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I'm excited for ladybird to reach alpha

It's okay, soon everybody will switch to their own vibe-coded browsers, right?

(https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender this looks so dead...)

Main reason I keep using Brave is its "good enfough."

The CTO at my company recommended Brave in 2019; I figured why not and have found a compelling reason to change.

The "elephant in the room" paragraph actually is making me consider Vivaldi. Its still Chromium, so it will support all my plugins, and I use NextDNS so most of ads will be blocked anyway. And its not like its amazing, but I've just never heard anyone rave of a browser that was particularly efficent either.

> A browser built on the Chromium project is riding on top of that elephant trying to tell it where to go.

You can give away all the insanely expensive base software to build a browser and you'll still get blamed for not encouraging enough competition.

It may be YACB, but that is precisely why it works for the author. Chromium browsers have the best compatibility because that is what is tested for. If it were any other way, then this post wouldn't exist.

I'd assume that isn't the elephant in the room since Vivaldi is also YACB

Not agreeing with Eich, but it's interesting that he is the one who gets so much hate for Prop 8, being kicked out of Mozilla for it, even though it passed in California with 7 million votes.

Just as a counterpoint, I switched to Brave because Firefox no longer holds the technical or moral high ground. Brave is an open-source browser which makes it different from Chrome and Vivaldi. Brave is a privacy-focused browser. Brave is the only browser that is open source and also lets me pay for it so I can have a clean, uncluttered, fast experience. Brave is the only chromium-based browser that I'm aware of that continues to support Manifest V2 for UBlock Origin, which is critical for my use case.

Mozilla has been distracted by a million shiny things around them. They've been mismanaged almost criminally and they have changed their terms of service to be much less privacy-oriented than they used to be.

In my humble opinion, Brave gets far too much hate on this site and is actually the best browser made today in terms of open source availability, a focus on privacy and empowerment of the end user, while maximizing site compatibility.

Right, I felt the same thing. Switching to Brave because Firefox "isn't ethical enough" is like switching to McDonald's because the farmer's market produce isn't organic enough.

I'd like to switch friends and family over to brave, but trying to avoid ads that might confuse them was kind of the point...so....

Is there something in Firefox's license that prevents forking? Why does it seems like all of these browser are always Chromium forks and we never see Firefox forks go mainstream?

> using yet another Chromium based browser doesn't really improve the current situation with Google's browser monopoly

It's not a monopoly if you can build your own with it. This is like saying glibc is a monopoly.

Billions of people use non-Google web browsers every day. Monopoly does not mean "company or product I don't like".

>but using yet another Chromium based browser doesn't really improve the current situation with Google's browser monopoly.

Not everyone wants to be a martyr/activist to change their habits and experience in order to support a political cause they don't really understand.

Most people just want the best, frictionless and most familiar experience to the product they already know and love, which often means a slick and shiny product from a monopolistic anti-consumer company.

It's open-source so you can just compile it yourself.

Is it just me that think injecting affiliate is fair game? I hate with a passion all the sponsor segments everyone has now, grifting for something they pretend to use. I find it better if that affiliate money goes to a product i actually use and makes my life better. Brave origin is that, it solved my issue i had with regular brave. And i tried firefoz based browser but they are not up to par, they work for basic browsing, but struggle with video playback of jellyfin, some dont even have option to use mt own serxng service as search engine

> I LOVED Arc.

I assume you've heard of it, but just in case you haven't: you should try Zen! It's basically Arc, but based on Firefox, open source and, more importantly, actively maintained.

https://zen-browser.app

Agreed. I went from 20+ years of Firefox (back to the earliest days with the .zip files and just dumping binaries into a folder) to Brave a couple years ago.

I'm the same way. Turn off crypto by default (is it these days?) and that's pretty much it.

I like how they host selected Manifest v2 extensions themselves so uBlock Origin latest continues to work and is actively maintained.

Speed of Chromium with privacy focus. Works for me.

> Firefox always felt slower to me

Since Google has proven willing to stoop to bad behavior to lend Chromium the impression of superior performance[0] I don't consider subjective performance to be a meaningful benchmark.

As metrics go, I am more concerned with "demonstrable respect for user-agency", a competition in which a browser from the world's largest advertising conglomerate is forbidden entry.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/why-google-took-year...

Arc is still usable and gets chromium updates. It's still my daily driver since as you said, it's great.

Edit: I also use it as my mobile browser. I really don't see any problems on their mobile app (iOS)

See also Brave Origin: https://brave.com/origin/

The LibreWolf browser, and if need be the IronFox browser for Android, should have been installed and analyzed in parallel with Brave by the OP, then I'd accept that a proper analysis was begun.

I am not trying to spread FUD, but at the edge of my consciousness, I remember privacyguides getting some flak for some reason. Looking it up now, there's a lot of posts on reddit accusing them of putting affiliates on the site instead of actual private software.

Looking at it briefly, their software choices seem mostly sane to me. Not a lot of FOSS, but a lot of non-technical people don't know how to setup FOSS to begin with. Can't really get mad at a site recommending Signal and Syncthing and local LLMs.

I haven't seen privacyguides mentioned since being on HN, and I trust this site more than others. What are people's opinions on it?

In my case, I find it doesn't matter to me or, often, anyone I know. So the conclusion becomes I don't care and my only concern is if it is useful to me.

It's also why I avoid almost all social platforms and, if I land on one accidentally, I look at headlines alone--rarely the comments.

Oh! Damn it!

