I will repeat this one more time, because Eich seems to be missing the point.[1]<p>I don't adblock for privacy, security, or speed. Those are just nice-side effects. I adblock because <i>I do not want to be manipulated into buying things I do not need.</i><p>I wonder what would happen if, as a society, we said, "enough, no more ads". Would it really be the capitalist apocalypse that the ad industry is trying to make us believe it would be?<p>--<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10244964" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10244964</a>
It sounds like their plan is to block all ads, then sell the new ad inventory created by all the blank space on pages.<p>Why on earth would users want this browser?
Is anyone else concerned about the possibility that if ad blocking on the web becomes widespread enough, we will end up with more ads baked into the content itself? Native advertising, ads burned into images, ads burned in the middle of videos?<p>Thinking selfishly, I would much prefer the status quo, where I can block most ads, but the majority of consumers don't do it. Current ad blocking tech is fine, I'm afraid this could become an arms race.
I'm the founder of a competitor in this space called Paymail.net. We're looking forward to battling it out in the marketplace with Brave and the traditional ad networks. I posted an intro on Hackernews 2 days ago, but we didn't make it to the front page.<p>Our difference to Brave is that we give free ads to everyone, the advertiser only pays if the end user makes a purchase. Similiarly the display site gets nothing if there was no economic exchange. Capitalism is supposed to be a machine for you getting what you want. We want to help that process along. I have an uncompromising attitude that web/world ads should be for things that you really want to see, and then they become content.<p>That might be a utopian vision today, but I have strong belief in the power of people's self interest to drive positive change.<p>Edit: chrispm reposted the link here, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10940684" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10940684</a>
From a quick glance:<p>1) Desktop browser is an electron app with ad tracking injected into your app via <a href="http://cdn.brave.com/" rel="nofollow">http://cdn.brave.com/</a> (via <a href="https://sonobi.com/welcome/index.php" rel="nofollow">https://sonobi.com/welcome/index.php</a> which promises "EFFECTIVELY PLAN AND SOURCE MARKETING OPPORTUNITIES WITH QUALITY AND VIEWABILITY FROM PREMIUM PUBLISHERS"<p>2) iOS browser is a fork of Firefox iOS - <a href="https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios</a><p>3) Android browser is a fork of <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.linkbubble.playstore&hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.linkbubble...</a>
It's great to see more people working to solve the problem of intrusive ads! I wonder what exactly they mean by intrusive ads, though? I hope it's more than just ads that don't respect your privacy. To me an ad is intrusive if it has any kind of movement or animation. Anything that moves automatically attracts my attention, so this is very annoying if I'm trying to read something.<p>I don't mind ads in print magazines so much (other than the fact that print magazines are unlikely to write negative stuff about companies that advertise with them). Ads in print magazines are ok with me, because there's no movement on them. So I can easily read one page, even though the next page has a full page ad.<p>They mention standard sized spaces and faster browsing. I actually wouldn't mind large ads - like something taking up my whole screen - that I can scroll through. Back in the 90s, it probably made sense to have small 468x60 pixel banner ads, but as fast Internet connections are becoming more and more common, I don't really see the point of restricting the size anymore. Large full page ads aren't really a problem in print magazines, and I don't think it would be on the web either, if we just got rid of the animations.
That's funny. I also use NoScript, just to be extra cautious, and when I go to Brave.com, I don't see ANYTHING. I would hope that somebody claiming to want to fix the web would be able to serve up a page that doesn't need permission to execute a script.
I was just reading some web performance audits by Paul Irish:<p><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K-mKOqiUiSjgZTEscBLjtjd6E67oiK8H2ztOiq5tigk/pub" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K-mKOqiUiSjgZTEscBLjtjd6...</a><p>One of things he mentions on one of the sites, is Adsense looking at every scroll event, and doing tracking work which takes 25ms on a smartphone (his smartphone, likely to be high end). That means your scrolling performance is going to be inherently bad, probably below 30 fps one you take into account other work associated with the browser or the site. Having a browser which takes out this kind of code, but doesn't break the business model of the website owner does seem like an interesting idea. It seems like a major part of the mobile web is half-broken for these kind of reasons.
> <i>With Brave, you can choose whether to see ads that respect your privacy or pay sites directly. Either way, you can feel good about helping fund content creators.</i><p>How do they plan on doing that? Not like it hasn't been tried before. The problem is you can't collect money on someone's behalf without them opting in, and if it is opt-in only you get the chicken and the egg problem for adoption.
