Brave Passes 10M Monthly Active Users, Sees 19% Growth Since 1.0 Launch

by yarapavan • 7 years ago

384 224 7 years ago

petre• 7 years ago

I use it currently but do not care about rewards and other nonsense features, just about ads getting blocked.

MrZander• 7 years ago

Same, I couldn't get used to Firefox, it just felt too slow, even the new version. Brave feels just like Chrome, but with less Google. I love it.

techntoke3• 7 years ago

That is why I use Chromium. There is a lot you can configure with Chrome policies as well.

qxnqd3• 7 years ago

Same. For me it combines the best of Chrome (speed) with the best of Firefox (privacy). In fact I'd argue it's like having "privacy.resistfingerprinting" on, but without as many sites breaking.

thrwn_frthr_awy5• 7 years ago

This was the weirdest part of my experience trying Brave–it doesn't block all ads. So for me moving from Firefox to Brave presented more ads to me. I couldn't find any documentation on how to actually block all ads similar to uBlock Origin.

fastball4• 7 years ago

I can't think of any ads that Brave hasn't blocked for me.

In fact, more often than not the issue is that Brave is blocking too much and breaks some sites. Ironically, this includes the identity verification service (Netverify) used by their wallet partner (Uphold).

babuskov• 7 years ago

To counter all those throwaway accounts created to praise Brave, I have to say that I have no intention to use it because it's based on Chromium. Single-culture is bad even if your intentions are good. I never used Chrome either and have lived through ups and downs of Mozilla since 2002 when I ditched IE6.

I wish Firefox tech was easier to integrate into other browsers, so that we could have a more balanced ecosystem.

alwillis6• 7 years ago

When the SDK is released [1], there's no reason why a plugin to support BAT couldn't be implemented.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/braves-privacy-focused-ads-to-spre...

adtac• 7 years ago

I don't want to accuse anyone of astroturfing, but the comments in this thread seem to be eerily positive and very marketing-y. Maybe it's my skepticism of everything crypto-related being incredibly biased one way or another.

StillBored• 7 years ago

For whatever reason firefox seems to actively sabotage any attempts to reuse their technology. The one area where people were reusing it, mozjs has been nothing but heartaches for everyone involved because they literally break part of their API's with every release. Back a couple years ago they changed the library bindings from C to C++ basically forcing all their users to write their own shims even if they were C based projects.

This is likely a large part of why they are losing, I remember showing people how it was possible to create a web browser with a couple clicks and a line or three of code using the IE activeX component in delphi around ~2000. Back then it was possible to do similar things with KHTML.

So instead of a nicely structured project its got layers of crap, even in the build system where you have to dig through python wrappers around automake, etc just to figure out simple things where some options are in one place and others are in another depending on whether they bothered to convert one part of the project or not.

buboard21• 7 years ago

i checked some of the accounts - they don't seem throwaway.

it might be that some people are excited that somebody is trying something different on the web

napoleoncomplex• 7 years ago

Any details from verified creators or Brave directly regarding revenue? Even if it's tiny right now, it would be great to hear some data from anyone giving it a real go.

SlowRobotAhead• 7 years ago

They did an AMA recently on Reddit where they go into the payment positives in detail, of course they skipped the negatives like they are playing ads on your desktop outside of the page.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/7l4033/transcri...

fastball4• 7 years ago

You can opt out of the notification ads.

_bxg14• 7 years ago

Yeah, last time I tried to switch to Brave the desktop ads really skeeved me out. It's a shame. They should know that their target segment of users would be particularly offended by those.

Deimorz2• 7 years ago

I have it set up on Tildes (https://tildes.net) so that I can receive BAT from Brave users, but haven't really put any particular emphasis on it.

So far the site's account has a balance of 258 BAT, which should be worth about $50 USD right now. The "Brave Creators" interface is so bare-bones that I can't figure out what kind of rate that's come in at though. It says that 60.50 of it is from the "Current Period", but I don't know what that means.

Trying to set up the process to actually be able to withdraw the BAT has been annoying and has gotten hung up at multiple points with no indication of how long it'll take until it moves forward. At this point I don't even really think of it as money that I have, because I have no idea how many more steps I need to go through to be able to convert it to actual money, what that process will involve, or how many more fees will be taken on the way.

prophesi2• 7 years ago

Did you set up an Uphold account and link your Brave wallet to it? That should pretty much be the end of it; should be straightforward from there to send/exchange the BAT elsewhere.

