Re:Firefox Was Always Enough
by jonathansampson on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @12:50PM
(#25445724)
You're mistaken, or simply misleading. Brave has never inserted affiliate links into any content. What you may be referring to was the offering of affiliate links within the suggestions-dropdown in the browser itself. We wrote about this back in June of this year: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/.
When a user searched (e.g. 'binance'), the browser would check to see if an affiliate link existed. If it did, it would be displayed as a suggested URL. If the user were to press Enter at that point, they would be sent to the domain, with Brave's affiliate code in tow. We did make a mistake, however. We unintentionally matched against a fully-qualified URL as well (e.g. binance.us). We were able to fix that within a couple of days, however.
This is not in any way "sketchy". Open Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, or Edge and perform a search for "Hacker News". You'll note that in Firefox, and Opera (IIRC) you're sent to Google with an affiliate-identifier in the URL. In Edge and Vivaldi, I believe you're sent to Bing, but with the same type of identifier.
When a user searched (e.g. 'binance'), the browser would check to see if an affiliate link existed. If it did, it would be displayed as a suggested URL. If the user were to press Enter at that point, they would be sent to the domain, with Brave's affiliate code in tow. We did make a mistake, however. We unintentionally matched against a fully-qualified URL as well (e.g. binance.us). We were able to fix that within a couple of days, however.
This is not in any way "sketchy". Open Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, or Edge and perform a search for "Hacker News". You'll note that in Firefox, and Opera (IIRC) you're sent to Google with an affiliate-identifier in the URL. In Edge and Vivaldi, I believe you're sent to Bing, but with the same type of identifier.