macbook pro. It works fine on my 6 core & 4 core machines although.

I would also like something like the easy user switching that chrome has, since once user would have one set of session tab logins (twitter, fb, google, etc), and another user would have another. firefox -no-remote isn't that smooth of an experience compared to chrome's user switcher.

Sorry if I misunderstood you, but you said you were using Brave. Perhaps you should review how you evaluate the products you use because your record isn't great.

If you were wrong about Brave, your concerns about Firefox and Mozilla could be wrong as well.

It's just an attack vector I wish didn't exist at all. There's also metadata. Sure Mozilla doesn't have your passwords, but they know who you have passwords with. That creeps me out.

There's nothing wrong with the all-purpose heavily featured approach of stuff like Chrome and Firefox, and I get that other people like Sync, I just really wish there was a totally stripped down basic internet browser I could trust.

What about plain Chromium?

If we didn't do business with any company that was run inefficiently we would not do business with a lot of places. I'm not sure how the efficiency of the business is entirely coupled to whether or not the product is usable and meets user needs in ways that other competing products cannot.

take a look at ungoogle chrome if you are on mac or linux. https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

Not sure why you don't like Brave? You can turn off all of the crypto currency and advertising stuff. I think its a good idea personally. What is the problem in usurping googles ad business, exactly?

The Containers add-on[0] for Firefox that Mozilla makes has satisfied my need for partitioning. It's on a per-tab basis and also lets you define certain domains to automatically open in a specific container (e.g. Jira always opens in my Work container).

I can't really speak to Firefox's performance issues though. I feel like they're just as good on rendering and JS speed, but the overall UI doesn't have the same "fast" feel that Chrome does. Chrome has also seemingly gotten slower for me too.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

The majority of that funding seems to come from royalties ($504M of $520M) [0]. What would be the leaner way of collecting those royalties?

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/

Isn't profile sync opt-in?

"Face value"? Try "source value".

What exactly is your problem with an opt-in service?

de-Googled Chromium from an entity we trust is key here. Google and Microsoft are not trustworthy. The cool company of the day is not trustworthy in the long run, agreed. The only entity I know that I trust is Mozilla.

I am backing Mozilla each year with small donations and yet I am not using Firefox. I tried many times and I always return to Chromium (Brave on mobile and Chrome on Desktop).

So my solution is for Mozilla to fork Chromium and see what happens.

>Sure Mozilla doesn't have your passwords, but they know who you have passwords with.

Do they? I just skimmed the source and could not find anything that hints at that (and implementing it the way you said it is makes for much more complex code..)

I just don't enable it. It's not on by default.

For the average user—think your uncle who's about to ask you tech support questions this weekend—using Firefox Sync is way better for their privacy and security than reusing the same password everywhere. And for those of us who have and use password managers, Firefox Sync is not on by default—unlike Brave's attention-tracking or Chrome's Google logins.

Every time the containers add-on gets updated, it forgets all your preferences.

Brave is completely open source and the ads are opt-in.

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser https://github.com/brave-intl

You're right the business model is advertising, very similar to Google. However the key difference is that they're trying to enable ads in a way that is privacy focused. They don't let websites track you. The whole point is that there are client-side algorithms that decide what advertisements to serve you.

I've read un-googled chromium is often behind/not up to date with the latest Chromium release/updates (which makes it not secure).

Source: https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/issues/274...

i found that post because the un-googled chromium author linked to it here: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/issues/640#iss...

Really? Is that a known issue? I haven’t experienced that and I’ve been using containers on Firefox since they were introduced.

I noticed that, too. I tried to use Brave on mobile, and it ran about 5 times slower than Chrome. It's just not worth switching from Chrome IMHO.

Brave is open source where Vivaldi is not. Vivaldi seems to have some performance issues as well.

Aren't the Brave ads opt-in?

Brave ads will be 100% opt-in.

I've been using containers for some time now (probably since not long after it was announced) to keep my twitter accounts separate, and I've never had to reset or update my preferences.

"Will be" or "are"?

That's not exactly symmetric with the policy for creators... You guys screwed up on this issue, and you need to stop everything else you're doing until you figure out how you're going to fix the screw-up and apologize. Until then, posting here is not helping your brand image. Maybe if you don't understand what you're doing wrong you could re-read this thread until you do, but really you should just hire a CPA. A bank is not allowed to commingle deposits with its own funds. You should not keep money that is intended for creators.

