I don't adblock for privacy, security, or speed. Those are just nice-side effects. I adblock because I do not want to be manipulated into buying things I do not need.
I wonder what would happen if, as a society, we said, "enough, no more ads". Would it really be the capitalist apocalypse that the ad industry is trying to make us believe it would be?
--
Other users than you will be able to mix and match, too: better and more private ads on sites they don't support, with a revenue share to these users that they can spend on sites they do.
We aren't saying "only ads". We do see ads as a necessary funding model for much of the web today. I would love to see micropayments replace ads. Let's see what can be done.
I don't know much about the technical reality of it, but I've thought that an effective micropayments system could be revolutionary, one of thhe most important innovations in tech:
1) It could be a way of financing an incredible amount of essential work that current funding models fail, because the payments are one-off and not worth the high trasaction costs (in fees and user time). Think of art (how do you pay for an amazing digital image) to music (pay for one song) to journalism (how do you pay for one article) to games to FOSS code to expert Q&A to much more. Financing these endeavors could lead to much more and much better.
2) It can solve much of the privacy problem, assuming the micropayments are cash-like and not tracked. I hope anonymity, which you mention in your comment, and all aspects of confidentiality are being designed and built in as core functions.
3) It could enable automated rights clearinghouses in many fields. Do you want to use part of that code/song/etc. in your work? No need to contact the rights holder and negotiate a contract, an impossibly high transaction cost for most, just use the micropayment system. Much of art in the digital age is, or should be, collage. As they say, 'good artists borrow, great artists steal'.
In my mind, it could be the most important IT innovation for culture, code, and many other aspects of society.
Very happy to see the principal agent problem on the web stated so clearly. I've been calling it the tragedy of the commons in comments here and elsewhere. Thanks!
[1] And security and privacy, they're the basic minimum the world needs, right? Grandparent seems too quick to dismiss them.
I mean, authors would have to kiss the asses of the readers and try to be as friendly to their preconceptions as possible and make them feel like they are buddies.
Most donations are done based on emotions. So now we'd have distorted content, catering to the online hivemind even more than today.
> We have a micro payments channel to publishers, frictionless and anonymous, under construction, for folks who want no ads and who will pay.
That's in my opinion the interesting part. I would not maintain a browser for that reason, especially not for the .5% geeks that value that stuff. Directly supporting your favourite content creators would be an awesome thing. There already are micropayments providers like flattr or google contribute but they have different goals (flattr) or different approaches (google).
I'm just not sure if a for-profit organisation would be the right way to do this in web-land.
The ad-supported Internet is one of the few places where wealthy people and poor people are on equal footing, where children can still explore without parental permission, and adults can explore without constantly asking themselves "is this worth it?".
I imagine micropayments will be exactly the sort of problem people decry in Facebook's Free Basics, where large companies can afford to give access to their sites for free, while small website operators are forced to live in their walled garden or charge micropayments (and fade into obscurity).
I also think it's kind of weird how many people like the idea of micropayments for websites when we've seen firsthand what it did to gaming, and especially mobile gaming.
I too am hopeful for a better system that can replace advertising, but I don't think micropayments are that system.
Just wanted to throw my $0.02 out there. A browser company will obviously be the next google. Advertising makes no sense as a monetization strategy in any capacity. World wide web is an RSS feed and browsers currently only a feedparser not reader.
What new browser will solve
============
* crawlers are being banned and info is mich more protected.
* ads are being blocked more aggressively.
* corpus of sites too massive to provide relevent help as singular units.
* discovery biggest problem on internet again, sites like HN and reddit proof.
How browser makes money
=====
Companies have websites that provide data, browser provides digested and concatenated info to user.
User pays search engine browser for data & processing which is paid to websites.
As good content and info become more fragmented this will be valuable.
* provides data directly (skips results returns info)
* privacy by design, user pays for their own crawl index (basically AWS for data.
* parse and rank data like pandora
Implementation
=========
1. User can get their own corpus and filter it (subset of master)
2. Websites and aggregators sell data to platform (indexed data sets, indexing tools, or a sub corpus)
3. Users can buy or subscribe to these on platform market.
4. User information, parse heuristics, corpus ranking, etc are sent to private db setup for user. Data is requested from browser ==> user processing ==> main corpus (if not cached/get balance of non cached items) <== fetched raw data returned then processed and indexed according to users needs/algorithims then data returned to user.
Entire ecosystem product. You could build this.
Please do.
