
Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup - Seldaek
https://www.brave.com/
======
jordigh
I will repeat this one more time, because Eich seems to be missing the
point.[1]

I don't adblock for privacy, security, or speed. Those are just nice-side
effects. I adblock because _I do not want to be manipulated into buying things
I do not need._

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?

\--

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10244964](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10244964)

~~~
BrendanEich
I get your point, and it is a good one. We have a micro payments channel to
publishers, frictionless and anonymous, under construction, for folks who want
no ads and who will pay.

Other users than you will be able to mix and match, too: better and more
private ads on sites they don't support, with a revenue share to these users
that they can spend on sites they do.

We aren't saying "only ads". We do see ads as a necessary funding model for
much of the web today. I would love to see micropayments replace ads. Let's
see what can be done.

~~~
rorykoehler
I fall into the camp of blocking all ads because frankly I don't like them.
They are visual pollution. I also doubt I would pay for written content (maybe
on a very rare occasion I might) if given a micro-payments solution because it
doesn't seem worth paying for. I write blog posts from time to time and I do
it for pleasure because I enjoy writing about things that interest me and
sharing it with others. Honestly I don't feel any compulsion to fund any of
the media whose links bombard my social media daily. Even some of the good
stuff on this site I wouldn't feel compelled to pay for because truly it isn't
transformative and I would probably be better off not reading it and doing
something productive instead.

Stuff I do pay for: educational content (books, courses etc), Spotify,
Netflix.

You're obviously much more deeply invested in this and have done the maths. I
am curious, what percentage of web users do you calculate will use the micro-
payments, if it was a seamless perfectly executed experience? How much revenue
do you think it will generate and will it be enough to disrupt web-ads?

~~~
munificent
> I write blog posts from time to time and I do it for pleasure because I
> enjoy writing about things that interest me and sharing it with others.

I do the same thing, but I realized a while back there is a flaw in this
model. It means the available creative works—which in turn effectively means
the engine of culture—is determined almost entirely by people who are well-off
enough to have the free time to do that.

I don't have "free" time. I _paid_ for that time by buying a more expensive
house close to where I work, spending less time shopping by not chasing the
best deal, paying others to do home and car repairs, etc. etc. etc.

People who aren't as financially lucky as me don't have that opportunity. I'm
not crazy about the idea of living in a world where those people don't get to
participate in determining culture.

~~~
dreamfactory2
Which significant cultural works have been ad-funded?

~~~
eevilspock
Imagine if instead of libraries we made literature accessible to everyone by
inserting ads, including "native ads" and product placements in the stories!
Egads!

~~~
mirimir
Excellent point. Libraries are public services. They're funded by private
groups and governments. But it's not just about charity. There's an
expectation of social benefit, which indirectly benefits even private funders.

------
hapless
It sounds like their plan is to block all ads, then sell the new ad inventory
created by all the blank space on pages.

Why on earth would users want this browser?

~~~
jacquesm
Well, the logical extension of that is that you actually get paid to browse,
that might be a gamechanger.

Keep in mind that the supply side right now ends at the owner of the web
property that starts the ball rolling when in fact it actually starts with the
person sitting behind the computer looking at the page.

So this is a giant cut-out-the-middle-men opportunity and Eich is fairly
uniquely positioned to take advantage of that.

Wonder if that rev-share idea is part of the long term plan.

~~~
strictnein
We tried the "paid to browse" thing 15-20 years ago. Didn't go so well.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_to_surf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_to_surf)

~~~
jacquesm
Times have changed since then and it definitely would not be the first time
that something that fell flat out of the gate the first time became a success
the second time around. Lots of current successes are actually just warmed
over past failures.

That's not proof in any way that this might succeed now but there is something
to be said or giving that a shot with the number of eyeballs available today
(and the harder to advertise to markets that have been unlocked by the web but
where ad agencies are not yet capable of selling inventory).

If you could centralize that through the browser it would be a fairly powerful
strategy if adoption would be large enough (that's the crux), which is why I
wondered if it was on their roadmap.

~~~
lsc
huh. See, I thought the reason it failed last time,besides fraud[1], was a
broader reason - it's the same reason paid surveys aren't worth very much. the
idea is that the people you want to advertise to are precisely the people who
are willing to trade money for their time; the opposite of the people you get
when you pay folks to watch advertising.

