Switching to Brave from Firefox due to AI and ethical concerns seems like a lateral move at best if being generous.
I've switched fully to Meta's Muse for all of my research going forward.
It's not a monopoly if you can build your own with it. This is like saying glibc is a monopoly.
Edge, chrome, chromium, brave, vivaldi, opera... its all just rebadged chromium.
There's chrome, Firefox, safari.
Not everyone wants to be a martyr/activist to change their habits and experience in order to support a political cause they don't really understand.
Most people just want the best, frictionless and most familiar experience to the product they already know and love, which often means a slick and shiny product from a monopolistic anti-consumer company.
I'll accept this as a reasonable excuse for the non-HN crowd.
But the HN crowd should understand the cause. We've all experienced or heard stories of the IE6 monopoly days, and few of us trust Google.
And it's not much of a sacrifice to use Firefox, it's a great browser. Maybe not the best for everybody, but it is the best for some and OK for many/all. Calling yourself a martyr just because you use Firefox for political reasons seems a stretch.
That's who I was referring to. If you want Chrome to not be a monopoly anymore you'll need to convince gen-pop to switch not just part of HN.
>And it's not much of a sacrifice to use Firefox,
It can be. A few of my most visited websites have issues on FF, and Chrome does page translation far better than FF, which is a must-have for me as I live in a foreign country. Then Chrome's "Image lens" AI search is invaluable for my hobby work.
>Calling yourself a martyr just because you use Firefox for political reasons seems a stretch.
Majority of people will dump the new browser the second the find a website that doesn't work well on it. Using it despite that, IS a political statement, that not everyone will make. If you want FF to get more adoption, then you need to acknowledge its weaknesses so that it can fix them, and not bury our heads in the sand and attack its critics.
Not necessarily. Some of us just really don't like using Chromium-based browsers due to usability issues and want to use one that works better for them.
I use FF with FingerprintResist on, and many things such as WebGL outright disabled, on top of very restrictive DNS blacklist and uBlock Origin, and even despite all of that I find Firefox very usable. I can make online payments and book flights and other such things normally. I rarely, if ever, have to use a clean, stock Firefox profile or fall back to Chromium. On machine at least, Firefox gets a higher Speedometer 3.1 score than Chromium.
Every time there's a thread about browsers, at least one commenter presents themselves as a self-appointed representative of "the users" and declares what the users really want.
And it's not that these self-appointed representatives are wrong, necessarily, but they tend to say one of two things: either The People want serious privacy and FOSS commitments and no AI, or they want everything smooth and don't care about privacy. And whichever one it is, it's the most obvious thing in the world, according to the person saying it.
Since you're making rude false accusations like that, let me ask you, are you saying most people DON'T want "the best, frictionless and most familiar experience"?
Because I never met anyone who said they wanted a slower jankier less intuitive product than what they used before.
So how was my statement wrong when I said what people want?
>either The People want serious privacy and FOSS commitments
Most people don't care about privacy and FOSS, otherwise Google wouldn't be one of the most valuable companies in the world with some of the most popular products.
To clarify, by "most people" I mean most people in absolute terms, like the ones you when you touch grass, not just those from your HN/tech bubble, those are not "most people".
People want frictionless and familiar experience. But they also want tools where they are not the product (either by having their data sold, or being fed ads, or being captured by enshittificating services because alternative services cannot compete due to artificial barriers, ...). (edit: and I'm not saying that Chromium does that, just showing that "what people want" is not so simplistic)
Can you prove me that this other statement is incorrect? Are you saying that most people DON'T want to not be abused by their tools?
Of course not. The problem is not that your sentence is not true, it is that your sentence is loaded: you just provide one obvious sentence saying "most people love having the benefices of this product", but totally ignore that 1) this product also has disadvantages that people don't like, 2) alternative products provide other set of benefices and disadvantages.
I personally agree with the previous comment: these "most people" arguments are usually very poor, and it does not reflect very well on people who make them. (the fact that "best, frictionless and familiar experiences" is an advantage can be a good point to bring to the conversation, but it is way less simplistic than that (what is "best", what is "familiar", did people did not want browser tabs because it was not familiar, is a monopolistic situation as with IE6 at the time really "frictionless" when it allowed IE6 to not progress or fix bugs, is "open in 0.62 seconds" being better than "open in 0.75 seconds" really matter for the majority of people, ...) and this discussion can easily done in a better way than with the poor "most people want" argument)
I already did before: Google.
>Are you saying that most people DON'T want to not be abused by their tools?