Site owners have to opt-in to the system obviously, if for no other reason than that they have to receive the payments somehow.
So what will you do if I selected ad-free browsing and am willing to pay but the site doesn't support your system? Refuse to load the page? Do not block ads and override my decision? Block all ads and override the site owners decision?
What I object to are invasive ad networks that try to track me all over the internet and build a comprehensive profile of my identity and online activities. As far as I'm concerned THAT is the problem browser companies need to be addressing.
I don't understand why Firefox/Apple/Microsoft haven't been pushing this angle. They could strike a blow against their rival Google, and for their users, in the same stroke.
To use micropayments, I'd need to fund via Bitcoin or another anonymous method. Even cash in the mail, I suppose. Also, I'd want to buy per article, but I wouldn't want to substantively interrupt the flow of browsing, or think very much about the amount. Ideally, I'd like to be quoted payment amounts that just won against bids by advertisers.
Case in point - I connected to smh.com.au and since I have connected to it yesterday (only two times!) it has accessed 91 third party sites. 91! It's ridiculous.
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html
Clay Shirky's got some good additions.
http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.ht...
The solution I'm leaning strongly toward is a large-scale, preferably universal, content syndication / payment system. The big problem seems to be the getting there from here part (as usual), and some sort of super-aggregator (possibly Google, Amazon, Apple, or Facebook) might lead the way. Though I'm heartened that other minds superior to my own seem to find the same solution attractive: Phil Hunt (Pirate Party UK) and Richard M. Stallman (FSF/GNU).
Hunt: http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-fo...
Stallman: https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.ht...
My own, with some background:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2h0h81/specify...
Why information goods and markets are a poor match https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_inf...
This is an amazing option.
Stuff I do pay for: educational content (books, courses etc), Spotify, Netflix.
You're obviously much more deeply invested in this and have done the maths. I am curious, what percentage of web users do you calculate will use the micro-payments, if it was a seamless perfectly executed experience? How much revenue do you think it will generate and will it be enough to disrupt web-ads?
Interesting. I'm the opposite. I've yet to encounter an ad that has a hope in hell of manipulating me at all. I couldn't be more dismissive of them. And if I encounter one too often my dislike of the company starts to grow. "It's show time, and you've been coding like a beast..." really pissed me off. They're throwing garbage at me, they want my money, I want my money, I'm at war with them.
If you know what "just do it", "the happiest place on Earth", "think different", or "the world's most advanced operating system" refer to, you've already been manipulated. A lot of ads are just about making sure you have a particular brand in mind and you're keenly aware of that brand's existence. Then, when time comes around to actually buy something, you'll think back to that brand. There's a lot of sneaky group psychology in the advertising industry.
(Disclosure--I do digital media for a living)
Case in point, I once had a vet clinic as a client. People were seeking out information on Google for certain pet symptoms that owners may not have realized warranted a vet visit, and we ran paid search ads against those terms. People were clicking them and then coming in to get their exam, and often getting in front of what could have been a much worse outcome for their pet.
Was that manipulative or helpful?
Point is, people like to paint with overly broad strokes when speaking about advertising. Make no mistake, the lengths to which publishers have gone over the past couple of years is disgusting. Would you be surprised to learn that many in the industry also hate this kind of crap? I'm not trying to make excuses or anything as there are definitely bad actors (among advertisers, networks and publishers), but there can be very legitimate and helpful uses for ads that also respect privacy and aren't in-your-face. Not all ads are sponsored content or autoplay video units.
It's amazing how many people think this is true.
An ad may make me aware of a product of which I had not previously been but it's not going to induce me to buy something in which I had no previous interest.
If I'm thinking of Widget Class X Brand A, an ad might make me aware of Brand B and I may eventually purchase the Brand B but I was going to purchase Widget Class X anyway.
If I had no interest in Widget Class Z, it doesn't matter how many ads I see for it, I'm still not going to buy it.
Then, months or years later when you're on the market for something like Product-X, you absolutely do not even ever remember scanning your eyes over the ad, and yet your eyes are just simply drawn to the product, or when it is mentioned by word of mouth, there is some priming memory to be reinforced, and somehow you just happen to choose Product-X to purchase.
People hail the internet as a great way to find information -- if you type anything into the google search bar you're curious about, you either get wikipedia, which is clean and usually pretty great if incomplete, or clickbait ad-filled trash that gives you one sentence of content before you click "next", repeated 10 times downloading megabytes of data, tracking your habits, and grinding your machine to a halt, possibly infecting you with drive-by malware.