As your browser receives BAT on the 5th of every month, I think that's also when your Creator account receive tips, but I haven't confirmed that. The UI really is bare-bones and my site doesn't receive enough traffic to speculate further.

sam0x173• 7 years ago

For me so far one month = $2.24 based on current BAT value. There are people making more than me who spend more time on the web.

alwillis6• 7 years ago

"Making side money as a content creator with Brave & Basic Attention Token has made me more in a month than any ads or Youtube paid me out in several years. Thank you BAT !"--https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/e532bs/making_s...

karpathy2• 7 years ago

As one datapoint over last ~3 weeks or so I've accumulated 20ish BAT (~$5) from a combination of 1) ads shown to me, 2) tips from people to my twitter, 3) automatic monthly contributions from other users, presumably based on them spending time on the pages I've registered for rewards. In turn my auto-contribute settings (left at defaults) are to distribute up to 20BAT/month on sites I visit the most (e.g. DDG, HN, Github, Twitter, ...), which will happen automatically on Dec 15.

Agree with some of the other users that the tooling around the rewards is still a bit hard to navigate. There's the separate Uphold account, from which I seem to have to manually move BATs around to my browser wallet (?), I'm getting BATs from sources I don't fully understand, I don't think there is a page that just shows the timestamped deltas (debit/credit) etc.

antpls• 7 years ago

Excuse my ignorance, but why are you rewarding Github and Twitter, which have enterprise/private business models not entirely based on ads ?

buboard21• 7 years ago

just a couple of bucks. you can earn from both visitors and from referral link downloads. system is kind of fun and it incentivizes you to promote browser downloads

JohnTHaller• 7 years ago

From my previous: "We've still got BAT enabled on PortableApps.com with the standard custom Brave browser header and donation ask you setup via their program. We got 31.35 BAT (about $8.08) for around 2.7 million page views in the last month. We also got a single 0.95 BAT (about 24 cent) donation."

sirn• 7 years ago

I've started accepting BAT since January, and so far has received about ~35 BAT ($9.00) on my ~1 million pageview website. I have not done anything to promote Brave on the site (basically verify the website with Brave and that's it) so actually getting paid is quite surprising.

I'm using Firefox as my primary browser, though.

adamqureshi• 7 years ago

Tor browser works for me.

_bxg14• 7 years ago

I think Brave's potentially most important (and least certain) contribution to the world is its automatic micro-payments system. It's genuinely innovative and the only viable alternative that anyone has proposed to ads-based funding for smaller sites. It's also, by nature, incredibly hard to bootstrap. But I really hope it gets real traction and ends up standardized and/or copied by other browsers.

sp3322• 7 years ago

I mean to be fair, there were lots of other such micropayments systems. And some of them are even still running, with very low volume.

prophesi2• 7 years ago

What examples do you have? So far I can think of Steem coin and Dogecoin. The former has the vendor lock-in issue, and the latter has no standardized automation of tipping.

alwillis6• 7 years ago

Sure, but Brave and BAT are as painless as it gets:

• you get a grant of BAT to pay content creators on the web, YouTube, Twitter, etc. when you sign up

• Brave can (optionally) automatically allocates BAT to the content creators you visit the most based on the amount of time you spend on their sites

• you can opt-in if you wish to see ads related to things you're interested in and get paid in BAT

• for BAT you earn, you have the option to pay content creators or cashout to fiat (dollars, euros, yen, etc.)

Right now, Uphold is the gateway between earnings in BAT and fiat, but they're also working on integrating with Coinbase as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/cqjv7a/native_c...

manigandham3• 7 years ago

No it's not the first or only attempt at this. Time (or other metric) based funding of content has been tried several times. We spent 6-figures on experimenting ourselves with a autopayments browser extension.

The hard problem is getting people to actually pay in the first place, not how to divide up the money after. Since Brave is basically a higher-level ad network with a free browser, it's paying the users first and then taking it from them in a secondary loop. It's a combination of nice marketing and forceful control over typical ad experience.

