May be tone down your paranoia bit, once I disabled brave rewards, which was offered as a part of installation without any dark pattern I never saw any shilling. Also what’s wrong with premium search? You expect free things which cost a lot of money, but you must not see Ads? And Tor themselves wouldn’t recommend any other browser. Tor feature in brave doesn’t seem to be intended for super serious, but a safer VPN like alternative instead of say Express or Nord. Even that is optional. You are never forced to use any of these features. I don’t understand the sentiment of everything must be free and open source, when your daily life is not. At least on Yc backed HN, I wish I see people supporting alternate business models. If it works for them good, else market speaks.

Problem is that "free" is our only option. I would love to pay for search engine that has more configuration options and no ads, I would love to pay for a modern browser (engine) without any tracking and no ads. Reality is that I cannot do that.

Reality is apart from few hundreds may be users, no one wants to pay for stuff. WhatsApp costed a very nominal amount, No body in India cared until it became entirely free. So much that they favoured it over Indian grown app Hike messenger , which was much better Ux wise. So you must find a batch of users who are willing to pay, and hire/pay a chromium dev to maintain your code base, or some similar business model. Where the devs don’t expect to become rich based on the project, an their only goal is to maintain a ungoogled chromium. Expecting a corp to do that is a wrong way to look into it.

The right to directly vote for a search engine with actual money is huge, as is the right to withdraw that vote. If Google went this route a few decades ago, their search product (and the Internet as a whole) would likely be in a much, much healthier place today

Also, Google would have much, much less money.

What ad-supported financing removes, along with other things, is friction. You open google.com for the first time, and you can instantly use it.

Also, Google started in 1998. I don't know whether you remember, but I do: paying for stuff over the internet was pretty hard by then. Paying across national borders was harder still. I wished to pay for several pieces of software by then, but it was hard even if I agreed to walk down to a bank.

Compared to that, selling ads and receiving money from businesses was incomparably easier, for everyone involved. Unlike billing search users, it was a viable business model.

That was back when shareware told you to mail a check. I think "people who forgot" is a smaller set than "people who never knew." It's easy to forget a lot of this forum is people well into adulthood who weren't even alive in the '90s, and people who didn't get online until after the boom of new things built on the discounted ruins of the .com crash.

I've been using Brave on Android for a couple of years now, and it's great!

It asked me once during initial setup if I wanted to use Brave Rewards (or whatever the crypto component is called), I said "no", and it's never bothered me with anything crypto related ever again.

Then use chromium, who's stopping you?

brave shilling is concerningly effective

Yeah, I'm honestly flabbergasted that people like using a browser that has the performance of Chromium without the Google, a thorough / very performant ad-blocker built-in, and some totally optional next-gen features that many people like.

There is no "Chromium without the Google". Chromium/Blink is made by Google. By using a browser built on Chromium/Blink, you are actively supporting Google's browser engine hegemony.

The browser is not just the engine and the "browser engine hegemony" is not what really matters.

What matters is that Google does not establish a position where it can use its browser to dictate the direction of the whole web in favor of its business.

Chromium or not, Brave was never forced to adopt the changes in the extension manifest (which would block some ad-blocking and tracking mechanisms). They also never were forced to implement FLOC, they have their own policy regarding third-party cookies, etc, etc.

Sure it would be better if we had diversity and more choices in all different layers, but if you think about it the more companies use Chromium to create browsers that take the web in a different direction from what Google wants, the more Google gets judo-ed out of its dominance.

I think we’ve seen how Google can kneecap it’s open source products with Android, taking more and more portions into closed source. Why won’t they take the same step with chromium if Microsoft edge and Brave become too popular?

In your example, Chrome is to Android as Chromium is to AOSP. They can not close the Chromium parts, much like they can not close the AOSP parts.

Having MS Edge and Brave becoming too popular would be akin to getting LineageOS, /e/OS to mainstream, and it is exactly my point: no matter how much that would be against Google's interests, there is nothing they can do about it.

Lineage and e are both at a disadvantage because of a lack of Google play integration which makes banking apps among others not function. People can hack around this but the OS will never end up mainstream as a result.

To do the same to chromium, all Google would need to do is make YouTube rely on some proprietary DRM that’s not in Chromium and everyone will end up switching back to chrome. Brave isn’t large enough that Google cares to swat them away, but since they control the underlying project they have ways to neuter chromium.

> People can hack around this but the OS will never end up mainstream as a result

Not people. Companies.

Microsoft and Brave are only piggy-backing on Google's resources and manpower. It's not like they can't they do it, it's more of a "why should we try to set sail now while there is a huge transatlantic ship that can carry us?".

If Google starts neutering Chromium, it's on Microsoft, Brave and all other browsers depending on it will pick up the slack.

And if they don't, that's when it makes sense to look for a Chromium-free alternative.

If Mozilla's problems were financial or lack of capacity to get the resources to work on the browser, at least you'd have a point in saying "we need to support the alternatives now". But Mozilla's problems are not financial, they are due to bad leadership. No amount of money thrown their way is going to solve it.

> Brave isn’t large enough that Google cares

Google asked Brave to testify in Congress in their favor, to say that Google is not abusing its dominance on the web. Google can not swat them away.

It seems Brave tones down or deals with most of the creepy stuff in Chromium. https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...

On a technical level there is a Chromium without Google

https://chromium.woolyss.com/

I don't care for your political argument.

If you don't care for political arguments, you probably shouldn't defend a browser made by Brendan Eich.

Brendan Eich has personal political views. How would you say those manifest in Brave?

I'm with you. I check out most brave threads on HN and am always surprised by the level of hatred towards it.

I've been using it for over a year now. It's a good browser and I like the new ideas they come up with. I don't know whether it's going to catch on, but at least someone is thinking outside the box.

I'm surprised by the hatred towards pretty much anything these days, even things that are benign.

The only concerning thing here is the growing belief that one's consumer choices are their "identity", and alternate choices are an attack on that identity. Moreover, that alternative choices must be feigned in bad faith, part of a conspiracy, "fake news", etc.

What happened to you, Internet? Politics is one thing, but this is starting to bleed over into "liking Apple", or "hating Apple", or any similar camp one finds themselves in with a web browser or programming language or other piece of tech. "People who feel differently from me must be faking it as part of a plot." What the hell?

I'd love it if this wasn't political. If Brendan Eich wasn't running Brave, I'd probably trust the browser a whole lot more. Same as how if Apple stopped providing service to China and quit leveraging slave-labor, I'd probably trust their products a lot more too.

How is it political? One of the primary reasons I started using the damn thing is that whatever Eich's politics, they don't seem to affect the product. Vivaldi seems the same, and at least some of their staffers have politics opposite of Eich's. But both teams bring a simple professionalism to work: They all believe in user control and privacy and try to build a good browser on those principles. They're not interested in external political evangelism a la Mozilla, and to me it shows. Even though both of them have the same ethos, the angles they're coming at it are different.

But in the end I can expect both teams to deliver a tool that's built to enable me and my wants, regardless of what our opinions on things outside the browser are. After all, they're irrelevant to the browser. Within the browser space, there are politics, but both orgs' politics are of user control and less tracking and spying.

> Can we not just have the chromium builds degoogled

You mean like this? https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

That's my choice for when I need a Chrome based browser and I recommend it. No bullshit, just Chrome.

There's automatic updates if you install it via homebrew/winget/[packagemanager of choice].

If i remember correctly, i read in their docs that the builds can be submitted by anyone. Not sure how secure that is…