[1], in 1998, I seem to remember that one of my co-workers had installed a
thing on his work computer that would move the mouse and "browse" the internet
when he wasn't there, getting paid for seeing ads.

~~~
jacquesm
Of the old ad networks only doubleclick survives and they only do so because
of google massive anti-fraud measures.

Anybody that gets into ads these days will have to take abuse as their #1
priority to be able to compete so if this is to work at all you can bet that
anti-fraud measures would make up a very large component of the package.

Tying the end-user and one of the primary beneficiaries to the same chair is a
risky thing but not all forms of advertising are equally susceptible to this
kind of risk. For instance, performance based advertising and to a lesser
extent branding are not all that much at risk.

On another note fraud is present in all forms of online advertising at the
moment (with the same qualifications listed above) and it is simply priced
into the ad rates.

------
metafunctor
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?

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.

~~~
BrendanEich
Native ads can be, and are today, blocked. Consider those ugly Taboola and
Outbrain octoboxes with parasite pictures at the bottom of too many news
stories these days. Those are just img in div HTML. But adblockers remove them
with HTML rules (Brave will too).

In general, you can Greasemonkey anything. Tracker-less first party native ads
may be harder to match, but most sites would need tracking to aggregate
audiences, to get better ads and revenue, so third party native is on the
rise. And it is easy to block.

~~~
tomcam
Huge fan of Brendan, but this did not really address parent's point--which I
think is valid, and unanswered. Most people don't use Greasemonkey-propelled
solutions. I wonder if the answer is that highly targeted ads tend to work.
When I'm on the guitar subreddit it'd be fine for me to see ads from Fender.
And part of what I seek when I read a guitar magazine is ads, because they
alert me to things that I sometimes don't find out about any other way.

I also like the idea of paying to block ads that aren't relevant to me. I
believe in a free market and totally understand that things have to be paid
for. Sometimes ads are the answer, but I find many of the interstitials to be
irrelevant and sometimes they slow the site down unacceptably. Would be
willing to pay for this experience not to happen.

~~~
scrollaway
We can't really have both ad relevance (outside the local context) _and_
privacy. One requires the advertiser know things about me I personally have no
desire for them to know.

> Would be willing to pay for this experience not to happen.

I don't know if I'm in the minority, but I'm honestly not willing to pay for
that. Fact is, I use adblock right now, but if I couldn't use adblock on some
sites I'd simply stop visiting them.

I despise the ad-filled experience. I'm with the current top post and despise
the idea of being constantly manipulated into buying things I do not need. If
there were _less_ ad overall on the internet, I wouldn't care about blocking
them, but that's tragedy of the commons for you.

------
grizzles
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.

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.

That might be a utopian vision today, but I have strong belief in the power of
people's self interest to drive positive change.

Edit: chrispm reposted the link here,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10940684](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10940684)

------
vladikoff
From a quick glance:

1) Desktop browser is an electron app with ad tracking injected into your app
via [http://cdn.brave.com/](http://cdn.brave.com/) (via
[https://sonobi.com/welcome/index.php](https://sonobi.com/welcome/index.php)
which promises "EFFECTIVELY PLAN AND SOURCE MARKETING OPPORTUNITIES WITH
QUALITY AND VIEWABILITY FROM PREMIUM PUBLISHERS"

2) iOS browser is a fork of Firefox iOS - [https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-
ios](https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios)

3) Android browser is a fork of
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.linkbubble...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.linkbubble.playstore&hl=en)

~~~
drdaeman
Is Linkbubble free software, or they just made some agreement with author to
use/rebrand it?

(I always assumed it's proprietary, but seeing that others are FLOSS forks,
would love to be wrong about this one.)

~~~
david2777
It was purchased by an unnamed startup recently. I guess maybe it was Brave?
[http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/08/04/link-bubble-is-
under...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/08/04/link-bubble-is-under-new-
management-and-getting-a-big-v1-5-update-with-drop-down-support-colored-
toolbars-and-more/)

~~~
dblohm7
It must have been: Brave co-founder Brian Bondy blogged about that purchase
several months ago. [http://www.brianbondy.com/blog/171/the-link-bubble-
android-w...](http://www.brianbondy.com/blog/171/the-link-bubble-android-web-
browser-has-gone-fully-free)

------
jensen123
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.

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.

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.