_bxg14• 7 years ago

it's paying the users first

I didn't actually know about this mechanism. I thought users had to pay a monthly amount if they wanted to support the sites they visited. Adding another layer of ads on top is... interesting. But feels like it's just kicking the can down the road.

What I'd like to see is a mechanism similar to current paywalls but broken down into effortless micro-distributions the way Brave is. So a subset of sites would say "you can only browse our site if you're using a browser that will pay us and you're paying $10/month (total) which will be distributed amongst us based on what sites you visit and how often".

This would solve the main problem with paywalls, which is that literally nobody is willing to maintain dozens of separate subscriptions (both in terms of logistics and price) across all of the websites they read one article on each month. Apple News+ is trying a similar solution to this problem, but gated into their proprietary app. This could instead be a web standard that keeps people on the real web.

woodandsteel• 7 years ago

Yeah, lots of other groups have developed micropayment systems, but it looks like Brave might have finally figured out how to make it work on a large enough scale that it might improve the web.

I think that is partly because Brave has tied micropayments to something else people care about by putting their system in a privacy-oriented browser.

alwillis6• 7 years ago

it's paying the users first and then taking it from them in a secondary loop

I’m not sure what you mean… advertisers buy BAT to pay for ads and users get paid a percentage of the ad spend to view the ads if they wish.

Also, when Brave did the ICO for BAT, they raised $35 million in 30 seconds[1]. BAT's current market cap is over $265 million USD.[2]

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/35-million-30-seconds-token-sale-in...

[2] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/basic-attention-token/

noxer11• 7 years ago

IMO it misses the point. I don't want ads. Pay me for seeing ads may be better than just see ads but what I really want is no ads. For now I block them. This way I get to see nearly no ads. I can't get my head around why I would let some ads trough to earn some bucks. It totally missing the point.

What we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive without ad revenue. The internet must transit to a market where people pay for goods and services just like on literally every other market. There is money and goods/serviced and they get exchanged. That's how it should be. Now we have ads and a third-party in between which severs itself plus another party the advertisers. Brave removes the third-party (kinda) but leaves the advertiser in the game. Why? No one needs them to be part of a goods/service <> money exchange.

There is an open W3C standard that can be used for micro-payments it's called ILP. Not bound to a currency. No token. No scaling problems because it tires to run everything "on the blockchain". It's just a protocol it can be used with any token or currency.And Payment providers must compete against each-other just like it should be in a healthy economy. (At time of writing there seem to be only one payment provider (Coil.com) but that's just because someone has to start.)

buboard21• 7 years ago

we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive

So, just buy more BAT and you dont need to see ads. other people may not be able to afford paying, so they 'll prefer to see ads

but leaves the advertiser in the game. Why?

The printing press, radio and TV always had ads, why? becuase it's the most natural fit, and it allows them to have more / better content. ad-supported content is not going away. A world with more options is always better

_bxg14• 7 years ago

What we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive without ad revenue.

I think there's been some confusion (partly because of Brave's confusing marketing). I didn't even realize there was the pay-the-user-for-ads thing. I was only talking about the micro-payments from users to sites.

sjtindell• 7 years ago

Brave’s primary value add is literally paying content creators directly with no ads.

grok2• 7 years ago

What we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive without ad revenue.

The browser does have that feature -- you can sign up to pay content creators while not signing up for the ads.

While I do understand the problem with privacy/tracking, I don't understand the visceral dislike of ads. Ads allow for this fantastic thing that is the WWW where so many nice and useful content and services is available for free to most users who will not really shell out money for things they weren't looking for in the first place -- all financed by the companies that can afford to pay for the ads.

With Brave's ads, it sort of seems like you don't give up much in terms of privacy and tracking -- though yeah it's the start of a slippery slope, but hopefully down the road, if they sell their soul and do more tracking, there will be someone else who'll then provide a "free" service that does less tracking :-).

nostrademons2• 7 years ago

So turn off ads. The whole point of a market is that people who don't think whatever you're doing is worth the price you're getting don't have to do it, while those who think that it is worth it get the rewards. By turning off ads you're raising the market price of BAT ever so slightly so that those of us who don't mind the ads get paid more for it.

thescriptkiddie• 7 years ago

The feature where you get paid to see ads is a side feature. It wasn't in the initial release, and it is opt-in. The main purpose of the BAT token is to be like Flattr or Cointip, but for the whole internet.

wutbrodo2• 7 years ago

IMO it misses the point. I don't want ads.

