LXer: Is Brave the new champion the open web needs?
 

Published at LXer:

On January 20, Andreas Gal, former CTO of Mozilla, the company behind the popular open source browser Mozilla Firefox, announced in a blog post that former Mozilla CEO and Javascript founder Brendan Eich had launched a browser called Brave. "Brendan is back to save the web," Andreas wrote, and I quickly went to the Brave GitHub repository and cloned the repository to build a binary from source so I could check out what Brave was all about.read more

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I don't feel like a champion of the 'open web' would just be a clever way to stick ads in the browser. I'm not sure I want my browser to know anything about who I want to see ads from or not.

My hair started to stand on end reading Eich's comments on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10938593 Specifically, the part about having to Buy Out of ads. If that's the web BE wants to save, I'm happy to watch it burn.

I'll supply the matches and gasoline! That is a frightening thread...

Buy-OUT of receiving ads... what a horrendous model!

Advertising is to my information and communication channels as noxious gas is to the air I breathe - literally. Unwanted, unwelcome, unnecessary, harmful and destructive to whatever mental task I am doing at the time they are delivered.

Those who want to push them into my field of view and auditory space in any and all contexts are demonstrating complete lack of respect for me, and I DO NOT acknowledge that they have any "right" to do so.

The shared internet is an information channel, NOT a marketplace that exists only for the benefit of vendors. If I want to buy or sell I'll go to the market. If I want to be entertained I'll go to the entertainment sector. If I want to communicate and exchange knowledge, no matter how trivial, I MUST be able to do that without onboxious intrusions into that activity space.

Buy-OUT my astro!

I didn't read the article, but isn't that what a lot of websites and Windows software have been doing for years? Including early versions of Opera?

In one sense it is, does that make it any less harmful?

But in another very important sense, no it is not the same because it moves the filter, and its costs, from their end to mine, thereby giving them the advantage, and giving me the bill... again.

You may argue that it has no effect on me unless I choose to use it, but such "innovations" certainly do affect us all. And usually that is the hidden object of these things - to affect a wider group, to expand their markets.

It moves the goal posts, changes the rules of the game and lowers the bar for "them" to extract profit from "us". It normalizes the very thing for which many of us have excluded certain products and venues from our own spheres, and raises the cost of excluding them.

And it might actually create a whole new way to profit from ad spam. Great, a new spam market! If you think that exploitation of easy profit from the new easy-pay-for-no-ads built-in browser mechanism would not release a tsunami of make-them-pay ad spam exploits, then you have not thought this through completely.

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These things fundamentally pervert human culture into a pay-for-nothing paradigm, as do many other present day mega exploits. This makes it even more convenient to pay for the absence of something. Followed to its inevitable conclusion the idea of the absence of something harmful replaces the concept of the presence of something beneficial as the goal, and we all descend into the next level of our dark age.