~~~
Nitramp
If other companies in the space are an indication (e.g. AdBlock Plus),
"intrusive ads" are defined as ads that don't pay them, but somebody else.

------
wespad
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.

------
Brakenshire
I was just reading some web performance audits by Paul Irish:

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K-mKOqiUiSjgZTEscBLjtjd6...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K-mKOqiUiSjgZTEscBLjtjd6E67oiK8H2ztOiq5tigk/pub)

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.

------
iza
> _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._

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.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>or pay sites directly.

Call me crazy, but if I wanted to "pay the site" I'm using I'd just allow
their ads. This company is really sleezy. Its playing the "replace their ads
with ours" game and trying to make it sound like some wonderful moral position
against advertising. People aren't this stupid. This thing isn't going to
catch on.

~~~
michael_h
If you allow the site's ads, you are also allowing the ad network they use to
track you.

The point of this browser is to factor out random third-party ad networks. If
you elect to see ads on the site, they are presumably served by Brave. The
site still gets paid (so it's _not_ like the ISP's replacing ads on the fly),
but you don't have to worry about unknown trackers following you around the
internet and putting a strain on your CPU.

Whether it will catch on is another question...

------
anotherhacker
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.

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

~~~
roneesh
I'm not so sure that the average person won't care. They are increasingly
aware of how much they pay for data on their phone plans, and how crossing
limits decreases their speeds. After a big bill or two, people start looking
for options.

~~~
anotherhacker
"Why 3.5 times more Apple users choose Apple Maps over Google Maps"

The power of default settings is huge. Perhaps you're thinking of yourself or
your peers.90% of the rest of the population just doesn't care about these
issues.

Source: [http://fortune.com/2015/06/16/apple-google-maps-
ios/](http://fortune.com/2015/06/16/apple-google-maps-ios/)

~~~
roneesh
I tried to cover my tracks here and say "increasingly" aware. For instance I
saw an ad the other day that offered unlimited internet on your phone for $40
a month, but in slightly smaller text (not fine print, think H1 vs H2
relation) it said that after 1.5Gb speeds reduced to 128k. Disclosures like
that I think will make people more aware of their data usage over time.

However my supposition is predicated on the continued restriction of data and
speed by carriers. If any new business model comes along that upends that,
then I suppose Americans won't become data usage aware.

------
webjprgm
A few thoughts:

(1) If they block tracking, does it block Google Analytics? Because that would
annoy me as a website owner.

(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).

(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.

~~~
acheron
_If they block tracking, does it block Google Analytics?_

That's one of the biggest trackers out there, so it would be a pretty poor
blocker if it didn't.

------
runjake
The first question that pops into my head is "How is Brave going to
monetize?".

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.

~~~
chippy
They are monetizing by....advertising!

They substitute bad ads for their ads.

------
Animats
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.

"Then we put clean ads back". This is open source, right? It's on Github. Can
someone fork this and remove _all_ the ads? Thank you.

~~~
tomp
Well, given that's it's a fork of Firefox itself, you could just _un-_ fork it
:)

~~~
Animats
Their site doesn't even mention that it's a fork of Firefox. I thought it was
based on WebKit.

~~~
wldcordeiro
It's an electron shell app from looking at the desktop repo.

------
rockdoe
[https://github.com/brave/browser-ios](https://github.com/brave/browser-ios)

"Firefox for iOS"

They forgot to remove the branding from their "new" browser.

~~~
m52go
It's not a mistake. Firefox is referenced throughout the documentation. Looks
like Brave is built on top of it.

~~~
rockdoe
Venturebeat claims it's based on Chromium, but they also seem to be pretty
confused because they're calling it "a brand new browser, because (builing on
top of existing browsers) would imply limited functionality by virtue of their
application programming interfaces (APIs) and less impressive performance
gains"

[http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/20/brave-
browser/](http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/20/brave-browser/)

So it's Chrome on Desktop, Firefox for iOS on iOS?

~~~
ainar-g
Firefox on iOS is built with WebKit, not Gecko [1]. IIRC, it's because Apple
doesn't like engines that are not WebKit. Chromium uses Blink, which is a fork
of WebKit, so Firefox for iOS and Chromium are relatives in a sense.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_for_iOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_for_iOS).