It's "missing the point" because it doesn't fit your personal preferences precisely? There are plenty of people who don't care at all about ads, and there's a full spectrum of attitudes in between them and the hard no-ads position. Brave is targeting people within that spectrum.

woah• 7 years ago

They really messed up by having the thing where they can pay you to watch ads. Everyone seems to think that’s all it is.

TulliusCicero• 7 years ago

The internet must transit to a market where people pay for goods and services just like on literally every other market. There is money and goods/serviced and they get exchanged. That's how it should be.

While I don't think simple flat payments for services and goods is wrong, it's worth noting that it's more regressive than ad-based services: the value of ad impressions is proportional to discretionary income, whereas a flat $10/month is proportionally more for a poor household than a rich one.

Like, try asking poor households whether they'd rather pay $5 or $10/month for various internet services vs seeing the ads they get now, and we both know which option most would choose, for very sensible reasons.

naasking• 7 years ago

I can't get my head around why I would let some ads trough to earn some bucks. It totally missing the point.

The point is so you and everyone else can continue to enjoy free content.

What we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive without ad revenue.

Brave solves this as well. You can buy BAT instead of earning it by allowing ads. BAT is distributed to content creators with ads on or off.

stjohnswarts2• 7 years ago

I don't mind ads but I don't want the tracking. Just throw up some generic ads based on the site. Sorry I want my privacy big corps or I'll continue to block everything.

buboard21• 7 years ago

if this kind of model works, the biggest contribution will be security. potentially , cross-site scripting could be disabled altogether if it is no longer needed to fund the web

BlueTemplar7• 7 years ago

What is not viable about Flattr ? (2.0, 1.0 admittedly required quite a bit of effort for website owners to set up...)

marknadal• 7 years ago

You might be interested in an alternative we propose called Freeism, it inverts the traditional economic model:

https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd7...

The gist is that it redefines wealth from "how much people hoard" to "how much people give".

Would enable an ad-free web.

tomaszs• 7 years ago

Brave will be the next browser. No doubt about it. It is made by a genius.

baal80spam• 7 years ago

I hope you are correct as it deserves to be.

ganstyles• 7 years ago

I've been using it for a bit and really enjoying it. Mobile version anyways. Only downside is it doesn't seem to be able to autofill all my information for forms, so I switch back to chrome when I'm making a purchase on my phone or something like that.

Elof2• 7 years ago

I exported all of my chrome settings and loaded them into brave. Easy to do and all my things are working as expected.

buboard21• 7 years ago

oh cool. last version i checked i could not import my passwords

sam0x173• 7 years ago

Been using it for a month. Have made a little over $2. Loving the BAT stuff.

Also loving profile switching which for some reason I never used in Chrome but now use in brave like mad because I have several clients with separate gsuite / google cloud platform environments.

degenerate• 7 years ago

Does profile switching work similar to Firefox's Multi-Account Containers?

Or can you only be "viewing" one profile at a time?

erredois• 7 years ago

On Firefox you can have multiple containers on a single window. On brave each profile has its own window.

aloukissas• 7 years ago

Brave is the best thing to have happened on the web for a long time. I've used it since it was in early beta, really happy how far along it's gone.

buboard21• 7 years ago

pity that firefox is not innovating as much

noxer11• 7 years ago

They teamed up with Coil which sets on an open standard named ILP. We don't need more walled gardening. All relevant Browsers support it alredy. W3C is behind ILP. Doesn't need it's own Token. Supports Fiat an Crypto.

buboard21• 7 years ago

oh cool. when should we expect to see it in firefox?

iudqnolq2• 7 years ago

Most major browsers support the Web Payments Api, but Firefox still has it behind a feature flag [caniuse]. The Web Payments API does not enable micropayments by usage. The W3C is absolutely not (yet) behind Interledger Payments (ILP), Coil's proposed spec. You can determine this from the fact the unofficial draft spec has giant red watermarks saying "UNOFFICIAL DRAFT", and the following disclaimer:

This document is draft of a potential specification. It has no official standing of any kind and does not represent the support or consensus of any standards organization. [draft_spec]

It is being discussed on the W3C's Web Incubator forum, which is promising but not an endorsement by the W3C [wicg].