Firsty, most people don't consider themselves as "being abused" when they use Google Chrome instead of FF, otherwise they wouldn't use it voluntarily in such great numbers. That's just a hill HN and techies love to die on that not representative of the majority.
Secondly, most people (outside of tech) either don't even know they are the product, or they don't even care. See facebook, instagram, X, etc as proof.
Simply, people are just making choices and no choice is perfect. They use Google Chrome DESPITE the disadvantages of Google Chrome.
And that is exactly why the argument "people use Google Chrome so Google Chrome cannot have negative consequence" is simplistic.
But more importantly, some of the advantages of Google Chrome only exist because some people are not using Google Chrome. It is not a zero sum game: the best situation is when we have an healthy balance when people are using alternative. The initial comment you answer to did nothing else, just said "me, I use Firefox", it did not even said "everyone should use Firefox".
And the fact that they are not aware of a bad consequence that is bad for them is really not a good argument. In fact, it demonstrates that your logic is flawed: the fact that the majority of people use something does not demonstrate that this product is a good idea. This is the usual race to the bottom: let's enshittify as much as the people can bare. That is just creating a shitty society. Civilisations would be so much better if this mentality did not exist.
I had this conversation so many time before, and it is so simplistic and naive. Can you not just do better?
>Because I never met anyone who said they wanted a slower jankier less intuitive product than what they used before.
Well someone's having big feelings, but this is a straw man, speed and privacy don't have to be mutually exclusive and in practice they aren't for the most part. Users who are casual enough that ad tech telemetry and privacy are mysterious words to them are also not people who are going to note the 0.1% difference in performance that you claim they're prioritizing. Belligerently repeating a just so story based on a flawed framing of trade-offs faced by users doesn't make it more true.
>Most people don't care about privacy and FOSS
Again, this is a just so story, and I think it's just something weird about the vernacular of HN that people are comfortable making claims like this or thinking they can be leveraged to make authoritative judgments. But one person's trust me bro is as good as anothers, and I don't even think it's right that people really are trading privacy for performance and any sort of margin that significant enough to really be noticed. And frankly, if they do notice a performance difference, it's probably because they don't have ad block and if they don't have ad block it's probably because they're using Chrome.
Google actually maintains their market share through a combination of strong user experience and an utterly dominant position as a distributor. Chrome is the default browser on over a billion devices and is advertised and deeply integrated into the ecosystem of the world's most used website. I've said it a million times but if it was just about the inherent quality of the product then Opera would have conquered the world back in 2012.
This mechanism is well understood pretty much anytime software monopolies face legal scrutiny. Microsoft wanted people to believe that Internet explorer was just that much better than the competition, and Google probably wanted the world to believe its search was so much better, which is why it had to be the default option for Apple devices in Europe. But if that was an organic manifestation of consumer preference, it wouldn't have to be maintained with billion dollar arrangements, or hostile ecosystem lockout that came under legal scrutiny.
You can also make requests without being a dick and calling people "self appointed X" just because their viewpoint doesn't match yours. Conversation work better that way.
I'm the same way. Turn off crypto by default (is it these days?) and that's pretty much it.
I like how they host selected Manifest v2 extensions themselves so uBlock Origin latest continues to work and is actively maintained.
Speed of Chromium with privacy focus. Works for me.
Since Google has proven willing to stoop to bad behavior to lend Chromium the impression of superior performance[0] I don't consider subjective performance to be a meaningful benchmark.
As metrics go, I am more concerned with "demonstrable respect for user-agency", a competition in which a browser from the world's largest advertising conglomerate is forbidden entry.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/why-google-took-year...
I use edge sometimes, chrome once in awhile, FF etc.
Never do I use brave ever because one incident I forgot about (not about the founder), and it was good enough reason not to go back.
The linked source cites: "...a 2008 donation of $1,000 to California Proposition 8, which called for the banning of same-sex marriage in California, and donations in the amount of $2,100 to Proposition 8 supporter Tom McClintock between 2008 and 2010."
I assume Brendan Eich was already relatively wealthy at the time and that these donations represented a modest fraction of his income. Whatever happened to some nuance in public discourse? How do people who condemn someone’s character so categorically over donations made roughly 18 years ago function in a workplace with diverse opinions,...
... or for that matter, navigate society?
It's also why I avoid almost all social platforms and, if I land on one accidentally, I look at headlines alone--rarely the comments.
Oh! Damn it!
The woke/cancel culture crowd (none of whom knew him personally) went after him with a vengeance in 2014, but there were LGBT and LGBT-allied co-workers of his at the time who were aghast at the outrage. Here are three examples I could find online just now [0][1][2]
[0] https://subfictional.com/on-brendan-eich-as-ceo-of-mozilla/
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150202162458/http://words.tofu...
