The article strikes me as strongly ad-hominem. The individual attacked exercised his democratic right (small-scale financial support of a political cause) as a private person, and he is proclaimed evil for that because the OP politically disagrees.<p>I'm a bit shocked that this article even made it to HN's front page.<p>(However, I do appreciate the technical and business model explanations later in the article about Brave.)
Something like half of this piece is guilt by association. Literally the first argument is that 15 years ago Brendan Eich donated to some cause that the author finds repugnant, hance you shouldn't use his browser today. I also oppose Eich's views, but I believe that he has the right for his political belief, and anyway it shouldn't have any bearing on his professional contributions.<p>The author lists a number of crypto features, some of which failed and some turned out inconsequential. I don't see how this should have any effect on the users who use Brave for other features like adblocking or tabs sidepanel.
Brave is the worst of all worlds in the modern browser space. I genuinely believe that it doesn't get much better than LibreWolf and uBlock if you value privacy and don't want to give in to Google - you probably don't need all of the stuff Brave is trying to sell to you.
If you were to stop using things because of the political views of the people who are involved in their creation, you would end up having to give up most everything.
So the argument is:
1. The guy who started Brave has political opinions and has financially backed them.
2. He built a browser that blocked ads and then tried to monetize that.
3. His monetization scheme doesn't make much money for anybody but the company and makes it difficult for others to monetize.
4. The browser tried to increase revenue by steering users to affiliates (but did a poor job of it).<p>So to sum up, Brave is doing the same thing as Google except that they never figured out how to effectively serve ads to users, so they actually protect users from ads.<p>Stop using Brave browser. Seriously.
For iOS I couldn't find anything better than it. Firefox addons on iOS don't work because of apple's webkit requirements.<p>May be someone can recommend something with uBlock working?
I'm concerned about Firefox's RAM usage. See this set of benchmarks:<p><a href="https://www.androidauthority.com/brave-vs-firefox-3314241/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.androidauthority.com/brave-vs-firefox-3314241/</a><p>I thought that perhaps with uBlock Origin Firefox could use less RAM, but searching on that only found results were uBlock Origin sometimes used huge amounts of memory (hopefully fixed by now).
Brave in "high" shield settings blocks ads and nasty practices on phones. Firefoxmobile does now too via extensions, but it's also sadly noticeably slower for most sites I care about.
People are not the same as the things that they make.<p>People didn't like Germans during WW1, so they threw away Beethoven's music. How dumb is that?<p>The Nazis invented missiles during WW2, so we should perhaps throw away all of our Space technology? How dumb is that?<p>Some guy that's not very nice writes a good browser, so perhaps we should throw that browser away? How dumb is that?
This article is way over the top to me. Eich shouldn't be discredited simply because he donated to some conservative cause once. A lot of companies do that to hedge their bets in DC. And let's say Eich is what you would call anti LGBT or what have you? I don't agree with it but I don't think someone should be attacked for it. Maybe he has some religious beliefs or something. Or maybe, since that was years ago, he changed his mind or became a different person. It seems illiberal to me. It seems the best way to get people to agree with a point of view is make solid arguments and see if they come to a new decision. Going after him or anybody and trying to destroy his career seems less ethical than what you are accusing him of frankly, considering companies pull this kind of stuff every day. There is a much better way to criticize Brave than stoop to this thin emotionally low article.