Also, I love the useful little features they include like redirecting all http requests from www.reddit.com to old.reddit.com. One can also bypass paywalls at the NY Times and The Economist with the click of a button.
I use Brave daily and have never heard of this feature. How do I turn this on?
They have a built in ad blocker and only block ads, not replace.
The OPT-IN text notification ad service is separate. You can enable it to get text notification ads in exchange for BAT. It's OPT-IN and completely up to you.
It's ALWAYS been like that. At no time did they ever "replace" blocked ads.
What's really shady is how these obviously false talking points about Brave get perpetuated to this day, in every Brave thread.
I have been using Firefox for over 10 years now, and if they do something stupid I'll be on here complaining with everyone else. If they crossed the line I would definitely look for another browser.
The problem with Brave users seems to be that Brave can do no wrong. Bundling crypto in a browser seems absolutely insane to me. Remember all the shit Firefox got for bundling Pocket? Difference is, Pocket actually makes a little bit of sense in the context of a browser.
At the end of the day, it's thin veneer over Chromium and IMO they won't be able to block manifest v3 forever. Firefox can.
Not liking the product or the company is one thing. Not liking crypto is perfectly understandable (I don't have any real interest in it either). But I wish people could just say they don't like it, or make informed criticisms. In most cases it's painfully obvious people have never even fiddled with the browser and simply trust hearsay.
I’d rather pay for articles than have ads blasted everywhere. YouTube premium as an example is very worth it! However when you subscribe to something like The Economist they still blast ads at you. Also I really don’t want to pay for one off subscriptions everywhere, especially when they don’t even turn off ads.
Long term, blocking ads isn’t viable, nor is it even really ethical.
Sure I’m bummed that brave didn’t go another route and try to get a group of publishers in on the attention token rather that the sorta shady interception tactic. Still Firefox is in a position to try and make a federated micro transaction system, but haven’t tried.
Almost everything wrong with the modern Internet can be traced to payment being difficult. If you could get small donations to sites, they'd be able to pay for themselves and wouldn't need to rely on your friendly neighborhood mega corp and ads. Crypto's promise was to provide that, digital money you can move around globally over the Internet fast, easy and without a middle man. So it's makes a ton of sense to have that in the browser. That crypto currency so far falls quite a bit short on delivering on that promise is a separate problem.
> Remember all the shit Firefox got for bundling Pocket? Difference is, Pocket actually makes a little bit of sense in the context of a browser.
Pocket never made any sense at all. Why would you bundle some proprietary service into an Open Source browser instead of improving the built in bookmark and download functions of your browser? Software-as-a-service is a cancer that should never ever get anywhere near a project claiming to be about privacy.
Pocket makes people mad because we expect Mozilla to be better. By the way, where is the source for the server side of Pocket? I can't find it anywhere, Mozilla lied about it. Whatever Brave did wrong doesn't excuse anything Mozilla does wrong, nor vice versa. They're all snakes, corrupted years ago by Google's influence, kept alive suckling on the teat of the biggest monopolist in the room. Both of them.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3284076/brave-browser-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it looks like you've been using HN mostly for flamewar and ideological battle. Can you please stop doing that? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we have to ban such accounts.
Brave will remove the ads from a site, that a person/company has paid for to ad provider. The ad provider thats supposed to pay the website host / content creator / whatever.
Now Brave will insert their own ads and that another company has paid them to insert. So they are stealing and making money from the effort that someone else is expecting.
I can't understand how this seems negative to anyone. There is a certain assumption that any Brave user would have an ad blocker anyway.
What is the alternative?
What are you talking about. They are stealing from content creators / whom ever took the time to create the website to begin with and taking their money. They are literally leeches.
I don't care about the ad business and believe there are better ways to do this, but this is scummy stuff.
Use an ad blocker or whatever you want but this is another company profiting from it.
The ads go in the browser if you decide to turn them on. You can also turn off the ad blocker and have both, if you so desire.
I'm pretty sure having new tab ads and push notification ads does not leech off websites.
Ad blocking by itself is arguably leeching, but that's clearly not your argument if you suggest using other ad blockers.
Yes but we are not profiting from stealing ad revenue from content creators.
>I'm pretty sure having new tab ads and push notification ads does not leech off websites.
You wouldn't be using a browser to access content, and give them a reason to show you ads.
Brave's ad blocking and advertising are separate things - the adblocker is basically pretty much like uBO, but written in Rust and integrated as part of the browser.
Brave Rewards is a separate module that lets users watch ads that get delivered as toaster popups. Brave uses a part of the revenue to buy BAT from the open market and gives it to users who viewed the toaster popups. The company also operates a tipping service that lets users give those crypto tokens to content creators they like. (Since Brave buys the tokens, the tokens will have a buyer who pays with real money from the real, normal advertising business).
Second, the browser did actually start being built on top of Gecko - as far as I know they had an Electron-like solution just with Gecko, and used that for the first versions of the browser. Later they transitioned to being a Chromium soft fork.
Do you have a company that depends on advertising? I hope it fails. I use firefox btw, and I block all ads.
However that is a minority (and my pro crypto comments usually recover to +3 or 4 a few days after), and most of us are here because we like good technology.
So that is why Brave is relatively popular here: we don't think it is shady.
This is more general than crypto. I've seen a recurring pattern where a comment of mine gets downvoted pretty quickly after posting, and then gets upvoted hours (or days) later.
This is another reason why you shouldn't comment on voting - in addition to being against the HN guidelines (which should be a reason by itself), comment score can change drastically in the 2-hour edit window. Just don't do it.
Maybe a screenshot? Literally anything.
I’ve been using Brave for a while, even before the crypto stuff but all, and I mean all of that can be turned off. I haven’t seen an Brave ad in place of where a typical ad would be. Ever. That kind of defeats the purpose of Brave, doesn’t it?
The only reason I known internet ads still exist is because of Chrome forced on my work computer.
You're presenting a very persuasive argument for using Brave[1].
1. They automatically block ads.
2. By default, they show no other ads.
3. If the user wants to see ads, the user can opt-in, and then only receive text ads OOB (of the actual content).
I don't think that I've ever had such a joyful reaction to a feature-list in software before.
Thank you.
[1] Downloading it now as I write this.
You keep saying "stealing", I just downloaded (and am now using) Brave, and with a clean install it shows no ads. No "normal" ads nor their own ads.
I just don't wanna see ads; why is that wrong?
It's opt-in. I downloaded the browser, I am using it, and I see no ads, and Brave makes no money of ads.
In order for me to see ads, I have to go into the settings and turn on the flag.
In order for Brave to profit, the user has to go into the config and turn some setting on.
I fail to see how this is stealing, because Brave does not get revenue unless the user takes some specific steps.