Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive

by thek3nger • 2 years ago

136 122 2 years ago

donkeyboy• 2 years ago

Different topic, but can someone talk about which browser they use now? I’ve used Chrome for the past N years with ublock Origin, but recently I’ve been getting some ads on Youtube. Also some websites just didn’t work in Chrome. I switched to Brave a week ago and things seem ok, but it’s a weird browser with Tor built in, and also Spotify.com always crashes with a Memory problem. Does anyone have any thoughts on browser preference these days?

timeon• 2 years ago

Firefox is safe bet. But not sure why would Brave have special problem with Spotify, it is Chromium based.

web3-is-a-scam• 2 years ago

I’ve been using Firefox for nearly two decades and I’d be hard pressed to switch now. I’m practically married to it: through sickness and health.

ejb999• 2 years ago

I use brave exclusively for years - zero problems - seems faster to me than other options. Also use it with Spotify and can't remember ever having an issue (brave on mac if it makes a difference).

Yes it has Tor built-in, but you don't ever need to use it - it's just there in case you do (I have never needed it myself).

dwighttk• 2 years ago

I use Brave for YouTube and things that require Chrome and Safari for everything else. Oh… Firefox for when I want to load Facebook. Like once a quarter.

polyvisual• 2 years ago

Brave is great. I disabled all the web3 stuff and tidied up the homepage so it doesn't show me all the news etc.

The only issue I have is that the sync between my iphone, macbook, windows can sometimes get out of sync.

andyjohnson0• 2 years ago

I'm very happy with Firefox.

rplnt6• 2 years ago

I hated Firefox for the longest time, because it was a sub-par browser with a cult following, but since Chrome ruined any competition I went through several chrome-based browsers (never Chrome itself due to severe lack of basic functionality) and am slowly ending up with FF as my primary browser. My standards have lowered substantially, and firefox is just good enough. Always using more browsers and trying something on the side, but while there are some nice features to be found, there is always a major drawback. I had high hopes with Vivaldi, but it's a broken mess that I can't recommend.

malauxyeux• 2 years ago

Would you mind saying what you would like to do but can't with FF?

I don't think I'm part of a cult, but I've used FF as my default browser for over a decade and I guess I don't know what else people want from a browser.

GordonS• 2 years ago

Huh, I'm very happy with Firefox. Been using it, and Chrome, for several years now - I much prefer Firefox, but I'm kind of curious what you prefer about Chrome?

godelski4• 2 years ago

with a cult following

I guess I'm in this cult. But one of the big reasons is what else is fighting the chromium monopoly? Safari? Just imo there's not too big of differences between browsers and people just exaggerate these differences.

rekoil8• 2 years ago

Been using Brave since I think around 2019? Very happy with it, love the integration of IPFS, ENS, Unstoppable domains, and the removal of all the Google trash present in Chromium. Fully end-to-end encrypted sync as well. Don't use Tor much, but it's great that it's easily accessible if I need it.

alisonatwork• 2 years ago

Cromite[0] is the best on Android, it's a privacy-oriented open source patchset on top of Chromium.

Cromite has a desktop build, but it's a bit more experimental than the mobile build, so you can use Ungoogled Chromium[1] instead. Ungoogled is also a privacy-oriented open source patchset on top of Chromium. Check the beta flags to enable some more interesting features like getClientRect anti-fingerprinting measures (unfortunately breaks some React-based sites that go into infinite re-render loop).

Both of these browsers selectively include patches from Brave, but they are community-oriented builds so imo more trustworthy than Brave, which continues to package various shady anti-features and always will because it's backed by a for-profit company.

LibreWolf[2] is the nicest Firefox-based one for desktop, I think. It's pretty hardcore, though, I most only use it to visit mainstream social media sites.

I tried a bunch of the Firefox-based ones on mobile and none of them clicked for me. Cromite is just too slick on Android. Put the address bar at the bottom and off you go. Only downside is no online syncing of tabs and bookmarks, but meh. You can save all open tabs to bookmark bar in one hit then export your bookmarks, send the file through whatever E2EE channel you want to your other device, import and reopen them again.