> a 2008 donation of $1,000 to California Proposition 8

The woke/cancel culture crowd (none of whom knew him personally) went after him with a vengeance in 2014, but there were LGBT and LGBT-allied co-workers of his at the time who were aghast at the outrage. Here are three examples I could find online just now [0][1][2]

[0] https://subfictional.com/on-brendan-eich-as-ceo-of-mozilla/

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150202162458/http://words.tofu...

[2] https://medium.com/@__davidflanagan/for-the-record-7645a4bf8...

Tbf opposing gay marriage is quite an extreme opinion in much of the developed world. I suspect Eich's position on the matter is tied to his Roman Catholic faith, so although he showed a certain level of remorse in 2014, he never actually came out in support of gay marriage. He then later spread misinformation about mask-wearing during COVID, including suggestions that people could die from wearing a mask.

Do moralities expire like tomatoes left on the counter?

Same way Muslim or russian immigrants integrate. By forcing their opinion on everybody else.

I once mildly defended Eich on HN, and he replied and asked me not to. I hope he won't mind if I just say that my view of him is more in line with those of his old Firefox coworkers who personally worked with him.

>You can say that you like his work without having to have endless caveats about how you don't agree with a political position he took twenty years ago that *even he no longer believes*.

Not according to the public record.

You might like Brave Origin then. If hidable crypto integration is what keeps Brave free, I am personally content with it.

i used edge on windows since it become chromium, but i moved to linux a year ago and edge barely works there. So, i looked around and eventually settled on Vivaldi. It has some annoying quirks, but overall it suits my needs quite nicely. And I like their general ethos more than the rest (that I'm aware of). I use it now exclusively on android and linux.

Adblocking is pretty poor in Vivaldi. I'm planning to migrate away as a result. Only thing that would keep me is if they adopted Brave's adblocker, which actually works.

I gave Vivaldi a few chances and its UI was always slow and clunky. It also had a sea of settings that were by default opinionated in a bad way.

I absolutely love vivaldi and switched a few years ago, probably 2 years ago, so I've used it enough to really know it's for me today and not 2 months then gone back to chrome after problems. I had major annoyances with its default settings (omnibars mostly) and it throws opinionated stuff at you but its customizability is incredible and once I fixed the omnibars annoying default search settings I was good. It defaults to any typos or wrong domain names taking you to startpage searches and its frustrating for new users but you can turn it off.

Drag and drop tiling into the same window instead of having to create a new window sold me a long time ago but I also have tons of other customizations. But then you have the vivaldism where I can't open a new window and drag a link into it because because the start page captures that as a page add. It has some hiccups but in general I love it.

As an example instead of ctrl+n'ing 4 windows side by side and having to add all the additional window padding a new browser window vs tab has, you can sit on amazon or whatever retailer and price compare 4 tabs right next to each other in the same window and there is almost no padding taking up room, etc. It's very clean, you just drag a product tab into the same window and it pops into it as a tiled page that you control separately, and its marked with a highlight. You can tread the tiled page as a new tab, but its much smaller and you have to click it inside of the tab, so it's not something you're going to drive all day long. I'll put 4 products next to each other, read about them then close it or use that tab as my research tab.

Built-in full page screenshotting/exporting way better than Chrome. I haven't used the mail. The sidebar takes getting used to, I use that as a favorite bookmarks bar and look at downloads in it and RSS feeds. Built in vertical tabs I never look at that. Its sync is much better than it was a year ago, I've had no problems, it's not google chrome sync but you just throw a code onto both ends, my android vivaldi doesn't have extensions unfortunately.

It has an insane amount of settings that I spent a few days tweaking and sync between everything, and now I never touch that menu it's frightful. Sometimes I have to edit my right click context menu because Vivaldi decided to move a button under something (hello, close all tabs to the right). But you CAN do it vs other browsers that don't have full UX control and I'm now stuck with Googles (maybe) decision to hide my right-click close tab button under a 2nd dropdown.

It's been basically a chrome experience in that I don't get errors and ever have to use chrome or safari/bingthing basically ever.

I was always a heavy chromium extension user and customizer, never clicked with opera and firefox runs me off by some business decision every few years, burnt me migrating profiles, etc. I may have to hop off the chrome train completely though.

Whatever I pick next will feel ancient without vivaldis drag and drop tab system.

I haven't yet but eventually I'll happily donate $20 to the project. It's the first time I've felt in years like a browser was actually doing something new.

https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/tab-tiling/

>Brave Experimental Adblock rules for blocking twitch.tv ads

Those work now? That's impressive. I used to VPN to some east European country after I couldn't get adblock working.

Maybe they meant to link to the element where it says the guy invented Javascript. That would have been more appropriate.

"having political views" is not an escape hatch for denying the humanity of other people.

Someone who derides someone else who donates to causes they find disgusting is also a political view. You're just talking about two people with political views.

I will help the creation of and donate to an anti-maga bill that bans magas from existing eg jailing them if they express maga views. Its called having political views. I hope you won't complaint.

They are an absolute scumbag. It's really simple: in matters where doing the right thing is doing nothing, it means that you went out of your way to be evil. There's not even a self-interest vs. public benefit argument to be made in defense of prop 8: No one gained anything from banning gay marriage. No, the sole reason to vote for prop 8 was "I want to make people I find weird's lives worse". And that's scumbag behavior.

If your political views are "lets abuse a minority because I find them weird", those aren't merely political views.

Yeah — but JavaScript... :D

Having the opinion that there should be restaurants, stores, and bathrooms only for white people was an acceptable, mainstream political view during my father's lifetime. Expressing that opinion now would make you a social pariah. If you donated money in support of that cause today you'd probably be fair game for being openly called an "absolute scumbag" almost universally.

How that analogy compares to being against same-sex marriage is going to vary from person to person, but times change, as does what is considered just political views vs a civil rights issue.