> On the desktop, Brave provides a 40% to 60% speed increase, and a 2x to 4x speed increase on mobile devices. Mobile users see a direct reduction in both battery and data plan consumption. Brave also protects users with privacy and security features such as HTTPS Everywhere to encrypt data traffic, fingerprinting shields, phishing protection, malware filtering, and script blocking.
Maybe this is a good enough argument to get people to install it. But I seriously doubt you will get people to voluntarily pay money, which is slowly paid out as they surf the web, when the alternative is a free browsing experience with a standard ad blocker.
Also, all of their listed benefits to users is accessible on all other major browsers now with existing extensions.
I think we need to think two steps ahead here. Say everyone starts using ad blockers and disables flash. Then what? Websites still need to make money.
In this case Brave is betting that websites will want to ask for money from their users, but that each website maintaining their own subscription service is not viable. Maybe large websites like WSJ can get people to subscribe, but most probably cannot. Do you want to be subscribed to every website you ever read a single article on?
I think Brave in this case is positioning themselves to be the middle man. They want to become an essential layer that sits on top of the ISP. If their vision of the future turns out to be accurate, being the first mover here will be very profitable.
I think we need to think two steps ahead here. Say everyone starts using ad blockers and disables flash. Then what?
Websites die out.
We're only 30 years in to the web, and only 20 or so of those where advertising has been a workable system for funding an online business. In business model terms that's still very much in the "proof of concept" stage. Arguably the concept has been proven only to work when users have no way to block it. When they can block it and still view the media they often choose to do so, which means the business model fails.
This is true everywhere. The hayday of TV advertising was 40 years ago but now people have demonstrated a preference for subscription services that don't carry adverts (Netflix etc). Ad-funded print newspapers and magazines are dying because they don't offer something that many readers want, so their advertising model falls apart because they don't have the scale necessary to make it work. Radio seems to be bucking the trend somewhat as commercial radio is actually bouncing back, but that may be due to the costs falling dramatically.
Now it's online advertising lead businesses time for a reality check. 10 years ago online businesses could make a great deal of money by showing adverts to users who came for the content, but with the rise of social and the contraction in ad revenue they can't really continue. Maybe the answer is subscriptions (eg paywalls). Maybe it's micropayments (eg Brave). Or maybe, and this is what I'd bet on for the overwhelming majority of websites, it's just death. Everyone moves their content to Youtube and Facebook.
The technical side of a web business has always been cheap. Even 20 years ago you could pay the hosting costs of a huge site for the less than the salary of a junior dev. The content production side (writers, designers, film makers, media, marketing, etc) is where 99% of the costs lie.
It may well be the case that the future of the web is a return to sites built and run to host content produced by the site owners themselves instead of paid writers, but considering very few bloggers even come close to earning a living through their work now I doubt it.
You can't reliably adblock vertically integrated sites like Facebook and Google search who sell and serve their own ads on their own domains. There's a scenario wherein monetization as we know it dies for the majority of long-tail sites and content creators migrate en mass to the large platforms in order to survive. Not a great scenario to think about if you love the decentralized nature of the early web but a plausible scenario nonetheless. There a few startups out there trying to "defeat" adblock by allowing smaller sites to mimic the vertically integrated nature of the largest platforms, and counterintuitively the web might be much better off in the long run if they succeed.
ublock and even adblock seem to cope quite well with both. I haven't unintentionlly seen a Google search ad in a decade, or any Youtube ads. In the case of FB they block 95%+ - periodically a few ads seem to slip through for a day or two at most.
So what's Bitcoin have to do with it? Seems like that's a gimmick. Just provide a normal refillable/subscription account, then pay out the websites. Isn't that what Flattr or some such company already does? Onboarding customers with Bitcoin is a sure way to avoid making money. You could pay out on the backend with BTC but that's a minor detail.
With current Bitcoin you can't even do micropayments. So they're almost certainly looking at doing some grouping and batch pay system anyways.