[0] https://github.com/uazo/cromite

[1] https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

[2] https://librewolf.net/

Delumine• 2 years ago

I love edge, even before the AI stuff, it had a great feature set and less memory consumption than Chrome

Vinnl2• 2 years ago

If ads, in particular on YouTube, are the problem, anything Chromium-based is probably only going to get worse and worse (see [1] and [2]). So that basically leaves you with Firefox and Safari.

I work for Mozilla (speaking for myself, of course), so I'll leave you to guess which I'd recommend :P

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-oppos...

65• 2 years ago

I still use Chrome, mostly because I much prefer Chrome dev tools over any other dev tool options. And I have a bunch of custom browser extensions I've made for Chrome.

I haven't had issues with uBlock Origin - very occasionally an ad will seep through on YouTube, maybe once every 6 months, but when that happens I refresh the page and the ad is gone.

Safari is the new IE and Firefox I've always found to just be alright - for sure not as big of a fan of Firefox dev tools over Chrome dev tools. And Firefox scrolling behavior can be annoying.

alanjdev• 2 years ago

I use Safari for personal browsing, Firefox for work stuff (because my work machine is Windows). Firefox with uBlock Origin works quite well at keeping me mostly safe from ads.

bad_user• 2 years ago

I use Brave. It's a fine browser. The ad-blocking is almost on par with uBlock Origin. And I like its built-in Tor, BTW. I don't have any issues with Spotify.com, and it doesn't crash on me. I'm on a Macbook Pro M2 Max, and I also use it on a Galaxy S21U (Android).

I tried using Firefox on and off, but it's sadly technically inferior to Chromium, and that gap has gotten worse. It still has things that it does better than Chromium browsers, like history sync actually working, or reader view. But those are few and far between. And Multi-Account Containers, one of its apparent advantages, comes with the caveat that Firefox doesn't have usable profiles and the security for its extensions is worse (e.g., no click to activate, no ability to disable extensions in certain containers).

What finally pushed me to Chromium is the poor PWA support in Firefox. On Android, it has bugs that haven't been fixed for years (never mind the poor performance that's well known), and on desktop they've basically dropped the ball.

I use several PWAs. If it's a chat app, I use it as a PWA. Also Spotify, since you mentioned it ... as I like having better sandboxing and ad-blocking in my apps. On Android, too.

kbelder2• 2 years ago

I use Chrome for work on all my devices, and avoid any non-work browsing on it. It's an attempt to keep the two halves of my life apart.

For all personal browsing and projects, I generally used Firefox, but switched over a couple years ago to using Brave on the phone, and am kind of half-transitioned from Firefox to Brave on desktop. I've been a Firefox user forever, but it's slowly losing me.

shever73• 2 years ago

I've been using Brave for a few years now. It's speedy enough, and does a great job of blocking ads and trackers. I've never had issues with Spotify and I like the auto-dismissing of cookie banners too.

PKop• 2 years ago

Firefox on Linux because touch-pad gestures for forward and back navigation don't work on Chromium browsers and also Firefox gives me a nice vertical tab setup with Tab Center Reborn + custom userChrome.css

A tip I found recently in about:config

browser.compact.show=true to bring back the compact layout option, results in very good use of space on laptop along with vertical tabs and also Firefox allows the vertical tabs to be moved to right side which is nice.

godelski4• 2 years ago

Firefox

I know what you're gonna say, but forgetting everything else there's one important factor you should consider. Chrome has a (near) monopoly and resolving that monopoly requires using non-chromium browsers.

But on top of that, Firefox is fast, secure, has privacy in mind, and a rich set of add-ons. But most of that is true for any browser you pick. There really aren't big differences between browsers and often we're making mountains out of mole hills when we compare. But I'll say, firefox has ad-blocking on mobile (plugins on mobile, like 800 exist)

nyarlathotep_• 2 years ago

Brave or Firefox with UBO a few userscripts, and a lightly tweaked user.js/userChrome for nice-looking tree-style tabs, in no particular order.