This feels to me like much needed incremental progress. Let's not give up on solving anything just because we can't fix everything we don't like all at once.
I clicked the HN link about ISIS fighter's salaries. Constant flash video playing in the other tab, CPU usage at 50%, obnoxious sounds pouring out of it. This should not be allowed to happen, we don't need to tolerate this kind of bad behavior on the part of websites. And even 'respectable' sites like newspapers do it.
See also: all sites and news organizations everywhere embracing terrible clickbait titles over traditional, informative ones.
[1] Like a massive jump in Javascript use and page sizes killing performance, and the expansion of Facebook/Twitter and the related death of the "no-one knows you're a dog" web.
A perfect example of this: I got a rash from poison oak exposure, and wanted to find out what the recommended treatment was. Seemingly a perfect use case for the internet. I was greeted with search results that are perfectly described by this sentence.
Hyperbolic to the extreme and rarely true.
Sweet.
What I don't care for is the idea that one or two megacorps know everything about me. So I selectively use ad-block software to keep the Big Boys from overly tracking me.
I find your version of the future--in which ad networks are gone and content proviers stay around because they provide their services "just for giggles" or require micro+ payments--unpalatable.
It didn't impact the economy negatively. It makes the city way more pleasant to walk around.
This is specially annoying in "newspaper" sites, where content should be king (I mean, guys, you are already ton of money selling your printed version) and you are welcomed with a full page ad that is not related to the content nor my interests.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/03/clean-rio-stripping...
Not at all. Printed paper is definitely on the decline - just compare what's easier to do e.g. at a train or while drinking your morning coffee: holding a huge-ass 1 m² newspaper while the train is shaking and the crowd makes it impossible to stretch your arm, or, holding a notebook/tablet/phablet to read.
I don't have anything against ads on webpages in general, but I really hate anything with sound/animation or focus-stealing like pop-up/interstitual/hiding/whatever. I don't block ads because I'm lazy, and because I think it's an acceptable payment model for content, but I just leave the page if the ads annoy me enough.
FWIW, the only ads I've actually purchased services/products from are when I'm actually searching for them and they come up as sponsored results or sidebar ads.
I mean, the web banners and billboards we see every day don't do a lot to actually sell products. But your friend telling you they really love a particular product helps a lot.
But in a society where a movement such as you've described was in motion, would both be equally as bad? Are both not manipulative in their own way?
https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/73/Sao_Paulo_A_City_Witho...
Or, perhaps, you only get ads when requested. "I'm in the market for a new refrigerator. Please show me ads for refrigerators."
But still, I have a fundamental problem with how all advertising has a slant, and at least a hint of a lie or manipulation. I do not like being lied to or manipulated, but I don't know what the alternative would be.
I don't understand what that means, and it makes me think you're babbling nonsense. If you mean a law should be passed, say that. If you mean something else, I honestly can't even guess what it is.
Then again, maybe it wouldn't make a difference. It would be an interesting experiment nevertheless.
That's an incredibly cynical way of looking at the situation. There is also the purpose of telling you about a product you can buy that might possibly be beneficial to your lifestyle. Through advertising you get to find out about that product faster, something especially important in these days of brisk innovation.
Like it or not, consumerism and capitalism go hand in hand. It has reduced global poverty and has made many of us in HN very comfortable. Advertising is bound hand and foot with this system. To deny this is to attack the very structure that we rely on.
( the above two paragraphs are possible satire )
Why is that OK but display ads are not? If all sites switched to native ads does that make it better?
So in 10 years, are you going to not visit any website because all the advertising will go native?
Most people are scared of the devil they know, but few are afraid of the devil they don't.
Not everything is about you. Some people are fine with seeing tasteful, non-intrusive ads to support content they really like (in my case, mostly smallish blogs and webcomics). By all means continue using the tools that serve your needs, and I'll do the same; but please stop acting like you're the only user who matters.
Do you get the impression that you, and people whose values are identical to your own, are their only potential customer?
I have no problem with ads, as long as they are not obnoxious and don't slow me down the site a lot. I accept the tradeoff. Some ads I actually like (such as an ad for a movie that seems interesting). It's not that rare for me to see an ad on YouTube that says "Skip Ad" and I watch it through till the end.
I don't even mind some targeting and tracking, I just wish I had more control over it. Amazon does it, to show me things that they think I am interested in based on what I have looked at. It's not bothersome to me when they get it right. Although I was never as big on shopping as some people, I don't tend to mind looking at things I might like to own.