(Bitcoin was supposed to support disintermediation, but it hasn't worked out that way. So was the Internet, yet now half of all traffic goes through Google or Facebook.)
This seems to be a protocol to coalesce multiple payments between a single sender and receiver, provided that the sender is willing to commit money up front. It does nothing for the case where a single sender wants to send one-time payments to multiple receivers, nor the case where many individual senders want to send to one receiver. In those cases it would only add overhead.
In the case of Brave it doesn't help them much since there is no real-time requirement, so they could accomplish the same by increasing the time between payouts. With some engineering they should be able to support literally thousands of users before they need to take everything off-chain.
That still requires 2 transactions for every (user, site) pair. On a network that can do 10 transaction/second total. It might be usable for certain classes of micropayment, but certainly not for a "every website I visit" scenario.
If one agree with ads as a mean to fund specific sites, then they should just whitelist themselves these sites they think should receive advertisement revenues?
I don't get the idea of bringing in even more 3rd parties in between users and publishers.
That is too much friction, it creates a non-monetary transaction fee that is too high. People don't want to think hard about whether each article (or even website!) is worth reading before they read it. I think this is why Netflix and Spotify is successful.
It doesn't make much sense to be honest. I've heard about this browser a few times now and I still have no idea how is it supposed to gain traction. The performance/bandwidth benefits of less shitty ads can be had by simply disabling flash and using an ad blocker, and otherwise average people just aren't going to care to switch. As far as I can tell the only reason investors threw $7M at them is because Brendan Eich is involved.
I don't see how there is any honesty in watching ads. You seem to be implying that I, as an Internet user, have agreed to view ads in return for content and that I'm being dishonest by not viewing the ads.
I believe the reverse is true. Content providers promise content via hyperlinked text instead they dishonestly deliver content plus ads, something I did not agree to.
I cannot agree to this. Your entire premise rests upon the idea that these people are creating content for you for free. That you are entitled to someone else's work for free.
NO, the entire premise rests on the FACT that the site owner IS sending the content to me for free. No entitlement there. Just reality. Now if they put up a pay wall and I start whining to you that is entitlement. Very different things if you think about it.
Now the obvious thing to say is - "well people won't pay to see the content" And to that I will respond by thinking: "hmmm, does the content really have any value then?"
If it doesn't have value, then why do you insist on viewing it? Once again, you're stating you're entitled to their content instead of simply going to another site.
Is my attention worth nothing? Are my contributions in the form of comments without value? Regardless I never agreed to view ads in trade for access to content and to be completely fair it was not offered to me in this way.
The usual offer is along the lines of "hey click this link you will like what you find there." This is a far cry from, "view these ads and we will provided you with content."
"Is my attention worth nothing? Are my contributions in the form of comments without value?"
Pretty much. You can't pay rent with "attention". It's just like the people that try to get designers to do work for free because of "exposure".
"Regardless I never agreed to view ads in trade for access to content and to be completely fair it was not offered to me in this way."
Yeah, you kinda did. This is the implicit agreement of the internet. If you don't like it, that's fine; there's nothing wrong with that. The point at which it does become wrong is, instead of going to some other website that doesn't do this, you continue to view the content, draining their bandwidth and resources, as though you are entitled to the content. If you don't want to view ads, go to sites that either offer content on a subscription basis and pay that, or on a donation basis.
I want to support the sites I visit but I really dislike ads. I subscribe to a few but it would be a pain to set up individually for every site. Other people are also worried about being tracked online. This lets you conveniently support sites as you browse, without being tracked.
> The performance/bandwidth benefits of less shitty ads can be had by simply disabling flash and using an ad blocker, and otherwise average people just aren't going to care to switch.
I think the point is that average people wouldn't know how to get an ad blocker, but would notice the massive perf benefits of having one.
A browser whose entire focus is on adblocking is therefore exactly what they would appreciate: out of the box, it works great.
Of course for us tech people here, installing an ad blocker is easy, so it seems a little silly. But we are a tiny fraction of the market.
