- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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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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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.
And orders of magnitude worse than just firefox.
It’s just code. It’s not like it’s cursed.
It’s just code…
There’s a reason my title on github is “Code Exorcist”
Had been using Brave for 4 years. Switched from it to Firefox after the Google DRM news came out. Firefox is awesome!
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.
Hello fellow Firefox lifer. It’s been awesome!
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.
If only someone would put the Firefox over the earth like the logo, that would be epic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I think it’s largely because of Brendan Eich not supporting gay marriage. The browser itself seems fine to me also.
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 !
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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nitter.net also works
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Switched back to Firefox myself. Highly recommend.
Firefox and ublock is where it’s at
Their business model is replacing ads with ads they get paid for. Obviously they aren’t going to like Google making that harder.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Well yeah, that’s how search engines make money. They aren’t magic
Exactly, and yet they claim “each search plants a tree”.
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.
How about having the WEI configurable just for particular sites, bit like FoxyProxy.
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…
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.
You could use a SearX instance. It includes google’s results.
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
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.
Despite the anecdotal N=1 example, which of course can’t be reproduced and corroborated because the OP felt the need to omit the search query they used for some reason, Google results have generally been garbage for years — yes, to an extent that it becomes useless.
Hell, one of the suggestions for “google results” on Google itself is “google results are getting worse”, with lots of articles explaining why when you search it.
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!
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
Holy shit can i get a link to this?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/20/23731397/neeva-search-engine-google-shutdown
That not the original page I read it one since I was a neeva user I read when they post on the now gone neeva search engine
Google needs to be broken up. Honestly most tech companies do as they have consolidated way too much
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.
No it won’t. It’ll just fork the internet.
Genuinely not sure if you’re joking. Brave people are… difficult to understand.
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.
Haha, you think government and banks update their websites
Brave users remind me of Joe Rogan bros. I wonder what that Venn diagram looks like.
Yet they still don’t switch to Gecko 🤦, despite Firefox being faster than chrome these days
This sounds awesome. I’ve been trying to switch to Firefox for the past couple years but Chrome’s responsiveness and speed always pulled me back (along with some other issues)
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.
I love Firefox, but I’m very skeptical of these results. I want to see them repeated elsewhere.
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.
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.
I don’t agree with Brave’s business model, and the shady stuff they did, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
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.
Brave has had my respect. Today, Brave earned my appreciation.