------
juandazapata
It's funny when AdBlock tells you that brave.com has 2 blocked Ads. Oh the
irony.

~~~
rorykoehler
uBlock Origin is blocking 6 assets/sources

------
abhv
How will Brave prevent anti-ad-blocking mechanisms from interfering with the
page?

For example, cbs/abc/nbc seem to detect muBlock and then stop serving content.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
This is the most annoying thing about ad blocking going mainstream. It was a
rare site that bothered to detect us before Apple got into the game.

~~~
Nursie
Personally I think it's very healthy and marks the beginning of the next stage
of the web - how does it work in a post-advertising world?

~~~
jacquesm
If the various stages of the arms race have been any indication so far it
tends to get worse rather than better with every stage so far, which does not
lead me to believe there will be a 'post advertising world', only a 'more
annoying and harder to get rid of / ignore advertising world'.

~~~
Nursie
Well it's true, it has been an arms race, but until recently it's been between
relatively small numbers of blockers and the advertisers.

Now that Apple have taken it more mainstream it's going to be interesting to
watch what happens.

But you might be right, sadly. More of the same and worse...

------
abercromby
Man that logo is similar to Workfront's:
[https://www.workfront.com](https://www.workfront.com)

~~~
rockdoe
Workfront's trademark doesn't seem to be an issue for Brave due to different
use fields. Looks like Eich can't make a calendaring app though :-)

------
threesixandnine
Am I getting the message from their #about section correctly?

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).

------
zmanian
The biggest challenge of micropayments is how to minimize the cognitive load
of making many tiny payments.

How should the user agent decide when to alert the user?

------
Kristine1975
What's with the requests to static.doubleclick.net on that page?

------
MisterBastahrd
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.

------
CaptSpify
Why a new browser, instead of plugins for existing browsers?

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.

------
callmeed
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)?

~~~
tomp
Also, an independent third party can't track such ads.

~~~
callmeed
That's good, right?

~~~
wsha
It's good for user privacy, but not good for the ad networks wanting to keep
an accurate account of how many times their ads are being loaded.

------
tomp
I don't see any reason I would prefer this over the native iOS ad blocking
(with an appropriate blacklist).

------
buro9
Urgh, what happens for a site when there are no adverts on the site?

Are "clean adverts" then placed on the site?

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.

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.

------
kybernetikos
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.

------
RobertDeNiro
I wonder how much they paid for the domain name.

------
bpodgursky
Anyone OK with this business model should also be ok with ISPs stripping out
ads and replacing them with their own content (remember that?)

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.

~~~
daxelrod
This is opt-in. I think more people would be OK with an ISP doing it if it
were also opt-in.

------
adrianlmm
Glad to see you back Brendan!

------
devy
Due to Brave's ad-block technology, I guess Brendan Eich will be blocked[1] by
IAB from their annual conferences. (every pun intended.)

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10937704](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10937704)

------
ck2
Does anyone else remember when adsense first launched and it was text-only
ads?

People would actually stop to read the ads because they were interesting and
relevant.

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.

------
headgasket
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.

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.

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.

------
xjay
Brave seems to acknowledge a smaller part of Ted Nelson's "Project Xanadu"
[1], where you're paying to access content.

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."

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.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu)

------
desireco42
I think this is great thing, it is right thing, that is coming from
trustworthy person/company.

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.

------
linksbro
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.

And can anyone find this 'roadmap' that Eich talks about in the post?

------
st3fan
"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

To be fair, Firefox for iOS is open source. Take it, remix it, improve it. It
is all good. Mozilla Public License.

------
chejazi
Haven't looked at the source but worth noting there's a Bitcoin logo on the
homepage near "Browse Better."

------
bootload
_" Brave is open source!"_

Wow, new browser technology that is open source, this is good news. I'm hoping
the development focus is flexible, remember flock? [0]

[0]
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/flock+browser](https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/flock+browser)

------
smanuel
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.

------
Plough_Jogger
The surfer in the main slider has had his fins completely adblocked.

[https://www.brave.com/assets/img/sliders/revolution/surfers_...](https://www.brave.com/assets/img/sliders/revolution/surfers_bluewash_tan.jpg)

------
Fice
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.

------
dbg31415
I really like just replacing my hosts file to block ads.

[http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts)

But I can't do that on my phone without jailbreaking it. Stupid phone.

------
jsvaughan
Surely we are soon going to see server side ad-injection and the end of ad
blocking