Definitely seems that way to me. For those of us that intentionally don't use ad blockers, I see literally no reason to use this browser over anything else. I see lots of reasons (extensions, comparability, compatibility, support, etc) _not_ to use it, though.
I dont care about brokenness - allowing arbitrary sites to run javascript / store cookies has begun to feel like running windows without a password in the 90s. When things break, I now stop using the website. In rare cases I add it to a whitelist.
has been the standard workaround since like… 2005, if not earlier, and works quite fine without JavaScript (assuming your server-side supports it, and most or all common frameworks do).
> But I seriously doubt you will get people to voluntarily pay money
I've always been curious about this. I'd definitely pay $25/mo if it was distributed amongst the websites I visit. Bonus points if it would distribute it more heavily to the smaller sites than the bigger ones.
By the time you're done manifesting that concretely, you've nearly got Patreon. Yes, it's not quite identical, but, for instance, once you accept that the site still has to opt-in it ceases to be magic.
I want micropayments for web content to happen. I much prefer that future to the advertising-supported present.
Getting there has a massive chicken-and-egg problem, of course, as you need a viable mass of both users and sites for it to get traction, and you can't get one without the other.
Requiring a new browser (vs. an extension to a normal browser) takes your "viable mass of users" problem and makes it about ten times harder.
I don't particularly like ads but I don't have a problem with the idea of ad substitution. This isn't very different from ad injection that WiFi hotspot and other captive portal operators do. For me, it is more about privacy than not seeing ads (provided the ads are not annoying and don't interfere with my viewing content).
Now for Brave, their incentive is to maximize profits just like any other ad broker. This is not necessarily aligned with my interests as a user. I get their theory, I just worry about how this works out in practice. To trust Brave, I have to believe they will never get greedy and never relax their privacy or security standards, even if these interfere with profit-making. That's a big ask. I would be tempted, too.
I also have concerns about 'malvertising', which has affected many high-profile sites who employ world-class security teams. They haven't been able to stop malware infecting their users via ads.
Admittedly this whole comment is pure FUD but that's just it - I am not certain Brave is the answer, and the easiest thing for me to do is keep using an open-source browser with an ad-blocker. Bonus, I'm using NoScript and have a gigabit FTTH connection and let me tell you, the web is lightning fast!
Good luck Brave team, but I don't think I am your target demographic.
I think that's very much ok. At least someone is paying attention to the ads, and curating them so they're not the same awful ads we've been getting. If the current browsers cared anything about our viewing experience we would never get kicked into the app store, or bombarded by some autoplay video, but we do and it's not stopping. Bring on Brave.
In my opinion, replacing ads is worse than simply ad-blocking.
Imagine a scenario where a replaced ad actually degraded the website's performance more so than the website's own ads, which is not all that far-fetched, and users end up blaming the website for having crappy ads.
Additionally, what if Google and Mozilla started doing that with their browsers, would you still be okay with it?
Not according to copyright law. Just because you have a computer (with a browser) doesn't give you the right to do what you want with someone else's content.
Unless it's for fair use, you can't photocopy your textbook, for example. I think you may just be learning about the nuances of intellectual property for the first time.
The answer is yes, you are allowed to scribble in a book you own and tear out pages. The answer does not depend on the "type of book" or any copyright licenses.
According to US law, I am also allowed to make copies for personal use, and several other "fair use" cases, absolutely regardless of licenses.
Precisely. Simply owning a book doesn't mean "I can do anything I want to it".
The same applies to copyright material online - just because you own a computer doesn't mean you own the intellectual property on it. You're free to scribble on your computer case though.
Whoever owns the copyright for the page content doesn't own the copyright for the ads. They are separate works. If I have a copyrighted work that says "please insert an ad from Google here" I am under no obligation to do so.
Copyright includes exclusive rights to determine use and distribution of a work of art. That means copyright owners may determining how their work is distributed, including requiring the bundling with other approved works for combined consumption.