I've been running Firefox Nightly, and it's way faster.

"Will be", as in, "are not".

Firefox absolutely sucks on Android. It's fine on Mac OS, but it is so much slower than Brave (Chromium based) and Chrome itself, that it becomes irritating to use. That being said, it does support extensions like Ublock Origin and Ghostery.

Mobile Chrome means zero extensions and ad hell, so Brave it is. Same Chrome engine and UI (swipeable tabs is something I miss in Firefox Android) and adblocking.

Exact opposite experience. I use Brave as my default Android browser specifically beacuse it's fast like Chrome, but without the ads. At work, I don't mind using a non-adblocked PC, but mobile ads are a special kind of hell.

On at least 3 separate occasions now I've gone to open a container tab, and found that I was back to the default set of (Work, Personal, Shopping, I think). Even better is when this happens, it also resets the count on how many container tabs you've opened, so near the end of the day I'll go to shift containers and get blocked by a "Congrats! You've opened 100 container tabs!" that needs to be dismissed.

This has happened to me several times as well. I use them with the temporary container tabs add-on (so, short-lived containers by default, plus a selection of specific sites that I retain information for, with strict cross-domain isolation), and let me tell you, losing that configuration is painful after setting it up.

The fact that you can't sync container configuration between devices is also a huge pain point, when you have a nontrivial setup.

I still use them, but I accept that I'm going to endure some pain now and then; I can't recommend Firefox containers to people who just want to get work done right now.

I have, and it's great. But it just comes down to trust. At the end of the day you are still trusting some random internet person to distribute the binaries. I don't want to have to build from source just to be able to trust my browser.

> Firefox absolutely sucks on Android.

Have you tried it lately? I agree that it used to, but it has improved vastly. It's my daily driver now.

My understanding is that you're experiencing Brave's other project, which is somehow both more scammy and scummy than this one. The idea is to replace the ads already in the web page with "good ads" approved by Brave, and give the original publisher 1/3 of the resulting revenue through some similarly unclear means.

This, of course, is exactly the same model as many pieces of toolbar malware, with the genius addition that by letting publishers opt in to receiving a small fraction of the revenue, they hope to make it easier to accept the loss than to sue.

Of course they'll respond by saying that users choose to download and run Brave. But the long term financial success of the project is dependent on most users either not knowing or not caring that their browser is inserting ads into webpages and taking funding from publishers (and maybe "opt-in" to seeing replacements ads through some UI dark patterns, I don't know). Frankly I don't see any real difference between this and the average toolbar that promises to "add value" to the browser.

Brave has the worst business practices of any open source company I know of, and they're a blight on the community in general.

I use the containers add on, and it's pretty much the only real advantage FF has over chrome.

Still need user switching although, because sometimes I want to separate multiple google/twitter/etc accounts for example and still want the automatic url-based container activation.

If brave implemented containers although, I would probably use it because chrome works better than FF.

Strange. Firefox seems to run just as well as Chrome for me nowadays (on Windows though).

The ad replacements are opt in, are they not? Ads for me are just straight up blocked.

I'm using Firefox right now om android and its a nice experience. Chrome variants are smoother scrolling I guess but the sync is sure nice in Firefox.

I did, tried it for a week, honestly the scrolling still feels horrible when compared to Chrome.

I have Brave installed on my work machine, it's opt-in... I don't have it activated and never even clicked the Ads button. It even shows as disabled in the settings.

Do you have old hardware? I use Firefox on my Pixel 2 and it's great, especially with ad blocking.

If you run Firefox with the -P command line argument, a profile selection screen comes up in which you can create multiple profiles. These are completely separated (down to the HSTS state!) "accounts".

I don't know how MacOS works, but if you set your Firefox shortcut to firefox -P you can switch profiles by restarting Firefox. Granted, it's not as nice as Chrome, but it might still be of worth to you in some way.

I know about the -P command, that is why I was referencing the -no-remote option ;) Firefox has multi-user, it's just janky.

You have to double click on your special shortcut with the command line option, and if some other program tries to open a url with firefox as the default browser with the -no-remote / -P command, then it will just not work if you have all users open.

While with chrome it's 2 clicks away and no edge cases making other apps opening urls not work.

I absolutely agree with that, scrolling feels really janky but I did get used to it.

