I've been giving Brave a shot due to their recent addition of first-class support for IPFS, and the numerous positive HN comments. It's... So much faster. However, it does a poor job of blocking advertisements and trackers. I'll be going back to Firefox for that reason, I can suffer the slowness.

One common response regarding performance woes on Firefox is that common addons, particularly uBlock, process a large amount of data through complex rules during page load. What I haven't heard is any plans on the part of Mozilla to support that level of ad-blocking and privacy protection at the product level, rather than the extension level, which may provide much needed performance enhancements.

uBlock Origin, HTTPS Everwhere, Decentraleyes, Privacy Badger, au-revoir-utm et al should be native features at this point.

If you use firefox, google have to at least play nice.

What's the point of using a browser frontend (used to be called chrome, but i guess google stole even the words) if tomorrow all the content depend on google-owned DRM? You will only be able to use your fancy ipfs or whatever transport if you have the google blessed keys or whatnot.

Google is most likely keeping them afloat just to ward off a stray monopoly charge at this point.

Their strategy to grow their user share seemed twofold: better tech (through Servo/Rust) and dev-oriented features (their market share among devs was much higher than among the general population).

They cut deeply into both of these.

90% of https://webcompat.com/ is sites that are broken in Firefox, not necessarily because FF isn't standard compliant, but because many Web devs just dont bother testing their sites/apps with it anymore.

As for better tech I suppose they chose a 80/20 approach, but I'm not sure it will suffice.

But anything will only happens if there's a user base as contributors are a (small) ratio from that number.

A browser with the same market share as ‘Samsung internet’ that is primarily funded by google? They have less voice than brave, who at least maintains their independence (and their own forks/build processes).

Safari is the only other real contender with 5x the market share of Firefox (and counting).

And only available on Apple devices.

Anyone who thinks Mozilla is independent is in deep denial.

> How annoying are those "utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss" in URLs ? Right!

> So this extension removes them and prevents you from being tracked.

> Source code at https://github.com/Rik/au-revoir-utm

- https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-still-plans-to-cripple-...

- https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338

So you will get a sub-par ad-blocking / anti-tracking experience on Chrome or any of its clones like Brave or Vivaldi.

I would recommend LocalCDN over Decentraleyes. They covers CDNs (more than Decentraleyes) and various libraries such as javascripts (like jQuery) and frameworks.

these constant debacles of add-ons and extensions being sold to adversarial maintainers, it's a good time to do integrate this if they are serious about security and privacy. I understand blocklists are a massively sensitive topic for mozilla however.

What issues are you having with the blocking?

/Disclaimer, Brave webcompat support

Generally, I run uBlock with all-but-regional block lists enabled.

Oh, and Brave has its own ads.

Also, what's stopping you from installing uBlock on Brave? Considering Chrome doesn't ship with any adblocker, is it not beneficial (given your preference for adblocking) to provide an adblocker out of the box, given you still have the ability to use any extensions you would use with any other browser?

The only strong reason I have to keep using Firefox is to support ongoing development of an alternative to chrome's rendering engine on PC.

I would try in private window mode, and ensure shields ads/trackers is enabled.

HTTPS Everywhere/Brave tries to upgrade connections to https, if not falls back without throwing up annoying warnings.

You can block ads just by editing your hosts file. There's no need to depend on any browser's particular functionality in order to get rid of them. Nor on extra hardware (Pi-hole), for that matter. I have a cron job download a prefilled copy from a popular github repository [1] daily.

[1] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Drives me bonkers sometimes when I forget to turn off

For example YouTube ads.

[0]: https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb

lets hope we get to see ipfs

https://chaoswebs.net/blog/tracking-ipfs-users-via-cache-pro...

So even if you use a VPN with it, if you are logged into a website that knows you, it could scan what you have saved from ipfs (among known IDs anyways)

if you folks are interested, maybe you can vote it up. it might get funded.

In fact, webtorrent happens to be my favorite bittorrent client.

In general, I wish that more decentralized web tech didn't go about creating incompatible protocols. (Context: I'm working on Braid (https://braid.news) which is adding decentralized tech into today's WWW.)

https://js.ipfs.io/