Call it manipulation if you want....ok. I personally enjoy having a web that is mostly free, and don't begrudge people that try to make a living at producing content for me.
Many of the use-cases for ads have been replaced by search engines, marketplaces and aggregator sites. There's troves of information and access out there for a consumer to make informed purchasing choices.
If I need something, I can actively find it.
The use-case for ads is:
1. I don't need the thing 2. I am not aware of my need for thing
Advertisers probably claim (2) when almost certainly it's just (1)
Yes, these models can't yet support a creator by themselves, but the share has been getting better and there has been a quite noticeable effect on content.
[1] http://thescepticalpirate.eu/adblock-destroying-ads-good/
It's just much better to browse the web with them blocked. I don't hate ads just what they do to my computer and phone.
So, I don't believe that I should buy things only when there is an existing "need". Just as is the case with science and technology.
I don't mind some ads, but some websites go overboard on ads and have more ads than content.
What really annoys me are pop-up ads or ads that launch a new web browser window.
Then there are ads that play some video and has someone talking in it.
Then there are free download sites but some of the download buttons are ads that download adware stuff. Only one download button is the correct one.
I can resist most ads, and I really cannot afford to buy things I see advertising for.
I use UBlock Origin because some sites started to detect Adblock and refuse to show content.
This Brave web browser is just the next in a line of ad blockers it is a web browser with an ad blocker built in.
Advertising has gotten out of control and I pity the person without some sort of ad blocker that doesn't know any better and clicks on ads to get tool bars and other stuff installed.
In order to combat ad blockers some sites have gone behind a paywall and need an account with a subscription to view content. Going back to the newspaper business model of subscribers and away from the free website paid for with ads.
Some advertising like Adsense are not so bad, I don't mind those ads so much because they are not annoying.
The ad problem won't go away, unless you're top tier brand your business rely on it. You may tame it but it's like weed, it comes back.
>I don't like ads at all (99.9% of the time not their target)
Just because you don't ever act on ads doesn't mean you aren't still a target.
I'm not sure I agree all ads are associated with capitalism. Propaganda is one example. There are also ads for awareness and for non-profits.
Also I have noticed that the best content that I like is typically ad free or at least doesn't have the buy-product-ads (e.g. PBS TV and NPR). This is the case with most media with the only exception being the Internet.
The only time I have issues with ads is when I'm ironically either trying to buy something or I have decided to go low brow and click on some sleazy news.. (its like the South Park episode on ads.. they trick me..).
It kind of would. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. are all funded by selling ads. There's a few experiments with buying out ads, but when the current price is "free," any increase in price of these services to users is a huge increase in price with an expected equivalent decrease in users.
As a fellow AdBlock user, we have a huge problem to reconcile: the sites we use by and large don't exist without someone clicking on ads. The Categorical Imperative Adblock would block not only the ads, but the website delivering them as well.
Surely, though, "this project does not fit my use case" is not the same as "this is a bad project and you should feel bad"? There are people who adblock just for those reasons, and who would (or claim that they would) allow through ads, to support content creators, if those concerns were obviated.
Would it be on-demand research only? Would you browse lists of new products [eg the Wirecutter's "Realist guide to CES"]?
I do both of these already, and I do have js disabled on most sites, and I think ads mis-align the incentives of publishers...
But I think that there are demographics that benefit from ad-supported [ie free] stuff more than I do.
It's happened to me on Facebook a couple times where there has been an advertisement for something that scratched an exact itch I didn't know there was a solution for.
Honestly, I think if you're against ads, you just aren't getting good ones.
For me, not being baited into buying stuff is a nice side effect.
I block ads because it's fun to see how badly Google, Apple, Microsoft, apps and websites want data about computer users. It's a game (I would guess that's how they see it); one that forces the user to be vigilant about networking.
Tin foil hats are not going to save you, but a good judgement will.
So no ads for Greenpeace? Your favorite political party? Your favorite union? Your favorite website?
Right?
Right?
Cinema prices has not changed since they introduced several minutes of advertisement for each movie.
Buss prices in my country has not gone down when they introduced advertisement on the inside. They are currently also considering to stop having advertisement (after a political party wanted to advertise a very controversial message), but there has not been any mention of an related increase in ticket price.
Sometimes, the market price is just the price that the market is willing to pay, rather than an exact balance between costs and revenue.