The Firefox addon, which acts as a shim until they can get native support in Firefox, may well be in partnership with Mozilla (I couldn't find anything about it), but the partnership would most likely be in very early stages. When I click on the link you shared to Mozilla addons I get the warning:

"This is not a Recommended Extension. Make sure you trust it before installing."

It has around 350 users, which includes people who installed the add-on but didn't setup payment.

In summary, the tech is promising but browser support is a long ways down the road.

[caniuse]: https://caniuse.com/#feat=payment-request

[draft_spec]: https://webmonetization.org/specification.html

[wicg]: https://discourse.wicg.io/t/proposal-web-monetization-a-new-...

Etheryte• 7 years ago

Given there's very clear monetary incentive for the company to hype their own product, and that these stats can't be externally verified [1], this is essentially just snake oil. Personally, if anything, I find the constant forced hype across media and social media to be a red flag. If your product was really both good and honest, you wouldn't need to try to force it down people's throats.

[1] https://community.brave.com/t/why-doesnt-brave-market-share-...

icandoit• 7 years ago

If your product was really both good and honest, you wouldn't need to try to force it down people's throats.

You do if bad products are spending more ad dollars than you. Being good isn't enough to capture the market.

jjeaff3• 7 years ago

You could say this about almost every product out there. How is brave any different?

wiggler00m• 7 years ago

(good + hype) > good

seibelj• 7 years ago

This is the most unintentionally hilarious comment ever posted on HN. “Any good product would never need to post about themselves.” Welcome to tech startups? I guess?

pcdoodle• 7 years ago

It's a great browser, I love that tor is integrated and 1 click away.

etaioinshrdlu• 7 years ago

It would be cool to use https://www.orchid.com/ (when it's ready) with the Brave browser. Tokens all the way down!

dross• 7 years ago

I installed it on my personal laptop due to constant crashes with chrome that debug logging didn't help to solve. Brave suffered similarly so I stuck with Chrome. I do extension development so when I saw that they used the same store I was pleasantly surprised. I couldn't test my extension behaviour though, because the app it enhances was having issues.

I'll give it a go on the PC I'm using for work(family) until I upgrade. Free BAT!

jayess3• 7 years ago

I recently switched to an iPhone from android. Brave seems like the only browser that allows me to block ads without some sort of external plug-in app. I miss having ublock on iOS. But brave seems to do the trick for me and its place.

nashashmi• 7 years ago

Braves filter is much more granularized. Cookies get blocked. Specific scripts get blocked. I love it.

But it's webkit and I like Firefox.

jayess3• 7 years ago

Same here. I'd love ad blocking on firefox in ios but it doesn't seem to be an option.

rhexs• 7 years ago

Only reason I haven't switched to brave on iOS (for that free ad cash) is that using the back gesture seems to always reload the previous page, whereas I don't think that occurs in Safari.

I suppose the other reason is that it's mostly the same thing due to iOS restrictions, but I do like Brave.

jayess3• 7 years ago

HN has become a bizzaroland where I get downvoted for voicing support for an app.

randie63• 7 years ago

You have to try Kiwi Browser. It has build in ad blocker (need to be enabled in settings first) and a real dark mode for websites. And bottom UI.

iteratorloopmap• 7 years ago

Not even open source. But it tries to mislead people into thinking it is open source.

Stay away from it.

hellofunk• 7 years ago

I wish it was easier to get a constant sync between devices for bookmarks, but other than that, happy user here.

swozey• 7 years ago

Yeah, I enjoy using it but I use 4 different devices throughout the day and not having sync and the clunkiness of its sync (sometimes it doesnt work at all for me on my home network between desktop/laptop) actually pushed me back over to Firefox yesterday when I got a new laptop.

I also finally got sick of the ads popping up as system notifications, which are far more distracting to me than regular ads, so I disabled that.

erentz• 7 years ago

One of the serious criticisms against Brave was that they were collecting payments for sites and creators that had not signed up and who did not want to sign up. That is they were charging for other people’s content, that they don’t own, under the guise that the money went to those creators when it didn’t and wouldn’t. Seemed a pretty serious criticism to me. Has this changed?

rauchp• 7 years ago

I've heard that as well, but haven't heard Brave's side of it.