~~~
anonx
That doesn't work well with AD networks though. Site owners will either have
to use links of the form: siteOfAdNetwork.com?id=smthhere and it still will be
possible to block them. Or AD network will be unable to check the number of
clicks.

~~~
jsvaughan
ad links could be via redirects from the hosting site, intercepted by the web
server plugin.

personalisation would be a problem, because you won't have a cookie, but there
is always device fingerprint etc

I agree it isn't quite as good but it is possible to make ads
indistinguishable from legitimate site content.

~~~
anonx
Will the site redirect to AD network? If so, it is still easily blockable.
AdBlocker can preload suspicious links and if they redirect to
siteOfAdNetwork.com block them.

The only option I see here is to have some kind of click counter both on the
web-master's (who monetizes) and client's (who advertises) web-sites. And the
counters' numbers will be sent (using server-side) to the AD Network. But that
doesn't work if the client wants to advertise not his/her web-side (where AD
network's script can be installed) but Facebook profile or something like
that.

Alternatively, AD network can charge not for number of clicks but for
alternative parameters (e.g., number of days AD is published). Though, still
not easy (no guarantees) to check whether web-master who's monetizing his/her
web-site doesn't cheat.

------
rameshvel
There is no mention about licences.. For desktop/iOS, it uses
chrome(electron)/mozilla(firefox-ios).. But no mention about the android one
(linkbubble)

It would be great if they clarify the terms & licences in the FAQ

------
lossolo
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.

~~~
stonogo
I have never forgotten this. It's my primary motivating factor in mercilessly
blocking ads and ad servers, both within my browser and at my routers, both at
home and at work.

If someone wants to make money off of me, they're free to send me a bill. If
their content isn't valuable enough to sell directly, why should I waste my
bandwidth and RAM monetizing their garbage?

A world without Facebook and Google sounds wonderful. Sign me up; I'm willing
to pay.

~~~
petercooper
It was called 1997. You can go back there by connecting over a 56k modem and
using Netscape 2.

------
vhold
> We make sure you aren't being tracked while you shop online and browse your
> favorite sites.

That's not a realistic claim. Nothing is stopping publishers and advertisers
from sharing back end data.

------
_pmf_
AdSense was considered the pinnacle of unobtrusive ads in the past.

------
privateproperty
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.

Sorry Brendan you failed the first test. I wont adapt to Brave.

------
LeicaLatte
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.

------
puppetmaster3
This will be banned by app stores and such and quickly.

------
lumberjack
Where is the incentive for the user to use this thing?

~~~
chippy
their pages load quicker on desktop and on mobile saving time and battery

------
jagermo
Playing the devils advocat:

How Do you want to finance development in the lang run?

It is a nice solution and I'd hate to see it go because of financial problems.

~~~
devopsproject
try reading the "about" section

------
SeanDav
If it can add top class security / anti tracking / anti fingerprinting, it
would become far more compelling.

------
tincholio
So, creating Javascript, hating on gay people, and now an ad company... this
guy really wants people to hate him!

------
willherschel
Brave wants to save me from intrusive 3rd-party trackers... but uses Chartbeat
and Doubleclick on Brave.com?

------
pussinboots
patreon but it allocates a percentage of however much you want to pay per
month to the sites you visit relative to how much time you spent on them

------
return0
Sounds like a brave plan indeed. Good luck to them!

------
ifdefdebug
My ublock add-on blocks exactly 5 requests from their home page... so why
would I want to install their browser?

------
outsidetheparty
The more I read through the Brave website the more it feels like this is
actually vastly worse than the status quo.

All quotes are directly from the FAQ:

"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."

"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 _need_
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.

"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.

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 _none of that matters_ , 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.

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.

This is just. I mean. Gah. Flames. On the side of my face.

[1] (I can't find that figure on their site, but it's quoted here:
[http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/267089/new-
bro...](http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/267089/new-browser-
offers-brave-solution-to-ad-blocking.html) "...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.")