Sure, but drive-by contracts are not enforceable. You'd have to present me with the terms of use and let me agree to them before showing me the content.
Copyright itself isn't a contractual agreement, even though a SaaS TOS may lay out copyright agreements. Websites typically list their copyright publicly, and claiming negligence (typically) isn't considered a valid defense to infringement.
Copyright is a limitation on distributing a work, not on receiving one. Copyright has no bearing on me after I get a work, as long as I don't distribute it to anyone else.
A law does not establish if something is really immoral. And until people with dollar signs in their eyes don't have all the sway in making those calls I reserve the right to resist.
Once you send information out into the world. you DONT own it. Real ownership is the ability to exert control over something. Divulged information cannot be controlled by the original source.
So resist by not visiting those sites. Once you say that you are still entitled to the content, you have lost any claim to moral high ground, and are just acting like an entitled child.
"Once you send information out into the world. you DONT own it."
This sounds like someone who believes that if something comes up in a Google image search, it's free game for anyone to use.
Oh I don't feel entitled to it at all. But If I send you a GET request and you will just send it to me now questions asked then I'm going to ask for it. Nice try.
Your variation of the old "if you don't like it why don't you just move" argument is the more childish response.
Besides, enforcing this intellectual property racket is paid for by my tax dollars. Lets call those "contributions" to the
cause my dues.
"This sounds like someone who believes that if something comes up in a Google image search, it's free game for anyone to use."
Exactly. You imply that it is written in stone that ip is a sacred thing. Not everyone agrees.
My employer and I have an agreement that we came to ahead of time. It's not like I showed up, started working, and then demanded money. I have no idea what argument you think I'm making that would be comparable to being employed.
You send me some html, css and Javascript from YOUR domain to MY computer. I reserve the right to do what I want with it.
YOU have NO right to determine what I do with it after you send it to me. It is pointless to think that rules regarding that can be enforced anyways. To me that is the reality of the situation, its like we are debating if gravity should pull us down or not.
Edit: for civility (with lack of sleep as the excuse).
This person's phrasing of his / her sentiment is a tad off-putting, which is why I imagine people are downvoting, but honestly I see it as the same way: I made a TCP request and fetched your data. How my data display device (i.e. web browser) displays it is up to me. If I choose to alter it or enhance it, that's up to me. It was your decision to send me your data, not to tell me how to display it.
Well, if they made me register an account and agree to a ToS, I think it changes things. I have now signed an agreement, and the data is only delivered through an authenticated manner. But if it's publicly available, like a blog post, I don't see how you can place any restrictions on me. I think you are speaking about ethics, and you can try to convince me that my ethics are inferior to your ethics, and I can try to convince you that my ethics are better than your ethics, but that becomes a parlor game. Surely, a blind person has a need to display the data retrieved differently? Perhaps your ethics change for the disabled?
I've gone off topic, but the point is, if the ad-supported business model is failing, that's a problem for business to solve, not pleas to my "morality".
I'm solely challenging your assertion that you have zero ethical obligation to a content provider because of the mechanism by which they provided you content. I don't think your digression into meta-ethics is very interesting, so I'll focus what seems to be your concrete point.
> Well, if they made me register an account and agree to a ToS, I think it changes things. [...] But if it's publicly available, like a blog post, I don't see how you can place any restrictions on me.
What if there was no authentication mechanism, but just a heartfelt request in the text of the content which asked you kindly to whitelist that site in your ad blocker?
What if they didn't explicitly request it, but you simply know that that's what they would want?
What I'm trying to get at with these questions is this idea that web users are freed from the obligations of fairness and honest dealings due to the technical mechanisms of the internet.
Let me shift the conversation, and say that by the time you are trying to save an industry by arguing about morals, it is effectively doomed. A simple technical fix (installing an adblocker), a fix which is not illegal and in fact hundreds of millions of people do, renders the whole discussion moot.
