My Internet History in Web Browsers(willhallonline.co.uk) |
My Internet History in Web Browsers(willhallonline.co.uk) |
I'm always surprised that Brave is so popular among the HN crowd. I guess that cryptocurrencies are the hot new thing, but Brave's alleged future business model is "hide ads from web pages, and then show our own". That's shockingly sketchy.
Using a built-in cryptocurrency to convince users to do their marketing for them under the promise that they might get rich in future when the value goes up is, admittedly, clever, if evil.
It's not perfect by any stretch. When I was on Android I used it as my default; now I'm on iOS and Safari is fine. I sold my personal MBP, and now I only use my work MBP for light browsing sometimes (Opera) and my home desktop/gaming rig very rarely indeed recently. Brave makes up maybe 5% of my browser usage right now, but I still recommend it to friends. It's good at what it does, and the crypto stuff feels very much like an afterthought.
I have a complementary wild guess that someone has worked out an ethical philosophy argument in which Brave's plans made sense. It could conceivably include "this is war" (e.g., crucial importance of liberty-ish principles and the Internet, dangerous powerful aggressors, failures of legislation and enforcement authorities), "the ends justify the means", and perhaps an assumption of "we won't be evil".
(My first pick would be a world in which US and non-US legislatures are willing to genuinely and utterly smash certain dotcom practices and thinking. My second pick would be to light a fire under Mozilla, to be more aggressive and fearless, at the same time Mozilla's funding model is redone, to remove conflicts of interest (and push out anyone who would actually rather be at a dotcom). But I'm kinda giving Brave some space, for the moment, as one of the possible third alternatives, since maybe they can do good things Mozilla can't/won't, or maybe their role is to provide additional shakeup pressure on Mozilla.)
I read too that they had plans to switch ads in all pages for their own ads or some crap like that. If they pull that off on me I will switch to something else.
Now that Chrome has become the new IE of the web, I sometimes have to switch to a Chromium-based browser for some sites to work. For this, I rely on Ungoogled-Chromium.
Best of all, their website puts Brave's selling point as 'not letting other browsers treat you as a product'. Yeah, fat chance.
update: a quick look later, nothing I could not have done using standard open source tools like HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger and/or uBlock Origin.
IE(because there wasn't much choice) -> Mozilla -> Firefox -> Palemoon
I keep firefox installed because some sites don't play nice with palemoon, but i've never used chrome for any extended period. I played with chromium a while ago but I didn't like it.
I've never really understood why chrome became so popular, when I tried it, it felt like a step back fromm firefox in every way. Sure it's better than IE, but that's not really a very difficult thing to accomplish. I'd rather use lynx than IE.
Netscape -> Firefox -> Chrome -> Firefox
But I had to use IE in some jobs.
IE only if it's REALLY required by badly designed products/sites.
lynx -> OS/2 WebExplorer -> Netscape -> IE -> Mozilla Suite -> Camino -> Firefox -> Chrome -> Safari -> Samsung Internet
(also the Emacs browser at some point, but hard to place it into the timeline)
Right now, I'm almost using a different browser on every device:
Safari on my iPhone X and iPad Pro Opera on my MBP for browsing, Firefox sometimes for development Brave on my Windows-based gaming computer
late 90's on Mac and Windows: Netscape, Windows95+ on PC: Internet Exploder
2001+ iBook: Safari
2008+ Intel Mac: Firefox
today Ubuntu and Debian on Intel laptops: Firefox and Chromium, Android: Firefox and Chrome, PowerPC Macs: TenFourFox, Roccat (WebKit)
IE (for Mac) -> iCab -> Opera -> OmniWeb -> Safari (for a long time) -> Chrome (when it was new) -> Firefox
Firefox -> Opera -> Firefox -> Chrome -> Iridium -> Chrome -> Firefox