Not defending it in anyway. but strategically I feel like Brave should take the money, and just email the creator every 3 months saying you have X amount of money you can claim. Of course, if Brave is just profiting this money that's pretty shitty.

jjeaff3• 7 years ago

Even if they do that, it isn't right. They are removing ads and thus revenue from content creators. They have no right to do that and then skim some profit before paying out. And even if they did, they have no way of knowing if what they are paying is more or less than what the creator would have gotten had their content not been modified.

bdibs• 7 years ago

From their FAQ:

"Publishers must verify ownership of their properties with Brave in order to receive contributions from Brave users. If a publisher has not verified ownership, then a user’s contributions will be held in reserve inside the browser for 90 days. The browser routinely updates an internal list of all verified publishers to determine whether a property can receive contributions. At the end of the 90 day period, any contributions marked for unverified publishers will be released back to the wallet. No funds leave the browser except to go to verified creators."

burtonator• 7 years ago

Seems more than fair to me if I understand correctly.

If you're not accepting money, you don't get to keep it but they give you a buffer of 90 days (which they didn't have to) and if the buffer is exceeded it goes back to the user wallet.

chance_state• 7 years ago

I think the answer is "not anymore" based on what's in their FAQ.

Publishers must verify ownership of their properties with Brave in order to receive contributions from Brave users. If a publisher has not verified ownership, then a user’s contributions will be held in reserve inside the browser for 90 days. The browser routinely updates an internal list of all verified publishers to determine whether a property can receive contributions. At the end of the 90 day period, any contributions marked for unverified publishers will be released back to the wallet. No funds leave the browser except to go to verified creators.
Previous versions of the Brave desktop browser worked differently. Until version 0.58.21, released on January 11, 2019, browsers with Brave Rewards enabled would contribute BAT to content creators whether or not they had verified. Brave would then hold contributed funds for those publishers in escrow until they’d verified.

https://brave.com/faq/

summerlight• 7 years ago

I also wonder about its legal consequences; If some creators decide to sue them for this issue then what would be the outcome? I don't think I am allowed to freely use some random contents without creator's explicit consent then give back some arbitrary amount of money in the current IP framework.

pushcx3• 7 years ago

It's changed, but apparently no one was punished for it, or even for the false claim that the funds were held "in escrow" when Brave was holding funds itself and eventually claiming them.

When someone commits fraud, gets caught, shows no contrition, and then takes a little step back so it's no longer obviously fraud, I think the emphasis in that sentence needs to be on "obviously", not "no longer". I wish they'd quit spoofing their User-Agent so it'd be possible to opt out of the new version of this scheme, but they'll only send an accurate header to sites that sign partnership agreements.

justsee2• 7 years ago

I followed that episode closely.

To claim it demonstrated intentional fraud rather than poor UX and rewards architecture in an early beta (which was immediately fixed) is simply not credible.

The only funds flowing through the system at that stage were from Brave's own marketing budget through the form of user grants.

The concerns were about theoretical, future issues if Brave ever broke out as a mainstream browser and rewards / payment solution.

Even now, a year after the issue was fixed, it remains to be seen whether Brave's payment system draws in anything more than Brave's own distribution of tokens (through grants and ad rewards to users).

As an early adopter I'm aware of honest, thoughtful criticisms (browser monoculture with Chromium) and... this is not one of them.

fuu_dev6• 7 years ago

There where actually 2 critiques and their practice would count as fraud in a lot of countries.

#1 Money was re-distributed if donated and not claimed -> its not frozen infinite.

#2 There was no way to opt out -> its now opt in iirc

Besides that there are other critique points.

#1 Brave is controlling the add economy. They do this by blocking adds and offering their opt in add service(and gain 30% of the add revenue)

#2 Brave is using its own crypto currency to have full control over the money flow.

What additionally lowers their credibility is that they put false advertisement on their website.

This makes me wounder whats the incent to use brave.

buboard21• 7 years ago

This makes me wounder whats the incent to use brave.

with adblockers and google sucking more and more of the advertising pie websites are looking elsewhere for monetization

Karunamon3• 7 years ago

I don't quite follow #2. BAT is an ERC20 token like any other and can be quite easily transacted outisde of the browser and outside of Brave's control.

judge20203• 7 years ago

By the way, it's just "ad", short for advertisement.

cirno• 7 years ago

BAT was also known for becoming the primary funding mechanism for an infamous website dedicated to stalking and harassing autistic people.