[2] https://medium.com/@__davidflanagan/for-the-record-7645a4bf8...
Eich never clarified his position (nor did he retract it nor apologize) so we have literally no idea what aspect of this he supported along with 52% of the population of California.
Hopefully AI help us find a cure for that mind virus one day.
He, like 52% of voting Californians, in 2008, opposed gay marriage. This was a different time: there were various arguments about "civil unions", concern from religious groups, worries about slippery slopes, etc., but we are passed that now -- he no longer holds this belief, and time has proven those concerns to be ill founded. Nobody should be held in indefinite contempt for political positions they once held. If we can forgive Barack Obama for opposing gay marriage, then we can forgive Brendan Eich. You can say that you like his work without having to have endless caveats about how you don't agree with a political position he took twenty years ago that even he no longer advocates.
Not according to the public record.
But this comment is of a type that I feel we have moved past. Ideological purity tests were always awful. If you want someone to set policy for how marriage should be considered in some context, then Eich is probably not the person to ask to do this.
But on technical matters unrelated to this I fail to see how it has any bearing at all, because his positions (based on indirect evidence) were not outlandish or out of the mainstream at the time.
That being said, I find it odd that you think no one can sincerely hold the position that someone's bigotry was/is abhorrent, however mainstream it was when they were putting money behind it (which is about as direct a piece of evidence that you can get).
I was alive and an adult as of 2008, and I didn't live in California, but I remember this situation. At the time, I was a somewhat naive young libertarian and my thought was that this was a great time to get the government out of the marriage business completely; leave marriage to churches and have the government only involved in the civil union aspect, which more naturally generalizes to gay marriage as well as certain conservatorship relationships or even polyamory, without forcing any cultural or religious shifts. So had I been in California at the time, I might well have voted against this measure, but I do not feel that I was a bigot for this, much less an abhorrent bigot. Since Eich never made and has never made public statements in any direction, we have literally no idea what his actual views on the subject were.
Once I set it up, it's been just a clean, ad-free browser. Based on Little Snitch, which is free on Linux, like Brave Origin, Brave has a clean list of default connections.
While Firefox may be considering shipping Brave shields for ad block, wouldn't Brave be more opposing to Google's monopoly considering it blocks their business model? Firefox is funded by Google and has bad privacy by default. It connects to Google servers when you first set it up.
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/ironfox-a-new-mull-fork/...
Librewolf has community support as you can see here.
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/librewolf-firefox-based-...
They don't do anti-recommendations on the pages but you can see the discussion for things on the forum.
Looking at it briefly, their software choices seem mostly sane to me. Not a lot of FOSS, but a lot of non-technical people don't know how to setup FOSS to begin with. Can't really get mad at a site recommending Signal and Syncthing and local LLMs.
I haven't seen privacyguides mentioned since being on HN, and I trust this site more than others. What are people's opinions on it?
I haven’t heard anyone mention it in years besides “the crypto thing in Brave that everyone turns off”
I also relate to this post: tried to make Firefox my default browser for years, but slowly Brave became my default browser over time due to its adblocking abilities and general speed.
That said, Brave is a bit of a UI mess out of the box, with too many of their unnecessary "features" like their wallet and crypto BAT stuff being shoved at the user.
I think they're slowly realizing that their user base just wants a straightforward adblocking privacy browser though. They released "Brave Origin" recently, which is a paid app on some platforms, but at least cuts out of all the unnecessary baggage.
At the end of the day it's basically just a uBlock-Origin preset for chromium, but that's really all I'd want from Brave regardless.
The sync works really well, and all of the added "features" can be easily disabled.
I think the version of that for our generation is the person who says "Gosh let's not talk politics" about obviously political things when doing so is clearly just to shield preferred targets from criticism. Of course it's not always that, and you can never prove it in any particular instance, which is why it's such convenient phrasing. But it gets eye-rolls for a reason.
How so?
If your political views are "lets abuse a minority because I find them weird", those aren't merely political views.
Based on your misunderstandings of US defamation laws, and the fact that you jumped to stabbing over shooting, it sounds like you've been steeping too much in eurotrash defamation rules. Here in America, truth and opinion are both perfect defenses against defamation lawsuits. My comment consisted only of true facts (the man donated to support prop 8), and the opinions that follow from those facts (the man is a scumbag). You can only sue someone for lying about you, and for public figures like a CEO, you need to prove they were lying on purpose.
How that analogy compares to being against same-sex marriage is going to vary from person to person, but times change, as does what is considered just political views vs a civil rights issue.