I'm doubtful of this taking off. People stick with the default apps and settings. The average person just really doesn't care that much about this kind of thing.<p>Maybe enterprise or businesses will like it - so they can avoid their employees visit whitelisted sites that mistakenly have malicious code in the ads. Eg. Flash
A few thoughts:<p>(1) If they block tracking, does it block Google Analytics? Because that would annoy me as a website owner.<p>(2) The reason I don't pay subscriptions to sites like Wall Street Journal and NY Times is that I get my content from aggregators like Hacker News so I only go to one of those paid sites if I follow an occasional link. Micropayments would fix that if I could pay one company a $5/mo subscription to then have payments automatically dolled out to a select list of good sites until my $5 was used up (then maybe ask me each time after that, or something).<p>(3) They talk about avoiding the ad-blocking war, but they are just contributing to it. I guess what they think is that by making a way for the website owner to get paid they avoid some of the war, but many companies like to be in direct control of their money so they might not like a middleman sitting on the high way charging everyone a tax to pass. And if Brave doesn't charge something for its services then it has no business model, so I'm assuming they are not passing 100% of revenue on to the site owner.
The first question that pops into my head is "How is Brave going to monetize?".<p>They've received substantial investor money, so apparently they have something lucrative in mind. And it's probably not good for privacy-conscious end users.
So why do I have to "sign up" for this supposedly privacy-enhanced browser? They don't have a need to know who I am.<p>"Then we put clean ads back". This is open source, right? It's on Github. Can someone fork this and remove <i>all</i> the ads? Thank you.
<a href="https://github.com/brave/browser-ios" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/brave/browser-ios</a><p>"Firefox for iOS"<p>They forgot to remove the branding from their "new" browser.
How will Brave prevent anti-ad-blocking mechanisms from interfering with the page?<p>For example, cbs/abc/nbc seem to detect muBlock and then stop serving content.
Am I getting the message from their #about section correctly?<p>They want to block ads that the person running a web site put on their web site with their own (Brave Ads Infused TM Ltd. Inc. - let's make some money while pretending we are freeing the world).
The biggest challenge of micropayments is how to minimize the cognitive load of making many tiny payments.<p>How should the user agent decide when to alert the user?
So his business model is to hijack advertising and funnel it through his own little scheme, forcing publishers to pay him in order to get their customer's ads seen. Hope he loves getting his browser's user agent treated like Ebola.
Why a new browser, instead of plugins for existing browsers?<p>I dislike ads, but there are already solutions for blocking them. Although I do like the premise of this, I'm not eager to switch browsers just to start supporting advertisers.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but ... if ad blocking is such an issue for publishers, why don't they do the ad-serving logic on the server and display locally saved creative assets (from the same host)?
Urgh, what happens for a site when there are no adverts on the site?<p>Are "clean adverts" then placed on the site?<p>If the answer to this is yes, I'll be blocking the user-agent from my sites. I serve cache:no-transform and HTTPS to specifically prevent people mucking around with the page. I already deliver a fast and clean website.<p>This reminds me of when Virgin Media in the UK (an ISP) wanted to put adverts on pages without my permission. It really isn't a help.
Confused about this. Does it display adverts on pages belonging to organizations not using its network? That would be pretty ethically dubious in my book.
Anyone OK with this business model should also be ok with ISPs stripping out ads and replacing them with their own content (remember that?)<p>On the other hand, if this gets traction (unlikely, admittedly) this may finally force the issue to the courts and get content fiddling declared copyright/TOS violation. Which I'm not sure you all want.
Due to Brave's ad-block technology, I guess Brendan Eich will be blocked[1] by IAB from their annual conferences. (every pun intended.)<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10937704" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10937704</a>
Does anyone else remember when adsense first launched and it was text-only ads?<p>People would actually stop to read the ads because they were interesting and relevant.<p>Then google caved to images and animation and 100+ objects on a page, each with their own tracking scripts to slow browsers to a crawl.
This is a worthy endeavour. I want to download and help test and develop this today. Helping deflate this ad-bubble before it turns into the "The Zero Theorem" is worth the effort.<p>This however does not tackle the mindset shift that needs to occur for the masses to start protecting the private information they voluntarily give up on services they are signed in on the social net.<p>We are currently working on a project that will use this information to the marketer's advantage in a way that will make people sick once they realize the extent of the profiling going on, with the ultimate goal of reversing the trend before it's too late. Make people raise their guards, sell some tech on the way.
Brave seems to acknowledge a smaller part of Ted Nelson's "Project Xanadu" [1], where you're paying to access content.<p>From the Project Xanadu Wikipedia article:
"9. Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions") of all or part of the document."<p>Ted's approach is (in my view) also a deduplication effort, as you're citing the original content, tracing it back to its origin by reference.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu</a>
I think this is great thing, it is right thing, that is coming from trustworthy person/company.<p>Now, time will tell how things will play out, but I believe I can count on Brendan to make the right choices when it comes to features, compromises.