This led to a lot of complaints sent to Brendan Eich and his employees, which they were understandably extremely upset about, but they did eventually drop support for said website.

It does raise an interesting point, though: at what point does BAT funding cross an ethical line? One can imagine even worse things than stalking being funded if there are no checks. But then defunding anything can be seen as a violation of free speech.

wutbrodo2• 7 years ago

Is this any different from ad-funding, and the processes they have in place for approving/rejecting pubs? There's a spectrum between privacy and control over consensual (legal) transactions, but it has nothing to do with Brave.

etxm2• 7 years ago

Does anyone know if the mobile version is a wrapper around safari?

gilrain• 7 years ago

Yes, because that is the only possibility.

BlueTemplar7• 7 years ago

On iOS, you mean?

sneak• 7 years ago

Safari is not WebKit.

etxm2• 7 years ago

Sorry, meant WebKit on iOS.

robsinatra• 7 years ago

That is bullshit. Unless a trusted third party verifies this claim, it must be considered marketing lies and manipulation to encourage bandwagoning.

aclelland• 7 years ago

I've looked at verify a site that I control through Brave to start earning some BAT tokens but I'm really not to keen to have to also give PII (government photo and a selfie) to their only payment processor Upstart.

I'm not familiar at all with this company and I'd really rather not go giving them data just to earn revenue on my site that Brave has taken away by blocking ads.

Could someone who's more familiar with Upstart assuage my concerns? Are they legit, have they got a good track record?

buboard21• 7 years ago

all crypto exchanges require such documentation, or worse. you can keep the BAT there or perhaps transfer it to another exchange to exchange for another crypto. but always, regulatiosn and stuff

dessant2• 7 years ago

They require PII because they can, not because they are legally required. To accept cryptocurrencies and allow people to withdraw them into a wallet, you do not need to verify their identity, unless the tokens are exchanged to fiat on the platform.

There are companies that are more established and popular than Brave which do not ask you to hold your ID next to your face and take a selfie in order to withdraw donations to a cryptocurrency wallet.

kentf• 7 years ago

Would be curious on how much their Joe Rogan is responsible for their Q4 spike.

buboard21• 7 years ago

he s advertising brave?

Angeo34• 7 years ago

So many fake accounts here just wow. HN should genuinely ban Brave posts

netfl0• 7 years ago

How are you determining this?

caiocaiocaio• 7 years ago

Remember how there used to be pro-gay fried chicken and anti-gay fried chicken? Now we've got an anti-gay web browser. Amazing how the market provides. What's next? An anti-Jew web browser? An anti-black web browser? The only thing I can say for sure is that the next radicalized web browser will also feature blockchain.

procinct• 7 years ago

Am I missing something? Why is Brave considered anti gay?

distances3• 7 years ago

Because Brave's CEO is Brendan Eich.

Fair or not, this is exactly what I think every time I read about Brave, and truth be told, also the reason I haven't tried it out.

jwegan• 7 years ago

The reason some people label Brave as anti-gay is due to Brave's CEO and Founder Brendan Eich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich

On March 24, 2014, Eich was promoted to CEO of Mozilla Corporation. Some employees of Mozilla Foundation tweeted calls for his resignation, with reference to his donation of $1,000 to California Proposition 8, which called for the banning of same-sex marriage in California. Eich stood by his decision to fund the campaign, but wrote on his blog that he was sorry for “causing pain” and pledged to promote equality at Mozilla. Some of the activists created an online campaign against Eich, with online dating site OkCupid automatically displaying a message to Firefox users with information about Eich's donation, and suggesting that users switch to a different browser (although giving them a link to continue with Firefox). Others at the Mozilla Corporation spoke out on their blogs in his favor. Board members wanted him to stay in the company in a different role. On April 3, 2014, Eich resigned as CEO and left Mozilla; in his personal blog, he posted, "under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader".

awgneo• 7 years ago

This is my absolute concern with Brave as well and why I do not trust this browser and its advertising model in the slightest.

dang• 7 years ago

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21528921

BlueTemplar7• 7 years ago

I might have been interested, but Chrome-based is out of the question, and I'd prefer to avoid any ties to advertising too - and it's not like other options aren't available...