Well, I guess that too has its caveats. Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama were both vocally against same-sex marriage during run up to the 2008 election, I believe roughly the same time that the Prop 8 fight was happening. They didn't switch sides until public opinion started swaying in favor of it and I've never seen anyone hold their feet to the fire or call them "absolute scumbags" over it. Well, no one that wasn't already calling them that at least.
Um. As a developer who frequently switches between them, it's both. There are animation issues on some of my own stuff that are specific to FF and that I haven't been able to pin down yet. (It's low priority because I'm considering reworking the whole frontend in something other than React anyway and I haven't ruled out this being some state or ref related bug.)
The whole point of initiatives like Interop has been to make browsers' rendering and other functionality more consistent.
Drag and drop tiling into the same window instead of having to create a new window sold me a long time ago but I also have tons of other customizations. But then you have the vivaldism where I can't open a new window and drag a link into it because because the start page captures that as a page add. It has some hiccups but in general I love it.
As an example instead of ctrl+n'ing 4 windows side by side and having to add all the additional window padding a new browser window vs tab has, you can sit on amazon or whatever retailer and price compare 4 tabs right next to each other in the same window and there is almost no padding taking up room, etc. It's very clean, you just drag a product tab into the same window and it pops into it as a tiled page that you control separately, and its marked with a highlight. You can tread the tiled page as a new tab, but its much smaller and you have to click it inside of the tab, so it's not something you're going to drive all day long. I'll put 4 products next to each other, read about them then close it or use that tab as my research tab.
Built-in full page screenshotting/exporting way better than Chrome. I haven't used the mail. The sidebar takes getting used to, I use that as a favorite bookmarks bar and look at downloads in it and RSS feeds. Built in vertical tabs I never look at that. Its sync is much better than it was a year ago, I've had no problems, it's not google chrome sync but you just throw a code onto both ends, my android vivaldi doesn't have extensions unfortunately.
It has an insane amount of settings that I spent a few days tweaking and sync between everything, and now I never touch that menu it's frightful. Sometimes I have to edit my right click context menu because Vivaldi decided to move a button under something (hello, close all tabs to the right). But you CAN do it vs other browsers that don't have full UX control and I'm now stuck with Googles (maybe) decision to hide my right-click close tab button under a 2nd dropdown.
It's been basically a chrome experience in that I don't get errors and ever have to use chrome or safari/bingthing basically ever.
I was always a heavy chromium extension user and customizer, never clicked with opera and firefox runs me off by some business decision every few years, burnt me migrating profiles, etc. I may have to hop off the chrome train completely though.
Whatever I pick next will feel ancient without vivaldis drag and drop tab system.
I haven't yet but eventually I'll happily donate $20 to the project. It's the first time I've felt in years like a browser was actually doing something new.
Yes I know, it's a tired complaint years after the fact, but if you launch a browser with that system as a core value prop then it should probably taint the leadership team for a good long while.
Giving away Brave Origin for free on Linux is just the cherry on top.
It seems like most of their criticisms are a gut feeling of declining quality due to their intentions with AI. I don't love that, but the browser still works for me. What do other people think?
I think Google created a "moat" in terms of hyperaccelerating browser development with disproportionate firepower that nobody else could keep up with. And one potential non-terrible use of AI might be diminishing that moat and with it Google's ability to steer the whole web into their ecosystem. So if you want to be an optimist maybe that's a silver lining that will grow with time.
You can give away all the insanely expensive base software to build a browser and you'll still get blamed for not encouraging enough competition.
(https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender this looks so dead...)
The big one is anything to do with video calling — things often work but not as well, or you can voice call but not use video, or something like that. Most of the time the call works well enough, or I use a native app anyway, in which case this isn't a problem, but I suspect this is the thing people are most likely to run into in practice.
The other one is WebUSB, which is useful for certain tools that flash hardware (e.g. keyboards) from the browser. This is rarer, but I still have Chrome around so I can still use these tools. And mostly there's another option anyway, it's just that WebUSB makes things more convenient.
I have heard people complain about Cloudflare, but I've never noticed this. I suspect this is less to do with Chrome/Firefox, and more to do with privacy settings that Firefox makes more accessible. But again, I've never had an issue with Cloudflare myself, so I can't say much about this.
Other than that, I genuinely can't think of the last time I wanted to use a website but couldn't because of Firefox. And even in the above situations, it's rare that I actually run into issues, it's just something I'm aware of as a possible cause if something happens. Most of the time things work perfectly well.
So if you want it to be relevant, you actually do have to use it. Otherwise you can just as well give up and not care at all about the browser monopoly.