Haven't had Chrome installed on any of my machines for ~5 years at this point.

Not the biggest fan of Brave (especially considering this latest AI crap, and all the weird crypto stuff), but I'm satisfied with it overall. FF still remains #1 in my eyes and usage, but has to be tweaked to my liking.

AzzyHN• 2 years ago

Firefox + uBo. TOR browser uses Firefox as a base for a reason, and uBo works best on Firefox

soundnote3• 2 years ago

Brave. I pretty much turn most things off and use it as a more private Chrome with vertical tabs.

_the_special_• 2 years ago

The first browser to index (locally preferably) my browsing history and help me extract/surface useful information from previous pages I have visited will win me over. So far they all seem to be offering the same kind of AI that will crawl the current page and extract information from it.

Sabinus• 2 years ago

If Firefox could sprint some good APIs in they could get some incredible plugins going.

vdaea• 2 years ago

I don't know much about the WebExtensions api but it's likely the apis are already there.

freediver• 2 years ago

How much would you be ready to pay for that?

rplnt6• 2 years ago

Fully local (or private cloud sync) I would go as high as $2 a month. Cloud based solution, which is the only solution I expect, not interested just yet.

(note: not OP)

davidy123• 2 years ago

$0, unless maybe someone finds a way to not pillage the data of the service and add a lot of actual value, and doesn't squat on this ultimately simple thing that should be a small piece of a much larger thing.

open source AI and browser/OS companies are going to provide an answer soon anyway.

Moldoteck2• 2 years ago

I guess this can be done with an extension that would work on all browsers. Like parse each page, save compressed text that supports fast decompressing (maybe even images), build tf/idf + cosine distance for verbantim searches & save in db and maybe add some ai to enhance the search. The next steps would be custom ai searches like "show me pages related to x", it'll quickly decompress the pages & apply the search for each but there are different approaches, like maybe saving history on a server and apply some ai model with huge context or do an initial filtering with tf/idf and apply ai after that.

swasheck• 2 years ago

i’d want a feature to only do this for pages i mark as interesting (so, a bookmarked page i guess). i may not care to recall the match summary of as milan vs napoli.

i have rafts of bookmarked pages, but i don’t know which of the 45 postgres-related pages contains a helpful sentence or phrase about indexing that i think i remember reading a few months ago.

castles• 2 years ago

I'm still working on RAG (been annoyingly ill last while) but you might find this interesting to keep an eye on: https://socontextual.com/

Ollama /JUST/ recently added some (fast) embeddings models: https://ollama.com/library/nomic-embed-text

tiltowait• 2 years ago

I swear, Safari used to have a feature like this back in version 4. You could search for text in your history, not just titles/URLs.

vouaobrasil• 2 years ago

In my opinion, the goal of increasing automation has gone from a useful relief of labor to an obsession that will lead nowhere. Globally, this seems to be reflected only by increasing resource use and increasing ignorance of the natural world by producing purely for the sake of making consumerism more efficient.

AI assistant in a browser...it's getting ridiculous.

rplnt6• 2 years ago

for the sake of making consumerism more efficient

If only. This wave of AI integrations is primarily focused on pleasing (potential) investors.

WillAdams• 2 years ago

You need customers who bring in money to please investors over the long-haul.

benreesman• 2 years ago

If only.

This wave of AI integrations is happening in a context/framework for normalizing naked avarice so that preposterous power can be concentrated in the hands of the rich and dubiously ethical.

Almondsetat• 2 years ago

You just assert that it is ridiculous without any motivations

realharo• 2 years ago

AI assistant in a browser makes sense if it's acting as an extension of your memory - for example you're browsing some items you're considering buying, and the assistant creates a summary spreadsheet with their comparison, that you can later look at, etc. Could be useful for things like real estate.

