The Wayback machine feature is an interesting move, especially in the world of A/B tests and feature flags. I hope this bolsters support for IA initiatives and ends up powering some cool products, because I can think of a few ideas already (leaning heavily on competitive intelligence, inferring feature performance based on longevity/time-in-test, etc.)
In practice, though, I wish it were more stable, with basic working features. Instead it seems like basic functionality is buggy[0], and major breaking changes could crop up at any time[1].
[0]: https://community.brave.com/t/brave-sync-temporarily-disable...
I predict that if Brave happens to become popular, the IA will become a lot more popular and people would want to delete a lot of IA pages for privacy reasons.
It now lives on as an extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wayback-machi...
And here's the report: https://medium.com/firefox-test-pilot/test-pilot-no-more-404...
Basically if you look at the results, they aren't so encouraging, because the archive has results for only ~20% of URLs that aren't found and when it does have results, a majority of the time users tend to dismiss or ignore the notification.
Still, it's a useful extension that I keep installed in my Firefox.
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Adding something natively to the browser isn't a virtue, because the browser maker can have perverse incentives due to the nature of the business. I personally don't understand how some people can trust Brave for ad-blocking (given they are a company whose business model is still the serving of ads) instead of just installing uBlock Origin in their favorite browser, whatever that browser is.
Speaking of uBlock Origin, even if you can install it on Brave right now, given Google is deprecating the underlying API in manifest v3, I don't think Brave will be able to support uBlock Origin for long, in spite of what they've claimed, simply because I don't think they have the capacity to diverge too much from Chromium's code base.
And if you want Tor and such, might as well go for the real thing.
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> One thing I'd really like to see for Brave's mobile browser in the future is the ability to use Chrome extensions - it seems completely strange to me that this hasn't been implemented yet
Well, it's actually rather obvious:
1. Brave is basically leeching on Google's work, they don't have the capacity for actual software development that goes beyond branding and features that serve their own bottom line — speaking of which, if you care about the health of the web, you're not sticking it to Google when using Brave, precisely because it's still Chromium, still contributing to Google's dominance
2. Extensions can go against their own business model and their interests here are actually aligned with Google's (yes Mozilla's interests are aligned with Google as well, but Firefox on Android does support extensions and given their culture and how things have evolved on the desktop as well, at least in this regard I'm pretty sure they'll support extensions for as long as the underlying OS allows it)
I fail to see how extensions on mobile is more difficult than adblocking, tracking resistance, and TOR support. You can claim that all of those are just baking in well-understood functions from elsewhere, but it's not like extensions are novel, and mobile isn't that weird a platform.
That apparently only covers Chromium changes to allow an HTML UI, not the actual interesting bits of the browser.
Vivaldi generates revenue from partner deals with search engines and default bookmarks.
I can only speak for myself but I find that Brave as a daily driver is a wonderful browser. Since it's built on Chromium, it has all the common extensions I use with Chrome (Dark Reader, uBlock Origin, etc.). It has built-in Tor and a rich set of default privacy features. The ads it provides are opt-in and the way that it allows the user to choose which website/content creators to reward allows a level of freedom to users that other browsers typically don't.
I don't know about the ethics behind everything Brave is doing - but this built in functionality of 404 redirects with the help of the IA/Wayback Machine is, to me, an interesting and welcome feature. I did not know, before reading this thread, that other browsers had plugins/extensions available for this. The fact that Brave is simply building it in natively seems to be a bold move. If other browsers adopt similar functionality natively, we'll know that it was a winning move. When all is said and done, despite any missteps Brave may be making, it is trying a different approach, and I think that in the end, whether or not Brave succeeds, that's healthy for a competitive browser ecosystem.
Edit: One thing I'd really like to see for Brave's mobile browser in the future is the ability to use Chrome extensions - it seems completely strange to me that this hasn't been implemented yet (if I'm slow on the uptake and this capability has been added, please correct me)