Every time someone rattles out a list of "annoyances" regarding ads, I wish that I could plead with them to consider that there's even bigger reasons.
Plenty of people try to sell the idea that ads let us have content "for free", and that all we have to tolerate is "a little annoyance".
It's insane. If companies are buying ad-space, it's because they expect to get more business in return. This means that someone out there is being influenced by said ads, so that if the content cost X to put up online (hosting, funding its creation), someone is paying X+(ad company overhead) for it.
If these costs are being borne evenly, then it's complete societal waste. We could pay X for the content, and not incur the overhead. If these costs are not borne evenly, and some people are paying for the consumption of more disciplined people, it's probably contributing to terrible cycles of poverty (ie: some kid spending money on fancy new shoes he doesn't need and can't afford is paying for a well-paid tech-users YouTube habits, because it preys on their lack of education). Either way it's terrible.
Advertising isn't free. Insofar it works, for some people, it's basically coercive via psychology and simulated peer pressure.
There are many times where I am glad I saw advertising: my favorite band is coming to town, a new product that will save me hours a day just got released, the shoes I have been looking for are being sold at 30% off.
I don't want to give up all of my privacy, but sometimes I don't mind finding a solution to something in my peripheral focus.
Isn't it usually the opposite, though? The poor kid can access the sites for free, because the rich old guy is clicking on the ads and subsidizing the whole site. If there was a paywalled subscription, on the other hand, the kid would be SOL. I don't like web ads, but if anything they seem to be a progressive redistribution system to me.
Sure we could, but it's extremely clear that only hyper-specialized niches are willing to do that when someone else is providing similar content at no monetary cost to the end user. Like it or not, the market has spoken; they want content in exchange for ads, and are not willing to pay the content provider directly.
>Advertising isn't free. Insofar it works, for some people, it's basically coercive via psychology and simulated peer pressure.
I've bought ads before. I just wanted people to find out about my product. Short of a guerilla spam campaign, it's the only way to get exposure. I've since learned that so many people tune out ads that guerilla spam campaigns (formal spam campaigns are known as "PR") are really the only way to beat competitors.
You can say that they 'manipulated' me into going to their store, but that's only because it was in my own interest to do so in the first place.
If we put the bar for 'manipulation' low enough, it would seem that one shouldn't talk to anyone or get any information from anywhere, lest it change your mind in some way and thus manipulate you.
I don't understand this argument.
How are ads "manipulating" you? They're just ads. They're not an argumentative authority figure with a gun.
The only reason to block ads is because of speed of user experience. The "manipulation" argument is the weakest reason to block ads.
In any case, you manipulate other people for your own personal benefit. Everyone does.
Just talking to people is "manipulation".
I adblock precisely because of privacy, security, and speed.
And without ads of any kind, it probably would be a capitalist apocalypse. How would Apple sell the iPhone or Samsung sell the Galaxy phones without advertising? Word of mouth? That's a pretty slow way to get the word out. Relying on the press? That might work for really big players (and how is that different from advertising anyway?), but it won't work for smaller firms selling more niche products. What if you're shopping on Amazon and you buy product X, but product Y would go really well with it? Right now, Amazon will frequently show you "other customers who bought this product also bought product Y". But without advertising, you wouldn't see that, so you'd be stuck only buying the exact thing you're looking for, and never getting any suggestions. I actually like getting those suggestions; I do buy things like that from time to time, things I wouldn't have thought of otherwise.
Most adverts are trying to make you feel bad and that consuming their product will fill the hole they just made. Enough of these disgusting people.
If advertisers don't like that then I'm not sure what I can say to assuage their concerns.
Tough shit?
Why on earth would users want this browser?
There are project which lets you curate where you accept ads and where you really want to block trackers: see https://myrealonlinechoices.inrialpes.fr/ (I actually submitted it to HN a few days ago but it did not catch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10886400).
Keep in mind that the supply side right now ends at the owner of the web property that starts the ball rolling when in fact it actually starts with the person sitting behind the computer looking at the page.
So this is a giant cut-out-the-middle-men opportunity and Eich is fairly uniquely positioned to take advantage of that.
Wonder if that rev-share idea is part of the long term plan.
Alladvantage.com raised about 200m on that idea. The wikipedia page isn't correct, they had a pyramid based payout system. Fraudulent users would create enormous numbers of fake users under them and simulate all of their browsing.
Whether that's their main focus or not, I can't tell.
https://adblockplus.org/about#monetization
Edit: It looks like I was wrong:
https://mobile.twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/68983945486585...