Most AI tools I've seen however can't seem to get away from the classic "prompt -> response" chat UI.

surajrmal• 2 years ago

Some ai features make a lot of sense. Automatically organizing tabs is amazing for helping me not get lost in a sea of tabs. Longer form auto complete saves me time, at least on mobile. I used to rely on Reddit comments to summarize trashy low quality articles to give me the primary points. Now that I've been reddit sober for a while, it's been helpful to have my browser do that summarization for me, helping me stay away from Reddit.

I can't say I will use every ai feature, but so far they've been helpful. I don't feel more ignorant. What I think makes people ignorant is outsourcing labor tasks like a cleaner for the home, a gardener for the yard, or handyman for basic repairs. I don't think those are necessarily wrong to outsource though.

123yawaworht4562• 2 years ago

there are several AI features I would absolutely love to see integrated into the browser, primarily, content filtering with my own custom criteria.

for example, I don't want to see yuppie shit on news.ycombinator.com. right now, I have a userscript that filters out links from the worst offenders (e.g. newyorker), but every day, there are many more that shit up the front page and waste my time and attention. this could be solved with a very low parameter LLM by asking it to evaluate whether the text is related to science and technology or not.

hell, even images could be filtered with vision models, including local ones. I'd fucking love to hide a few broad categories of images from my sight, e.g. clickbaity youtube thumbnails (DeArrow helps to a degree)

everdrive• 2 years ago

This is just an arms race. It expends more energy, and the "solution" from the other side will be to pump more garbage in.

lupusreal5• 2 years ago

for example, I don't want to see yuppie shit on news.ycombinator.com. right now, I have a userscript that filters out links from the worst offenders (e.g. newyorker), but every day, there are many more that shit up the front page and waste my time and attention. this could be solved with a very low parameter LLM by asking it to evaluate whether the text is related to science and technology or not."

FWIW, I once used naive Bayes classification solely on HN headlines and it worked reasonably well for solving the problem you're describing.

tempodox2• 2 years ago

The browser will be even less under our control than before, surveillance will go to the next level, and your private data will land in even more obscure places than before.

Ridiculous maybe, but by no means pointless. “AI” will be the end of ad blockers and a whole host of measures to secure a remnant of privacy on the net.

saurik4• 2 years ago

“AI” will be the end of ad blockers...

On the contrary, I feel like AI--even if it doesn't advance much further than the level we already have achieved--is putting us at the cusp of finally being able to have good end-game fully-working ad blockers: I'll just have an AI in my browser read / look at / watch / "experience" your content and then launder away any and all ads in its presentation to me... I can even have it make extreme edits if required, rebuilding the audio and video, to remove subtle bias your content wants to infect me with due to sponsorship deals.

What is fighting to prevent ad blockers is not AI... it is pervasive DRM: if we live in a world where the tech platforms continue to side with Big Content and prevent us from being able to capture and alter media as we see it on devices they insist we "buy" and yet never "own"--and where the business models of the most powerful companies rely on proving that an end-user human affirmatively was on the other side of an interaction (and thereby might have been infected with paid propaganda)--we are stuck inside of a dystopia :(.

freedomben4• 2 years ago

well once KOSA[1][2] passes and every website requires KYC stuff like uploading a copy of your ID just so you can get access to potentially dangerous/offensive ideas, we might need an AI agent to automate that deep level of privacy invasion for us :-(

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/02/dont-fall-latest-chang...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39446355

dkarras2• 2 years ago

what is ridiculous about it? I read the gist of the articles I am mildly curious about by summarizing them on the spot. If it sounds more interesting than I thought I read it in full. Saves me time. Sometimes I ask one or two clarifying questions as well. Arc browser has this built in and I find it very useful.

I summarize the transcripts of 20+ min. long youtube videos to get the gist, which is what I am interested in anyways. Saves me time. (this is something I built custom for my use, maybe there are other options for this)

It is not an obsession. I always wanted something, someone that could do this for me, and now we have it.

imiric2• 2 years ago

If the AI is summarizing web pages, why couldn't this be done with a browser extension?

If the AI is summarizing files the user downloads, why couldn't this be done with external tools?