------
e15ctr0n
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!)

'Brave browser promises faster Web by banishing intrusive ads' | Jan 20, 2016
[http://www.cnet.com/news/ex-mozilla-ceo-try-braves-new-
brows...](http://www.cnet.com/news/ex-mozilla-ceo-try-braves-new-browser-for-
a-faster-private-web/)

> _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._

* 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. [https://github.com/brave/electron](https://github.com/brave/electron) [https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop](https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop)

* The iOS browser is a fork of Firefox for iOS, which is a Swift app developed from scratch by Mozilla. [https://github.com/brave/browser-ios](https://github.com/brave/browser-ios)

* The Android browser is Link Bubble, which is a wrapper around the default Android browser [https://github.com/brave/browser-android](https://github.com/brave/browser-android) Previous HN discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7453897](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7453897) Australian developer Chris Lacy announced its sale in Aug 2015: [http://theblerg.net/post/2015/08/05/ive-sold-link-bubble-tap...](http://theblerg.net/post/2015/08/05/ive-sold-link-bubble-tappath-and-all-related-assets)

* 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. [https://github.com/bbondy/abp-filter-parser-cpp](https://github.com/bbondy/abp-filter-parser-cpp)

* The database is MongoDB. [https://github.com/brave/vault](https://github.com/brave/vault)

Past news coverage:

​Mystery startup from ex-Mozilla CEO aims to go where tech titans won't | Nov
17, 2015 [http://www.cnet.com/news/mystery-startup-from-ex-mozilla-
ceo...](http://www.cnet.com/news/mystery-startup-from-ex-mozilla-ceo-aims-to-
go-where-tech-titans-wont/)

Use Link Bubble to open links in the background on Android | Aug 26, 2015
[http://www.cnet.com/how-to/use-link-bubble-to-open-links-
in-...](http://www.cnet.com/how-to/use-link-bubble-to-open-links-in-the-
background-on-android/)

------
shmerl
Is it using Servo?

~~~
rockdoe
No, it's using Chrome, Firefox for iOS and LinkBubble.

~~~
shmerl
That's not fun. But I guess Servo isn't ready yet. But why aren't they using
Gecko for example with IPC embedlite?

------
WhatIsDukkha
If we took the name "Brendan Eich" and replaced it with "Comcast" more of us
would find this entirely loathsome.

Indeed it is a very loathsome business model.

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.

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?

------
jscheel
Can they block scroll-jacking too?

------
Touche
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.

~~~
Jgrubb
Smooth scrolling plugins are vastly more offensive to me than most
advertising.

~~~
patates
I really wonder who thought adding lag to a primary browser interaction would
make your pages better.

------
melted
It is very brave of Brendan to pursue such an obviously dead-end idea.

------
xyzzy4
But I want to block _all_ advertising, not just harmful advertising.

~~~
whyagaindavid
100 % agree. I have been using webview or Chromewebview to whitelist all the
sites that I browse. See
[https://github.com/tobykurien/WebApps](https://github.com/tobykurien/WebApps)
I can browse with 56Kbps on the way to my work even in suburbs with poor 2G.

------
joesmo
It says 'startup' but I don't see a business model or customers willing to pay
for what they can already get free.

------
ebbv
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.

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."

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.

------
orliesaurus
hahahahahahaha and this is why I use the meanest adblocking oss software i can
find on my devices

------
wildmXranat
u

------
mirap
Have you seen git of desktop version? It seems it's completely written in
JavaScript: [https://github.com/brave/browser-
laptop](https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop)

Could such thing be secure?

~~~
rockdoe
JavaScript engines have to run untrusted code from the web 24/7\. They're some
of the most secured software in existance.

------
jorangreef
I would much prefer a new browser that makes true native web apps possible
with a one-click install to indicate trust.

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.

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.

~~~
matthewtoast
Are you aware of any existing, serious effort to build such a thing?

I love the idea - and it strongly appeals to me as a developer - but what
would make the average user switch to it?

~~~
jorangreef
Developers would drive adoption. I think adoption of new browsers has usually
been driven by developers.

------
indus
This para from their home page could be akin to legalizing marijuana!

 _" 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."_

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Sounds more like substituting "clean" methadone in place of heroin.