I'm sure for many people this makes a difference. Is that enough to switch? Ehhh...
Thinking selfishly, I would much prefer the status quo, where I can block most ads, but the majority of consumers don't do it. Current ad blocking tech is fine, I'm afraid this could become an arms race.
In general, you can Greasemonkey anything. Tracker-less first party native ads may be harder to match, but most sites would need tracking to aggregate audiences, to get better ads and revenue, so third party native is on the rise. And it is easy to block.
I also like the idea of paying to block ads that aren't relevant to me. I believe in a free market and totally understand that things have to be paid for. Sometimes ads are the answer, but I find many of the interstitials to be irrelevant and sometimes they slow the site down unacceptably. Would be willing to pay for this experience not to happen.
You're right, there will be new solutions to combat nefarious advertising. For example I can already imagine a plugin which uses ML to identify ads and block the content.... No more videos with ads in the middle.
Our difference to Brave is that we give free ads to everyone, the advertiser only pays if the end user makes a purchase. Similiarly the display site gets nothing if there was no economic exchange. Capitalism is supposed to be a machine for you getting what you want. We want to help that process along. I have an uncompromising attitude that web/world ads should be for things that you really want to see, and then they become content.
That might be a utopian vision today, but I have strong belief in the power of people's self interest to drive positive change.
Edit: chrispm reposted the link here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10940684
1) Desktop browser is an electron app with ad tracking injected into your app via http://cdn.brave.com/ (via https://sonobi.com/welcome/index.php which promises "EFFECTIVELY PLAN AND SOURCE MARKETING OPPORTUNITIES WITH QUALITY AND VIEWABILITY FROM PREMIUM PUBLISHERS"
2) iOS browser is a fork of Firefox iOS - https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios
3) Android browser is a fork of https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.linkbubble...
(I always assumed it's proprietary, but seeing that others are FLOSS forks, would love to be wrong about this one.)
I don't mind ads in print magazines so much (other than the fact that print magazines are unlikely to write negative stuff about companies that advertise with them). Ads in print magazines are ok with me, because there's no movement on them. So I can easily read one page, even though the next page has a full page ad.
They mention standard sized spaces and faster browsing. I actually wouldn't mind large ads - like something taking up my whole screen - that I can scroll through. Back in the 90s, it probably made sense to have small 468x60 pixel banner ads, but as fast Internet connections are becoming more and more common, I don't really see the point of restricting the size anymore. Large full page ads aren't really a problem in print magazines, and I don't think it would be on the web either, if we just got rid of the animations.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K-mKOqiUiSjgZTEscBLjtjd6...
One of things he mentions on one of the sites, is Adsense looking at every scroll event, and doing tracking work which takes 25ms on a smartphone (his smartphone, likely to be high end). That means your scrolling performance is going to be inherently bad, probably below 30 fps one you take into account other work associated with the browser or the site. Having a browser which takes out this kind of code, but doesn't break the business model of the website owner does seem like an interesting idea. It seems like a major part of the mobile web is half-broken for these kind of reasons.
How do they plan on doing that? Not like it hasn't been tried before. The problem is you can't collect money on someone's behalf without them opting in, and if it is opt-in only you get the chicken and the egg problem for adoption.
Call me crazy, but if I wanted to "pay the site" I'm using I'd just allow their ads. This company is really sleezy. Its playing the "replace their ads with ours" game and trying to make it sound like some wonderful moral position against advertising. People aren't this stupid. This thing isn't going to catch on.
The point of this browser is to factor out random third-party ad networks. If you elect to see ads on the site, they are presumably served by Brave. The site still gets paid (so it's not like the ISP's replacing ads on the fly), but you don't have to worry about unknown trackers following you around the internet and putting a strain on your CPU.
Whether it will catch on is another question...
Maybe enterprise or businesses will like it - so they can avoid their employees visit whitelisted sites that mistakenly have malicious code in the ads. Eg. Flash
The power of default settings is huge. Perhaps you're thinking of yourself or your peers.90% of the rest of the population just doesn't care about these issues.
Source: http://fortune.com/2015/06/16/apple-google-maps-ios/
Firefox overcame that disadvantage about 10 years ago. You could say Chrome did too (though nowadays Chrome is bundled so much it no longer applies).
(1) If they block tracking, does it block Google Analytics? Because that would annoy me as a website owner.