In general though, why does the browser itself need to be "smart"? Its primary, and perhaps only, goal should be to render web pages... I feel like this push to integrate AI features into browsers is done so that companies can promote their own (completely unrelated) AI services, and pull people even more into their ecosystem. It's obnoxious.

dghughes• 2 years ago

It truly is just a modern day Clippy.

lupusreal5• 2 years ago

Hardly. Clippy was hated because he interrupted you with unhelpful suggestions. I played around with the Leo thing a little bit and it never interrupts you; actually I had to dig through the UI a bit to figure out how to activate it at all.

Anyway, now that this sort of technology exists, Microsoft is missing a great opportunity to bring back clippy and cash in on some nostalgia. I miss that lil guy.

prng2021• 2 years ago

What’s wrong with AI in a browser? Each SaaS app you use in a browser has or will have AI. Is the AI built by each of those ridiculous? If not, then what is ridiculous about a browser striving to create a general AI than can apply to any site you visit within that browser?

greymalik• 2 years ago

How do they support this financially?

temp0826• 2 years ago

They're at the top of the pyramid for their shitcoin. Probably one of the best modern grifts out there.

rekoil8• 2 years ago

And regular advertising (where the audience doesn't get paid for consuming adverts) isn't a grift?

CaffeinatedDev3• 2 years ago

They are running mixtral, which is open source, so they can keep LLM costs to a minimum since they're probably running on their own hardware

Also I think they have loads of funding, and are factoring all of this into user acquisition costs

soundnote3• 2 years ago

The AI, specifically? Pretty strict usage limits for free users and a paid plan is the plan, it looks like.

ss64• 2 years ago

Friends don't let friends use Brave.

pcdoodle• 2 years ago

You mean chrome

tomrod• 2 years ago

Brave for mobile, Firefox for desktop. Firefox on mobile is a poor experience for accessibility. Also, in my experience, the delivery was quite better for Firefox Mobile before 2021. Not sure what all changes, but it really impacted my use.

rekoil8• 2 years ago

I really don't get this hate Brave gets on HN and other tech forums. It's a de-Googled Chromium fork which retains support for Manifest v2 extensions and has a bunch of neat extra features like first-party ad-blocking, an (underused and probably at this point should be considered a failed experiment) advertising network where users are paid for the ads they consume, Tor-integration, Web3 integrations.

Yes, it defaults to enabling their advertising features, but that's just it, a default setting, it isn't hard to disable if you don't want to "take part of the experiment".

jorvi2• 2 years ago

Yes, it defaults to enabling their advertising features

It does not, you have to opt in.

You are right in the rest of your comment thought. And in general, when you compare default configs, Brave does far more to protect your privacy than Firefox does.

Kuinox• 2 years ago

I really don't get this hate Brave gets on HN

Well maybe due to the multiples bad things that brave did in the past.

lupusreal5• 2 years ago

"I really don't get this hate Brave gets on HN and other tech forums"

Eich bad

andybak• 2 years ago

Asked it to extract some data from a spreadsheet. It's first answer was wrong. I corrected it. It's second answer was wrong.

That's when I quit.

(It was a simple sheet. I said "list the names of all items where [column name] is false". There was about 60 rows)

classified• 2 years ago

I'm sure your spreadsheet software has a function for that. This will qualify your spreadsheet software as AI since it's smarter than the other AI.

lupusreal5• 2 years ago

This is the first I've heard of Brave Leo. I hope Mozilla comes up with something competitive soon, or they might finally lose me as a user.

mcpar-land• 2 years ago

A lot of this new wave of "privacy focused" "we're not Chrome" browsers are A) just Chrome and B) venture capital funded. They're cool and fun now, but their ultimate goal is to burn VC money in a giant advertising pyre in hopes of pulling enough of the market away from Chrome to justify their existence. They'll either fail and burn out, or succeed and promptly enshittify to be even worse than Chrome. Please just use Firefox.

freedomben4• 2 years ago

Unrelated but about Brave and interesting to me: I recently found myself having a large upstream project that I need to maintain some custom patches for, and there's a need for deeper customizations and I worry that my rudimentary system of applying .patch files will turn into an unmaintainable nightmare of merge conflicts after every rebase. I was thinking about possible solutions, and it occurred to me that Brave being Chromium-based must have this same challenge but an order of magnitude more difficult, so I looked for their code to see how they solved this issue.

