I just don’t see this being sustainable long term when you’re upstream is doing everything they can to sabotage you. This is a huge maintenance burden for Brave and eventually there might be a breaking change introduced by Google that just makes this approach no longer tenable.

Mozilla is extremely friendly to content blockers, and does everything they can to make sure they are well supported as first class citizens.

How is Google doing "everything they can to sabotage you"? MV2's deprecation timeline was set in 2021, slipping further repeatedly. This is after they had already started the plan in 2018. It's been nearly a decade.

Boiling you slowly still means they're boiling you.

They don't boil you fast, because they can't: you would balk at that.

In other words, taken together, they do all they can to boil you on that issue and kill ad-blockers.

I feel like you can justify literally anything as "doing everything they can" if "they did it fast" and "they did it over the course of a decade, replaced the API, the API still supports ad blockers, etc" are treated the same way.

Hmm I don't know about sustainable long term. Maybe with LLMs the burden of rebasing and porting the needed patches to keep it working across versions would make the task fairly sustainable vs no LLM usage.

That being said, agree that this is a horrible move and we are paying the consequences of it due to the huge market Chromium-browsers occupy. I'm a Firefox user as well, but it is really slow in adopting latest web features and I won't hold my breath for a shiny future, in regards Mozilla. Maybe there is a shiny future, maybe there is not.

At family gatherings, in their computers, it's all Google Chrome. No adblocks whatsoever. They got "used to" seeing ads everywhere. I personally can't. Web is literally unusable for me without it. I try my best to install adblocks in their devices. Most of the time, making them use Firefox is out of the question, as they are tied and "used to" Chrome profile sync and don't want to log in their pages once again, etc. My mom got me luckily, and I got her Brave with all branding, sponsored and crypto non-sense disabled. Otherwise, she's the perfect target for incorrectly clicking through a sponsored post in a google search, or similar popups and stuff in other websites, resulting in deceive behavior.

This is the worst of it, actually. It's not just "commercial ads". Sometimes, it's just deceiving behavior, manipulating people's opinions, and making them feel in a particular way to do god knows what.

WebKit being forced down to iOS user's throat is also that should not happen, but we as society for consented to it. We can say that this is the only thing holding Chromium to become pure havok. Although ublock is available there, is it in their "lite" format, same as Chromium. So, not the full uBlock that we should be getting...

There's also a part where we should blame ourselves as culture for letting all these things to slide without doing anything for it. Microsoft got sued by the US in 2001 for an antitrust case for leveraging Internet Explorer through their Windows monopoly in PC market. We have it so much worse today, and no one seems to bat an eye. I know things are far more complex compared to the past, but hey, due to it, we should have more strict systems in place to prevent these anti-people behavior.

Ladybird is a welcome addition to the scene. Hopefully something beautiful comes out of them in the next couple of years.

I think maintaining the MV2 paths would be a huge maintenance burden, but this approach, being scoped to only four plugins that are widely used, seems to be much more tractable. I'd put on about the same level of effort as maintaining their own ad blocking engine.

The extensions are in addition to their own included ad and other nuisance blocking features. I've been testing migrating from Firefox to Brave Origin (the paid fork with no crypto features that has a free linux build) and it works pretty well without any extensions.

Yesterday I wanted to get a brave search api key on the free tier and they require a credit card even for that. That pissed me off a bit but still gonna test the browser a little bit more. Firefox is really pissing me off and I don't want to keep using it forever just because there is no other browser engine. Can't wait for Ladybird to become usable.

I used brave a bit and really liked it.

But its obvious that these guys are semi shady and they will show sooner or later. I liked chrome derviates and used them over a decade. I got tired of feeling forced to switch after vivaldi/brave so I went the firefox way last year.

The circle is completed.

how are they obviously semi shady? whats shady about brave?

yea this is bad, i had kinda forgotten about this https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/issues/45#issue...

i dont know, firefox is very buggy and unstable, crashes or just log me out of everything every few weeks, we dont really have great choices, wishful thinking, but i hope brave straightened up

Yuck! I'd heard of these but I am always like "it IS open source". But so is Mozilla. I actually did test a build of Ladybird. The sites I looked at (without login or anything) basically all work fine but they are VERY slow. This is understandable. Performance is not their priority right now. It is coming along fine though.

What bothers me about Brave is that, although it is "open source," in practice using Brave means running binaries distributed by Brave Software (a for-profit, VC-backed adtech company). As far as I know, no independent builds are yet part of a mainstream Linux distro, and the project calls forks "freeriding." The browser may be OK, but all of this does not inspire a lot of confidence.

The complexity here is definitely a point against Brave.