I used "will be" because the product has not actually been launched yet in a release version of Brave.

Agreed that scrolling is still janky, but the syncing of prefs (especially add-ons) is well worth it, imo.

Heck, even just the one add-on that lets you sleep your phone while a YouTube video continues playing is well worth using Firefox. Such a basic functionality isn't enough reason to get YouTube Red.

And then, you have add-ons like ublock origin that give you the Brave-like functionality without all this brouhaha.

Brave doesn't insert ads into the browser or otherwise replace web site ads. This is a thing people like to say about the company because it'd be obviously lame if we did this...but we don't do this. Do you have a citation for the claims that Brave does this?

If that's not what your Wikipedia page means, then it could hardly be more misleading.

"Brave Software has announced that it is developing a feature allowing users to opt in to receiving ads sold by the company in place of ads blocked by the browser.[8][9][10] Brave intends to pay content publishers 55% of the replaced ad revenue. Brave Software, ad partners, and browser users would each be allocated 15% of the revenue."

"in place of" is not correct. We're not replacing any ads in the browser. We are building a completely separate ad platform into Brave that will go live in 2019 but calling it a replacement for blocked ads is an inaccurate, weird construction. Not sure who wrote that wikipedia entry. The 55% number is not accurate either.

Could you explain what you mean by "a completely separate ad platform"? My understanding is that Brave's model is to block all native ads with tracking, and in the place on the site where that ad would normally be shown, to show an ad from Brave's own network. Is that accurate? If so, I think "replacement" is a very accurate label.

And here's a bit from Ars Technica's initial review of Brave:

"In practice, Brave just sounds like a cash-grab. Brave isn't just a glorified adblocker: after removing ads from a webpage, Brave then inserts its own programmatic ads. It sounds like these ads will be filled by ad networks that work with Brave directly, and Brave will somehow police these ads to make sure they're less invasive/malevolent than the original ads that were stripped out. In exchange, Brave will take a 15 percent cut of the ad revenue. Instead of using tracking cookies that follow you around the Internet, Brave will use your local browsing history to target ads."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/mozil...

Is that inaccurate? Was that accurate at some point in the past? I don't deny that I could be wrong and misunderstanding what Brave is trying to do, but I would posit that I have done due diligence here. This does seem to be the idea the neutral tech media has of Brave, like it or not.

We're building a way for users to opt into getting a few ads a day in the form of device push notifications (alerts in the top right of your monitor etc). We're not injecting ads into the HTML of sites visitors view. So yes, we're doing ad stuff, but we're not "replacing" the ads that we're blocking. Does the distinction make sense?

To your point about the Ars Technica comments, my understanding of things from conversations since I've joined in July 2018 is that when Brave launched, they put out a lot of info about stuff they were _going_ to do, and one of those ideas was to replace ads. However soon after launch, a lot of folks in the company and outside of the company explained to management that this was a really stupid idea and would be scummy. So Brave never went forward with it though it was a talking point to journalists early on. You could argue that having an idea to do a scummy thing two years ago is very bad. I'd like to think it's good when startups listen to feedback and adjust their product plans accordingly.

> when Brave launched, they put out a lot of info about stuff they were _going_ to do, and one of those ideas was to replace ads

So it's not exactly a baseless claim. I think between that ad idea, and this donation scam, I would _never_ use Brave nor recommend it to anyone. On top of that, it is blood boiling to watch you sit here and try to defend this scheme as a "UI problem" over and over again.

No it is a baseless claim. Brave's never replaced ads and has no plans to do so. And yes, this was a UI mistake that's being fixed as quickly as we can to address valid concerns from users.

Honestly, if you're running a Mac, your rationale seems to point to using Safari as your browser. I had a similar thought process as you, and Apple's incentives as a company seem to align best with mine. Apple's incentive with Safari is to make your user experience of running on Apple products better, to keep you in the ecosystem. Apple has taken a hard stance on exposing, collecting, and sharing user data, and although some of their AI suffers from this (i.e. Siri), their stance is something I can get behind.

Apple seems like the only company that builds a browser that is not incentivized to collect ad revenue. I've been using Safari for everything for the past few weeks, and really liking it. The performance on Apple hardware seems better too, and there are some cool Apple ecosystem features built in. I'm a web developer so there are certain things I still need Chrome for, but in those cases I fire up a single Chrome tab and use Safari for everything else.