Please fix the links to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. These should always be the first documents working on your startup's website.<p>And can anyone find this 'roadmap' that Eich talks about in the post?
"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."<p>To be fair, Firefox for iOS is open source. Take it, remix it, improve it. It is all good. Mozilla Public License.
<i>"Brave is open source!"</i><p>Wow, new browser technology that is open source, this is good news. I'm hoping the development focus is flexible, remember flock? [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/flock+browser" rel="nofollow">https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/flock+browser</a>
Someone should make a browser that blocks "Everybody can earn xxx$+ daily... You can earn from ..." spam comments. I think I've seen those mostly through the FB comments plugin.
Obviously FB can't / doesn't want to fix that.
The surfer in the main slider has had his fins completely adblocked.<p><a href="https://www.brave.com/assets/img/sliders/revolution/surfers_bluewash_tan.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.brave.com/assets/img/sliders/revolution/surfers_...</a>
I do not use ad blockers because I want to see how the owners of a website I'm interacting with really treat their users. I do not want to help some crappy web site to look better and more trustable to me than it really is. Don't like ads on a website — just go elsewhere.
I really like just replacing my hosts file to block ads.<p><a href="http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts" rel="nofollow">http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts</a><p>But I can't do that on my phone without jailbreaking it. Stupid phone.
There is no mention about licences.. For desktop/iOS, it uses chrome(electron)/mozilla(firefox-ios).. But no mention about the android one (linkbubble)<p>It would be great if they clarify the terms & licences in the FAQ
You all are forgetting one thing. Without ads google would not exist, without ads facebook couldn't exist and expand, make research. If everybody will block ads then you will see decline in free sites.
> We make sure you aren't being tracked while you shop online and browse your favorite sites.<p>That's not a realistic claim. Nothing is stopping publishers and advertisers from sharing back end data.
I do not trust them. If they really cared about privacy they woul d not have pulled scripts and fonts from bunch of 3rd party sites.<p>Sorry Brendan you failed the first test. I wont adapt to Brave.
Looks great! I have been running a open source blocker since WWDC and it is the right way to do things. Especially considering the state this space is in right now.
Playing the devils advocat:<p>How Do you want to finance development in the lang run?<p>It is a nice solution and I'd hate to see it go because of financial problems.
The more I read through the Brave website the more it feels like this is actually vastly worse than the status quo.<p>All quotes are directly from the FAQ:<p>"We do not even have access to identifiable user data". Except for the "in-browser targeting engine" which has "substantially more information about the user's activity available to it than traditional tracking methods", which are stored in the browser and then exposed to advertisers "to maximize user, publisher and advertiser value."<p>"Each ad request is anonymous, and exposes only a small subset of the user's preferences and intent signals to prevent 'fingerprinting' the user by a possibly unique set of tags". Except that the only reason advertisers <i>need</i> to fingerprint the user is in order to collect enough information to decide which ads to serve to them, which is precisely what they'd be getting from Brave (and then some.) Great, that information is stored in the browser instead of the cloud, and only subsets of it are exposed to the advertisers for each request -- but that doesn't benefit the end user at all. It benefits Brave, by maintaining their middleman position as the de facto controller of which advertisers gets access to that data.<p>"We block trackers, that’s a big win compared to the status quo." It is! For Brave. Because the whole browser is now an ad tracker. Ok, the data is keyed to a UUID instead of a name or other "personally identifiable information". How does that benefit the end user? In no way at all.<p>Throughout the site is repeated handwaving about how nothing is sent in the clear, they don't even have the encryption keys, nothing is personally identifiable, but <i>none of that matters</i>, because the end result is the same. It's still an ad tracker designed to enable targeted advertising. But with much, much more data to work with than in existing browsers. Offloading the tracking work into the client instead of doing it server-side is just misdirection.<p>And how about those content creators? "Our goal is to make better revenue for all publishers," they say, but I see no explanation of how stripping out websites' individual ad sales and replacing them with Brave's benefits the publishers. Congratulations! Brave's "revenue sharing" program means your ad space is worth 55% of what it used to be! [1] Oh, don't worry, they'll get around to building a micropayments scheme someday, which they'll also take a share of.<p>This is just. I mean. Gah. Flames. On the side of my face.<p>[1] (I can't find that figure on their site, but it's quoted here: <a href="http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/267089/new-browser-offers-brave-solution-to-ad-blocking.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/267089/new-bro...</a> "...revenue derived by selling ads through Brave will be split four ways: 15% each will be distributed to the user, to Sonobi and to Brave, with 55% allocated to publishers.")
