Maybe it's unfair, but I can't help but think of Brave as just a scheme to push their cryptocurrency. They're removing the website's ability to monetize and replacing it with their own system. That seems gross.
I use Brave and have never bought any cryptocurrency, nor do I intend to.
I think it will be a net positive if every targeted ad company stops using that model, so Brave shutting this down is a huge plus for me.
Note, I used a similar setup in chrome and Firefox that some might find gross as well as it removed the ability for websites to monetize me using ads or data from surveillance.
No, certainly not. I want an Internet with lots of business models including paywalls and large players, but also OSS, amateur bloggers, publicly funded sites, etc.
I remember an Internet back when there were only university sites and personal sites. It had a lot of flaws, but was better, I think than our situation where our data are sold and resold with no way of customer control.
You're not wrong about what it boils down to, but, I'm all for it. I didn't mind ads, generally, until I did. Until they started hijacking your browser, redirecting you, doing popups. Ad people have shown they cannot be trusted on the whole. What Brave seems to be doing is doing their own 'safe ads' system, and sharing the money. It will likely be less for the content creators, but as a 'at-my-wits-end-with-ads' Brave user, I just don't care.
If you look at the benchmark results, aggressively stripping ads and tracking can result in pages loading twice as fast and hours of extra battery life. I'm happy to pay money to view your website, but modern web ads are a ridiculous and punitive payment scheme.
What you're doing is the equivalent of walking into a store, picking up $100 of merchandise, slapping $10 on the counter and walking out because "I'm happy to buy your products, but your prices are ridiculous". It's not a very moral position to take.
gorhill makes a moral argument on the other side of yours [1]:
That said, it's important to note that using a blocker is NOT theft. Don't fall for this creepy idea. The ultimate logical consequence of blocking = theft is the criminalisation of the inalienable right to privacy.
Your analogy is flawed because it assumes the customer walking into the store retains their privacy and is not charged any hidden costs.
A more accurate example would be one in which the customer walks into a store that:
* data mines as much about that person as possible to profile them
* sells that data without consent to unvetted global buyers
* increases the risk that customer's devices are compromised (drive-by malware installs through ad placements on mainstream sites)
* charges them a hidden surprise fee (in the form of increased data usage, battery usage etc from poorly-designed ad systems).
Presenting naive analogies is harmful to our ability as a society to reason about the costs of systems like this.
I'd urge anyone to have a read and/or follow Ad Fraud Historian to understand how bad / harmful the existing ad-tech ecosystem is. [2]
It's truly awful, and anything that moves the internet away from this dystopian, incompetent and fraudulent monetisation approach to content is doing all of humanity a huge favor.
I'm much more sympathetic to the privacy point of view than the "pages loading twice as fast and hours of extra battery life" is my right so I'm going to remove your ability to make money so I can have your content faster.
The people most impacted aren't the entitled well-off first world citizens you allude to, but second and third world citizens and youth.
The rational choices of market participants do not remove the ability of sellers to sell, but they certainly do create more economic pressure for sellers to find and support better systems.
Also consider that the problem is not audiences vs publishers. It's corrupt middlemen harming audiences (privacy / malware / hidden costs) and defrauding publishers (fake traffic, bots, perverse incentives).
At this stage Brave's system of on-device ML in-browser for relevance and privacy, and opt-in ads seems a much better model, and I'm sure others will pop-up too.
We seem to be on the cusp of much better approaches to funding content, so it's really up to us to start advocating and supporting these new approaches.
Society has created legally enforceable ways to be compensated for copyrighted content. If you choose not to take advantage of those mechanisms, whose fault is that?
What you're describing is clear theft. Blocking ads is much grayer, since there's no real cost being charged by the site. I'd say it's closer as an analogy to say going to a store and using the bathroom but not buying anything.
I mean we would be paid for viewing ads this way instead of being paid nothing as it is now, and losing all our privacy instead.
Seems like a win/win to me. Advertisers would actually pay the eyeballs that should be paid for seeing ads instead of the middleman in the attention economy. The technology in the Basic Attention Token performs all the functions instead.
Maybe you will pay, but the market as a whole has been very clear here. Free wins. Personally I dont mind either. I'd prefer to see ads relevant to me rather within some limitations of privacy.
I feel government needs to set the limits here rather than expect business to self regulate. Nor will the market self regulate as this is more technical than most people are interested to understand, and back to free wins.
I seem to recall that the Safari content blocking API is like the proposed Chromium API, but that doesn't alarm people because
a) Apple is less of an ad company than Google, so less of a perceived conflict of interest
b) Google is perceived to break stuff that is already working
c) Safari/Webkit aren't dominant outside of iOS where they're mandatory
UI in javascript = still to this day it can take 2-3 seconds when opening new tabs or going fullscreen. Plus they released a statement about "observing" Google adblock decisions instead of going hard in with "we will not deprecate webrequest usability in our fork".
Does the webRequest API deprecation also impact Chromium, and therefore Brave as well? Brave seems like it's willing to backfill in changes to Chromium, but I'm wondering how this impacts the browser overall.
I use Brave as my daily driver (with Shields Up and uBlock Origin), but I'm not sure what the actual impact will be when it comes.
The only thing I'm missing on Firefox is when I am on my Macbook, is that fling when using my touchpad. It's essential to any MacOS app and it feels weird not to have it. I'm used to it on Linux and Windows though.
That's in macOS System Preferences. I use it all the time. Go to Trackpad / More Gestures and check "Swipe between pages". You can also control how many fingers you want to use. I set it to three fingers so that it doesn't conflict with horizontal scrolling.
Brave: https://brave.com/
Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/