I don't use brave myself, but I appreciate that it's actually taking serious efforts trying to fix the problem of ads. I'm kind of a little surprise hn seems to be so blind to this issue, considering the number of people here who are employed by companies that literally live off of ads. If ads are bad and annoying (which most here would agree they are) but I still want to support certain websites (because some websites produce good content that I value), there's no convenient way to do that right now outside of allowing ads on that website, which is not particularly desirable. Brave seems to be the only one seriously trying to address that.

Do you know of any other major effort being put into alternative (convenient) mechanisms for monetization? I'd be interested in looking into it if you do, since I don't use brave (Firefox has too many useful features to me).

I've seen a couple of comments in this direction across sites and would like to take a moment to point out that while advertisements are certainly annoying and a hassle, the root of the problem comes with the mining of behavior data that is then transformed into profile packages sold for advertising (and whatever other) purposes.

So, even if a browser is blocking ads, or changing the way ads are interacted with, the more important worry (imo) is whether the browser (or its features) are successful in blocking the behavior profile being built by aggregators such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

Yeah in my view there are 2 main problems with ads. One is as you say - collecting data profiles of people that are shared around with no respect for the user's preferences. The other is they are an unpleasant experience (resource hogs, obscure the content, etc). In my understanding, brave actually tries addressing both. For the issue of data collection, I believe its goal is to eventually enable (if it hasn't already) local profiling, so that you can still build profiles, but none of the data ever leaves your machine (and presumably they'd allow you to disable this feature - also it's open source so worst case you could always hack it out). For the user experience, since the ads (if you enable them) are served locally, they don't incur the same level of performance penalty as normal ads. Or (I believe) you can also just buy bat separate without ever enabling ads and use those to contribute to content creators (this is probably how I'd use it). I might have gotten a few details wrong but I think the overall direction is definitely worth exploring.

As for blocking the existing ads until the unlikely future where the brave style of ads becomes so common that the ads as we know them today entirely disappear - that's definitely a valid question. It doesn't help to be on the brave model if websites are still able to collect your data anyway. I think brave might have some special features helping obscure the data but I'm not too knowledgeable on that.

I think a good fraction of the Brave propaganda posts are from people holding BAT as a way to increase the value of their investments. This is actually one of most toxic aspects of cryptocurrencies: decentralized ponzi schemes by their vary nature encourage all holders to promote the scam endlessly in search of greater fools.

FF 1. doesn’t support screen share on browser based video calls.

2. Is super slow on Linux.

3. Doesn’t correctly read the ctrl key on my linux laptop i.e., I can’t correctly ctrl+c/v and so on.

Switched to brave as an ungoogled Chrome.

I do screen shares on Jitsi in Firefox ESR on a daily basis, not really sure what your on about.

What stack are you using? Firefox is smooth on Debian 10 both in Gnome and KDE.

Firefox is just worst. I also found he Mozilla foundation too evil to support. Vivaldi is proprietary. Brave seems like the only reasonable choice.

In what way do you see the Mozilla foundation as evil?

I'm asking as a Firefox user that doesn't have this image at all. If you have things that I should read to update, I would be interested.

Mozilla fired Eich over his private political opinions; they also run a lot of programmes with a very definite political slant. I wouldn't call them "evil" but as a conservative it's not a group that I'd like to support (but then neither is Google).

So you define evil as having a political slant while judging them based on the political slant you have?

That's not how evil works.

No, I explicitly said that I do not consider them evil. You're also misrepresenting the position of those that would consider them evil; they wouldn't be evil for "having a political slant", but because the specific political slant they have is evil (which again, is explicitly not my position).

EDIT: And also, they're arguably evil by virtue of, you know, firing someone over an inoccuous political position...

Hating a group of people is not innocuous.

Maybe hypocritical? That's a grave sin when one of the main factors for choosing their browser is ideology. It is hard to impossible to buy that Moz://a is pro end user when they are in bed with Google.