I think what many adtech companies have done is immoral. Excessive data use, tracking, distraction, and so on. But that's my opinion. Whose really in the "right" here? Does it matter? A new model will have to emerge, or at least a tweaked one. The adtech industry destroyed trust and angered people, thus motivating people to find a solution. Now businesses are springing up, like Brave, to solve the issue.
Can you outlaw ad blocking? No. Can you force me to use a certain web browser? No. So what are you going to do about it? Whine on HN about unethical assholes like me? I think innovation and creativity will have to crack the nut.
I'm sure you make a lot of good points here, but I'm more interested in the ethical calculus of the individual ad block user than the market forces at play.
In my opinion, there is no ethical question to answer regarding general content I receive via an HTTP request. There's no expectation on my part other than the server provide me a valid response, which I will make use of as I choose (within the law, of course).
The technology to implement a paywall is well established, and while it may be annoying to have wasted time making the request, I'd simply learn to ignore certain domains. If that becomes unmanageable, I'd look for, or write, something to filter the blacklisted domains.
I already do this for forbes.com and Wired, among a few others, and my life is not measurably poorer as a result. It's a slight annoyance that Google, for example, returns these sites in my search results. Perhaps I should campaign the major search engines to implement custom filters for me.
Really, I don't care much if the current ad-fueled ecosystem of adutorial content and click-bait thrives on the Internet, as long as I don't have to see it.
Implicit agreements for everything are a side effect of our idiotic and corrupt legal system.
Imagine going to a car lot and having a salesman walk up and say "our TOS say by walking onto a lot you have to buy something, you owe us. Didn't you read them? they are behind that dumpster over there duh. Its on page 53 paragraph 10"
Its really shady to link to some other resource on your domain in small print that is full of legal mumbo jumbo and pretend that constitutes any real agreement between you and somebody else. And yes I understand that all those Judges and lawyers who make a living off of making this crap up disagree with me.
For what ifs - What if you sending me a document without charge or explicitly asking for payment first did not imply that I "have" to download some other document that will annoy me and possible infect my computer.
I think this is a red herring. Yes, there are a million absurd examples of "implicit agreements" that one can think of. There are also many legitimate examples-- for instance, you shouldn't go into a bookstore and take pictures of all the pages in a book even though you haven't explicitly agreed not to and the store owners allowed you onto their premises.
So, is "if you're going to use my website, don't block ads" absurd? I don't think so, and if it's not then your comment is irrelevant to this discussion.
I'm not trying to create a law, I'm trying to discuss whether the individual ad block user bears any moral or ethical responsibility to the content provider. The argument offered here implies their interaction with the content host exists in a completely neutral moral plane because it's mediated by technology. I'm not convinced.
There have been a number of sites that have popped up as submissions here on HN where the site rendered without an adblocker loaded so slowly as to be basically unusable. Rendered in lynx, however, it was both readable and extremely fast to load. Does that count as an adblocker, or a TOS violation? What about curl + an html viewer (without JS capability?)
The moral calculus is complex, I'm not drawing a bright line. I'm simply challenging the assertion that, because of the technical architecture of the internet, a person's interaction with a content provider is not subject to morality at all.
I'm sorry, but this argument still hinges on the idea that you are entitled to their content for free. By going to their site, you have agreed to pay them in the form of ads. If those terms are not amenable to you, that's fine, just don't go to their site. Don't pretend you're doing something just and noble by stiffing them on the bill.
What transparency do they provide about how the payments are allocated? Can I see where the money went and which publishers actually collected their payment? Or is that all opaque, where Brave actually keeps "a portion" plus publishers don't actually get paid unless their payment is above some rarely reached threshold?
Personally I'd love to pay for using websites and get a faster experience (versus the alternative ways to do it), because I really want publishers to get paid. But I'm skeptical until I see that it's really happening. No transparency means 0% chance I use it.
