State of web browsers in 2018

Re:State of web browsers in 2018 by jolmg on Thursday December 06, 2018 @11:27AM (#18619399)

I haven't looked into Brave in years, but the original idea I remember was that the trend of having the web be free for the public and funded by advertising (mostly the single entity, Google) was bad for the general public in terms of privacy. Therefore, it would be better if people financially supported the sites they visited and benefit from, so as to extinguish the need to give so much power to the advertising industry. In order to do that, they were modifying an existing browser with a system that would make a payment to the sites you visited that supported accepting such a payment.

Is this what you're against, or has Brave done something else that deserves being dismissive of them?

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Re:State of web browsers in 2018 by curlypaul924 on Thursday December 06, 2018 @01:18PM (#18620566)

Advertising isn't fundamentally bad for privacy, otherwise newspapers and movies would be bad for privacy; it's targeted advertising (which requires keeping a profile for each user) that is fundamentally at odds with privacy.

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Re:State of web browsers in 2018 by jolmg on Thursday December 06, 2018 @01:53PM (#18620905)

Well, advertisers are going to do their job as well as they can, defined by the amount of money their methods bring. They can't track in newspapers or movies because there's no feasible way to do so. If you want a business to not do something that brings it more money, you'll have to introduce legal liability that makes that something not worthwhile. That's probably GDPR, in a nutshell.

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Re:State of web browsers in 2018 by bad_user on Thursday December 06, 2018 @11:40AM (#18619539)

People are bitching and moaning about Mozilla pulling an extension that works around paywalls from addons.mozilla.org, so do you honestly think that people are willing to "financially support the sites they visited"?

Without hitting a paywall that can't be worked around, hell will freeze over before that happens ;-)

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Re:State of web browsers in 2018 by sincerely on Thursday December 06, 2018 @02:08PM (#18621041)

People would be willing to if they had a choice that wasn't "Buy a year's subscription to our newspaper to read the one article you want"

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Re:State of web browsers in 2018 by jolmg on Thursday December 06, 2018 @02:14PM (#18621099)

I don't think they would on their own, but Brave's efforts to ease that path still seem commendable.

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