It's pretty interesting! They do basically the same thing for core Chromium, applying a (big) set of patches[1].

Incidentally, I'd be interested to hear any ideas/approaches to this problem. I'm guessing if there was something clearly better, Brave would be doing it, but it seems like there should be a better way even if I can't think of one.

[1] https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches

SushiHippie2• 2 years ago

I don't know why they went with patch files instead of forking chromium and rebasing the changes via git.

They document how developers should "rebase" chromium:

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Chromium-rebases...

And it looks like way more work than doing it with git via

  git rebase chromium/master

fabrice_d• 2 years ago

If you do that kind of rebase you have to force-push to your branch, and that's not great for many reasons. The other option is to `git merge chromium/master` into your fork. This way you don't have to force-push, but the history is not that clean and bisecting can be tricky.

zilti2• 2 years ago

Because `git rebase` is a heap of crap

bsclifton• 2 years ago

Something I would like to mention, as a dev on Brave, is that patches are considered a last resort. If there are patches, we try to keep them lightweight - like patch to have Chromium create the Brave version of the object (something we can restrict to one line).

What you'll notice more often is a folder we have called `chromium_src`. This directory mirrors the directory structure for Chromium under `src` and the build system will look for matches. If there's a file with the same name under `chromium_src`, it'll prefer that one. That file then does what it needs to differently and then includes the original file.

This approach helps keep things much more lightweight - but it has challenges too. If code fails to apply (file that `chromium_src` is matching gets renamed, etc) it can be hard to detect. This is where you'd want to have a test to catch that.

Another person shared - but here's a link to our patching documentation: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Patching-Chromiu...

You'll notice the actual patching itself is introduced with the caveat:

  > When other options are exhausted, you can patch the code directly

freedomben4• 2 years ago

Thank you! I really appreciate the info :-)

surcap5262• 2 years ago

spyware is now called assistant.

surcap5262• 2 years ago

When spyware is being called assistant. "Amazing" propaganda by corporation.

beAbU• 2 years ago

Is there a way to completely excise this feature from the browser?

codedokode• 2 years ago

Everyone seems to use LLMs the wrong way. Instead of using them to do useful work (for example: static code analysis with automatic fixing of found bugs, writing high-quality documentation), they create useless dumb chatbots. Waiting for someone to integrate a chatbot into a calculator.

zilti2• 2 years ago

The last things I'd want an AI to do is "fixing" bugs, closely followed by writing documentation. It will confidently make things worse and break them.

godelski4• 2 years ago

Isn't Brave supposed to be a security first browser? I thought this was their whole thing? So why are they using a non-local LLM? Forget your thoughts on AI for a second, and just consider what has to be done for these tasks. If you ask it to summarize the page (like the example) it has so send the information elsewhere, off your computer. Same with the PDF. This really undermines security and creates an way that exposes all your data. Their paid service even uses Claude so not entirely controlled by them either if you fully trust them to E2EE that data and then not store it.

So according to Brave, using their AI leaks:

- your searches

- What you're viewing

- What you're typing

Did Brave just turn into the Chrome that it once so hated? I guess it is just orange chrome.

CaffeinatedDev3• 2 years ago

I tried it, it's fairly good, solves a lot of the issues of not knowing the context that chat is using, but so far the responses are super lengthy. Sometimes they are even longer than the article itself haha

bozhark• 2 years ago

They are training off your data, I guarantee it

bzmrgonz• 2 years ago

Am I weird by wanting this in Mozilla? Somehow Mozilla seems more trustworthy!! Not trying to be a bigot, just thinking out-loud.

Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive

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