(2) The reason I don't pay subscriptions to sites like Wall Street Journal and NY Times is that I get my content from aggregators like Hacker News so I only go to one of those paid sites if I follow an occasional link. Micropayments would fix that if I could pay one company a $5/mo subscription to then have payments automatically dolled out to a select list of good sites until my $5 was used up (then maybe ask me each time after that, or something).
(3) They talk about avoiding the ad-blocking war, but they are just contributing to it. I guess what they think is that by making a way for the website owner to get paid they avoid some of the war, but many companies like to be in direct control of their money so they might not like a middleman sitting on the high way charging everyone a tax to pass. And if Brave doesn't charge something for its services then it has no business model, so I'm assuming they are not passing 100% of revenue on to the site owner.
That's one of the biggest trackers out there, so it would be a pretty poor blocker if it didn't.
They've received substantial investor money, so apparently they have something lucrative in mind. And it's probably not good for privacy-conscious end users.
They substitute bad ads for their ads.
"Then we put clean ads back". This is open source, right? It's on Github. Can someone fork this and remove all the ads? Thank you.
"Firefox for iOS"
They forgot to remove the branding from their "new" browser.
It sounds like the whole idea is to add bitcoin micropayments to the web and stop (via blockers) sites from using heavy intrusive ads.
For example, cbs/abc/nbc seem to detect muBlock and then stop serving content.
To be honest, if I was running a media company I'd be rather more inclined to block/redirect users of browsers designed to inject replacement "good" ads into my page than worry about users on a mainstream browser who happen to be using a plugin.
They want to block ads that the person running a web site put on their web site with their own (Brave Ads Infused TM Ltd. Inc. - let's make some money while pretending we are freeing the world).
How should the user agent decide when to alert the user?
I dislike ads, but there are already solutions for blocking them. Although I do like the premise of this, I'm not eager to switch browsers just to start supporting advertisers.
Are "clean adverts" then placed on the site?
If the answer to this is yes, I'll be blocking the user-agent from my sites. I serve cache:no-transform and HTTPS to specifically prevent people mucking around with the page. I already deliver a fast and clean website.
This reminds me of when Virgin Media in the UK (an ISP) wanted to put adverts on pages without my permission. It really isn't a help.
On the other hand, if this gets traction (unlikely, admittedly) this may finally force the issue to the courts and get content fiddling declared copyright/TOS violation. Which I'm not sure you all want.
People would actually stop to read the ads because they were interesting and relevant.
Then google caved to images and animation and 100+ objects on a page, each with their own tracking scripts to slow browsers to a crawl.
This however does not tackle the mindset shift that needs to occur for the masses to start protecting the private information they voluntarily give up on services they are signed in on the social net.
We are currently working on a project that will use this information to the marketer's advantage in a way that will make people sick once they realize the extent of the profiling going on, with the ultimate goal of reversing the trend before it's too late. Make people raise their guards, sell some tech on the way.
From the Project Xanadu Wikipedia article: "9. Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions") of all or part of the document."
Ted's approach is (in my view) also a deduplication effort, as you're citing the original content, tracing it back to its origin by reference.
Now, time will tell how things will play out, but I believe I can count on Brendan to make the right choices when it comes to features, compromises.
And can anyone find this 'roadmap' that Eich talks about in the post?
To be fair, Firefox for iOS is open source. Take it, remix it, improve it. It is all good. Mozilla Public License.
Wow, new browser technology that is open source, this is good news. I'm hoping the development focus is flexible, remember flock? [0]
https://www.brave.com/assets/img/sliders/revolution/surfers_...
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts
But I can't do that on my phone without jailbreaking it. Stupid phone.
It would be great if they clarify the terms & licences in the FAQ
If someone wants to make money off of me, they're free to send me a bill. If their content isn't valuable enough to sell directly, why should I waste my bandwidth and RAM monetizing their garbage?
A world without Facebook and Google sounds wonderful. Sign me up; I'm willing to pay.
On the other hand, I have literally never clicked on a non-text ad on a browser, except accidentally due to some sort of dark patterns.
Ads today tell me to rotate my phone to play a full screen video, play noise, track me, hide content between 10 clicks,infect my computer with malware, etc. They can all die, no one will miss them.
That's not a realistic claim. Nothing is stopping publishers and advertisers from sharing back end data.
Sorry Brendan you failed the first test. I wont adapt to Brave.
How Do you want to finance development in the lang run?
It is a nice solution and I'd hate to see it go because of financial problems.