I love Brave. I'm still locked into Chrome out of habit but I'm slowly trying to push myself over to Brave. It does a much, much better job ad blocking natively, and it's getting better with every release. The primary reason, however, is I like the idea of controlling how ad revenue is used. I think the idea of paying people to accept ads is a long overdue.
I just downloaded this and went to test it out. I went straight to a torrent site to see how it worked. The was a noticeable difference in how fast the page loaded but the pop under on the site still managed to open a tab with some shady advertising. I imagine they are still working out the kinks but when they are as effective as blocking ads as an ad-blocker and maintains its speed this will be a great browser.
Shouldn't a browser working the other way round should be implemented : you can not use any adblocker but in exchange of your eyeballs usage you get a small percentage of the ads costs ?
I don't think you (the viewer) could earn anything meaningful in that system. Afaik adsense gives the website owner profits on the order of ~0.01 cent / ad view. So "a small percentage" of that would give the viewer basically nothing.
also "eyeball usage" sounds about as dystopian as "human resources" :D
I like Brave on Android from when it was just a "bubble browser", but man alive it's flakey. Every day I get random bubbles on the screen that can't be moved or closed, or even worse, invisible full page coverage which means nothing on the screen works unless I pull down the Brave notification in the system tray to manually hide it.
Please fix this "jumpiness" on your bubble browser on Android. Every time I check Brave on Android I get angry because of this bubble hiding/showing the whole time. Especially on websites which hide their top nav bar themself... then I have two hiding mechanism jumping all over my screen. When I visit a website I want to read it without jumping text.
It's laughable that Brave is marketed as a new, fast browser when it's just a Node/Electron application. It's barely more than a skin on a Chrome window with no possibility of ever outperforming Chrome.
Does anyone here think this might be one of those historical moments like when the Mosaic browser was released?
I see some potential for what could be. But, I don't see the value proposition for the average consumer. I just don't think there's enough value in what they're offering, to be a major breakthrough that will revolutionize the internet. I see it as more of a niche offering.
So with that Brave, BitGo and Coinbase get to know it all? Or do I have a new pseudonym per site? How does this prevent all my transactions being known to the parties involved or even the whole world?
I like the idea behind the brave browser but there UI needs some work. There are no extensions yet to make tabs behave more like chromes on the desktop. On android (where I really neeed more ad blocker options) they have this weird bubble thing like facebook chat.
I find it unusable until they do something about this.
I installed Brave when it first came out as the ad plan sounded very interesting. There was another attempt using bitcoin in the browser to 'bypass' ads, but unfortunately, it wasn't have been successful (in the network effect sense) I'm still waiting for the LastPass option :)
Lastpass is available in the latest version I have (0.11.1). However, it doesn't get a menu icon anywhere in the title bar. You have to use the right-click contextual menu to use it if autofill fails.
didn't know they updated it, i'll give it a go later tonight. thanks! any bitcoin related updates? their seed money is all from bitcoin VCs so there must be something going on..
The replaced ads are bought through brave so users don't pay for that. I believe that is the default (would have to check to be sure) Either way most users probably won't really have any balance at all
I fail to see how ad blocking on the client side relates to prioritized network traffic.
ISPs are the only ones with control over the system to really hijack net neutrality anyway. Using a browser that blocks/replaces sources by your choice has nothing to do with that.
we'll let's help you with your issue: should content providers (reddit, arstechnica, etc) decide to de-prioritize those that aren't directly making them money, the effect is the same as net neutrality, (a tiered-access internet) is it not? Should Brave gain even a minority marketshare, you'll definitely see Google and Mozilla (and likely Microsoft) jump on board with similar solutions.
We've merely pushed the control from the ISP to the content providers. Does this mean it isn't a Net Neutrality hijack anymore?
Maybe this is a good enough argument to get people to install it. But I seriously doubt you will get people to voluntarily pay money, which is slowly paid out as they surf the web, when the alternative is a free browsing experience with a standard ad blocker.
Also, all of their listed benefits to users is accessible on all other major browsers now with existing extensions.