1_player• 7 years ago

AFAIK it is based on Ungoogled Chromium

BlueTemplar7• 7 years ago

"Ungoogled Chromium" seems like an oxymoron ?

glofish• 7 years ago

Looks like it has a builtin Tor based browsing model. Not just private window (incognito) mode, but Tor based incognito in addition.

(been using it for an hour now, it is kind of neat)

feross• 7 years ago

Pro-tip: Brave has built in torrent support. You can visit any .torrent or magnet link and it will load up directly in the browser, no external program needed!

Click this link from Brave: https://webtorrent.io/torrents/big-buck-bunny.torrent (Creative Commons licensed)

Disclaimer: I integrated my WebTorrent library into Brave. Sharing this tip because not enough people know about this feature!

mping• 7 years ago

Thanks for your work in webtorrent!

bufferoverflow• 7 years ago

Wow, that's nuts! I just pasted a magnet link into the address bar, and it started playing the movie.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:02cd53257b68fac90489850be10691df7c42e45a&dn=The+Terminator+%281984%29+1080p+BrRip+x264+-+YIFY&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexodus.desync.com%3A6969&ix=0

anaganisk• 7 years ago

As long as brave android and brave browser doesn't natively support YubiKey 2FA its a no no from me bruh.

im3w1l• 7 years ago

I recently wanted to play an online game, but hardware acceleration on Firefox on Linux doesn't work very well (Firefox on Windows is fine though - I've used the exact same hardware to play on Windows and it was butter-smooth), so I wanted to get a Chromium-based browser for that usecase. Ended up picking Brave, and it's worked well for that.

Still using Firefox as my daily driver.

anirudh24seven• 7 years ago

I have been using Brave on macOS for more than 3 years now. I used Brave on Android for a while and I am currently using Brave on iOS as my daily driver. I don't use their BAT system or anything associated with that. I like their default vanilla experience and the fact that I can install Chrome plugins on Brave. I still use uBlock origin on top of their default blockers. I use the built-in Tor experience time-to-time as well.

To me, Brave is what Firefox should have been. Good UI, good defaults, fast enough, support for Chrome plugins, etc. I am slightly concerned about their future direction though (if they enforce the BAT system down users' throats).

onyva• 7 years ago

Love the innocent “received very positive press reviews”

It remember being force to read about Brave in any article about the web, especially when the click bait title actually mentioned its competition.

Untrustworthy, and not just In their business model.

kylehotchkiss• 7 years ago

As part of the Brave 1.0 launch, Brave Rewards is now available on Brave for iOS, which contributed to the app’s 27% growth in the past month.

I'm a happy Brave user but the "Rewards" are a gimmick. I've made a dollar a month at best for clicking their amazon/intel/VPN ads. But the actual browser serves its purpose well as a well supported and actively developed de-Google'd chrome with pretty good ad blocker baked in.

Yuval_Halevi• 7 years ago

Brave is one of my favorite browsers (I'm using it right now) X5 better than Chrom x100 better than IE

throwaway_00072• 7 years ago

Wow. Actual user oriented and ground breaking innovations. This is the future. And it's beautiful. I'm impressed. Mozilla now looks like a dying swamp.

loh• 7 years ago

I've been using Brave for a while, maybe a couple of years. Its default ad blocking doesn't work 100% of the time, so I've installed uBlock Origin. I don't use the BAT functionality at all, but I think one of the main advantages to Brave (and likely any Chromium-based browser) is that you get all of the same fast, consistent rendering, plus all of the same Chrome extensions will work without any extra effort.

fouc• 7 years ago

Are there any sites that are only accessible with Brave?

Like a site that has popups with "You are unable to view content without Brave browser" ?

To make it work, brave would need to support something extra besides html/js that other browsers don't support.

CTOSian• 7 years ago

Interesting browser, but dear devs we are not in 90s -just a pc for net-browsing at home - and I am talking about the lack of sync of extensions/bookmarks.

Brave Passes 10M Monthly Active Users, Sees 19% Growth Since 1.0 Launch

Related Stories