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Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

(twitter.com)
323 points plusCubed | 9 comments | 21 Dec 18 17:48 UTC | HN request time: 2.222s | source | bottom
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aphextron ◴[21 Dec 18 19:26 UTC] No.18735814[source]▶
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.
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rthomas6 ◴[21 Dec 18 19:28 UTC] No.18735832[source]▶
Honest question. Why not Firefox? What are your concerns with it?
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woolvalley ◴[21 Dec 18 19:40 UTC] No.18735923[source]▶
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.

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1. beering ◴[21 Dec 18 19:51 UTC] No.18736023[source]▶
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...

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2. subway ◴[21 Dec 18 20:23 UTC] No.18736295[source]▶
Every time the containers add-on gets updated, it forgets all your preferences.
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3. sftwds ◴[21 Dec 18 20:42 UTC] No.18736464[source]▶
Really? Is that a known issue? I haven’t experienced that and I’ve been using containers on Firefox since they were introduced.
4. bichiliad ◴[21 Dec 18 21:01 UTC] No.18736611[source]▶
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.
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5. subway ◴[21 Dec 18 21:41 UTC] No.18736921{3}[source]▶
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.
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6. logic ◴[21 Dec 18 21:59 UTC] No.18737068{4}[source]▶
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.

7. woolvalley ◴[21 Dec 18 22:56 UTC] No.18737446[source]▶
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.

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8. jeroenhd ◴[22 Dec 18 00:29 UTC] No.18738014[source]▶
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.

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9. woolvalley ◴[22 Dec 18 00:31 UTC] No.18738022{3}[source]▶
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.