Though the team working on Brave seems to have a few ex-Mozilla engineers, they have chosen to fork browsers other Firefox. (Also, nice to see so many Canadians!)<p>'Brave browser promises faster Web by banishing intrusive ads' | Jan 20, 2016 <a href="http://www.cnet.com/news/ex-mozilla-ceo-try-braves-new-browser-for-a-faster-private-web/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnet.com/news/ex-mozilla-ceo-try-braves-new-brows...</a><p>> <i>Eich and his team built Brave out of Chromium, which is the foundation for Google's Chrome browser, which leaves most of the actual development and security support to Google. Why not use Firefox, into which Eich poured so much effort? Because Chrome is more widely used and therefore better tested by developers who want to make sure their websites work properly, he said. "Chromium is the safe bet for us," he said.</i><p>* The desktop browser is a cross-platform desktop application created with a fork of Github's Electron framework that is itself based on Node.js and Chromium. <a href="https://github.com/brave/electron" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/brave/electron</a> <a href="https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop</a><p>* The iOS browser is a fork of Firefox for iOS, which is a Swift app developed from scratch by Mozilla. <a href="https://github.com/brave/browser-ios" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/brave/browser-ios</a><p>* The Android browser is Link Bubble, which is a wrapper around the default Android browser <a href="https://github.com/brave/browser-android" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/brave/browser-android</a> Previous HN discussion here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7453897" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7453897</a> Australian developer Chris Lacy announced its sale in Aug 2015: <a href="http://theblerg.net/post/2015/08/05/ive-sold-link-bubble-tappath-and-all-related-assets" rel="nofollow">http://theblerg.net/post/2015/08/05/ive-sold-link-bubble-tap...</a><p>* The ad blocking technology is courtesy a Node.js module of Adblock Plus filter that uses a bloom filter and Rabin-Karp algorithm for speed.
<a href="https://github.com/bbondy/abp-filter-parser-cpp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bbondy/abp-filter-parser-cpp</a><p>* The database is MongoDB. <a href="https://github.com/brave/vault" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/brave/vault</a><p>Past news coverage:<p>Mystery startup from ex-Mozilla CEO aims to go where tech titans won't | Nov 17, 2015 <a href="http://www.cnet.com/news/mystery-startup-from-ex-mozilla-ceo-aims-to-go-where-tech-titans-wont/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnet.com/news/mystery-startup-from-ex-mozilla-ceo...</a><p>Use Link Bubble to open links in the background on Android | Aug 26, 2015 <a href="http://www.cnet.com/how-to/use-link-bubble-to-open-links-in-the-background-on-android/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnet.com/how-to/use-link-bubble-to-open-links-in-...</a>
If we took the name "Brendan Eich" and replaced it with "Comcast" more of us would find this entirely loathsome.<p>Indeed it is a very loathsome business model.<p>People have taken exception to it when ATT and Comcast inject ads into your browsing experience and when Adblock Plus removes and then reinjects them.<p>Why is this not hijacking the web, extorting publishers with buy into yet another ad network and then trying to leverage this into a future payment network?
The scrolling on this website is janky as hell. Looks like they are using some "Smooth scrolling" plugin that makes scrolling not smooth at all. Not sure why native browser scrolling was insufficient for them, I'm scrolling here in HN all the time and it's perfectly smooth.
This seems awful from a content provider perspective. I no longer get to have control over my own content, Brave gets to decide for me how much my content is worth and what ads appear on my site.<p>This isn't that far removed from coming into a bakery and saying "The Cupcakes are no longer $2, they're $1.50 'coz that's what we think people want to pay."<p>I realize the idea is that this is "better" for the content providers than Ad Block, but both are, IMHO stupid. If a site you visit has ads you don't like, complain to the people who run the site and stop going to it. All Ad Block software has never been a fix, merely a tool in an ever escalating war of ads where users and content creators both lose.
Have you seen git of desktop version? It seems it's completely written in JavaScript: <a href="https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop</a><p>Could such thing be secure?
I would much prefer a new browser that makes true native web apps possible with a one-click install to indicate trust.<p>A browser built with Electron that exposes Node.js and otherwise keeps away from the HTML5 kitchen sink, in order to push innovation away from the spec committees and back out to the community. Vital technology like TCP, UDP, DNS, and the filesystem is being locked up behind a fascade of poorly implemented APIs.<p>A browser with a small, efficient core, optimized for rendering, and with a brilliant app install system, and brilliant native cross-platform integration. The time is ripe.
This para from their home page could be akin to legalizing marijuana!<p><i>"The new Brave browser blocks all the greed and ugliness on
the Web that slows you down and invades your privacy. Then
we put clean ads back."</i>