All quotes are directly from the FAQ:
"We do not even have access to identifiable user data". Except for the "in-browser targeting engine" which has "substantially more information about the user's activity available to it than traditional tracking methods", which are stored in the browser and then exposed to advertisers "to maximize user, publisher and advertiser value."
"Each ad request is anonymous, and exposes only a small subset of the user's preferences and intent signals to prevent 'fingerprinting' the user by a possibly unique set of tags". Except that the only reason advertisers need to fingerprint the user is in order to collect enough information to decide which ads to serve to them, which is precisely what they'd be getting from Brave (and then some.) Great, that information is stored in the browser instead of the cloud, and only subsets of it are exposed to the advertisers for each request -- but that doesn't benefit the end user at all. It benefits Brave, by maintaining their middleman position as the de facto controller of which advertisers gets access to that data.
"We block trackers, that’s a big win compared to the status quo." It is! For Brave. Because the whole browser is now an ad tracker. Ok, the data is keyed to a UUID instead of a name or other "personally identifiable information". How does that benefit the end user? In no way at all.
Throughout the site is repeated handwaving about how nothing is sent in the clear, they don't even have the encryption keys, nothing is personally identifiable, but none of that matters, because the end result is the same. It's still an ad tracker designed to enable targeted advertising. But with much, much more data to work with than in existing browsers. Offloading the tracking work into the client instead of doing it server-side is just misdirection.
And how about those content creators? "Our goal is to make better revenue for all publishers," they say, but I see no explanation of how stripping out websites' individual ad sales and replacing them with Brave's benefits the publishers. Congratulations! Brave's "revenue sharing" program means your ad space is worth 55% of what it used to be! [1] Oh, don't worry, they'll get around to building a micropayments scheme someday, which they'll also take a share of.
This is just. I mean. Gah. Flames. On the side of my face.
[1] (I can't find that figure on their site, but it's quoted here: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/267089/new-bro... "...revenue derived by selling ads through Brave will be split four ways: 15% each will be distributed to the user, to Sonobi and to Brave, with 55% allocated to publishers.")
'Brave browser promises faster Web by banishing intrusive ads' | Jan 20, 2016 http://www.cnet.com/news/ex-mozilla-ceo-try-braves-new-brows...
> Eich and his team built Brave out of Chromium, which is the foundation for Google's Chrome browser, which leaves most of the actual development and security support to Google. Why not use Firefox, into which Eich poured so much effort? Because Chrome is more widely used and therefore better tested by developers who want to make sure their websites work properly, he said. "Chromium is the safe bet for us," he said.
* The desktop browser is a cross-platform desktop application created with a fork of Github's Electron framework that is itself based on Node.js and Chromium. https://github.com/brave/electron https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop
* The iOS browser is a fork of Firefox for iOS, which is a Swift app developed from scratch by Mozilla. https://github.com/brave/browser-ios
* The Android browser is Link Bubble, which is a wrapper around the default Android browser https://github.com/brave/browser-android Previous HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7453897 Australian developer Chris Lacy announced its sale in Aug 2015: http://theblerg.net/post/2015/08/05/ive-sold-link-bubble-tap...
* The ad blocking technology is courtesy a Node.js module of Adblock Plus filter that uses a bloom filter and Rabin-Karp algorithm for speed. https://github.com/bbondy/abp-filter-parser-cpp
* The database is MongoDB. https://github.com/brave/vault
Past news coverage:
Mystery startup from ex-Mozilla CEO aims to go where tech titans won't | Nov 17, 2015 http://www.cnet.com/news/mystery-startup-from-ex-mozilla-ceo...
Use Link Bubble to open links in the background on Android | Aug 26, 2015 http://www.cnet.com/how-to/use-link-bubble-to-open-links-in-...
Indeed it is a very loathsome business model.
People have taken exception to it when ATT and Comcast inject ads into your browsing experience and when Adblock Plus removes and then reinjects them.
Why is this not hijacking the web, extorting publishers with buy into yet another ad network and then trying to leverage this into a future payment network?
This isn't that far removed from coming into a bakery and saying "The Cupcakes are no longer $2, they're $1.50 'coz that's what we think people want to pay."
I realize the idea is that this is "better" for the content providers than Ad Block, but both are, IMHO stupid. If a site you visit has ads you don't like, complain to the people who run the site and stop going to it. All Ad Block software has never been a fix, merely a tool in an ever escalating war of ads where users and content creators both lose.
Could such thing be secure?
A browser built with Electron that exposes Node.js and otherwise keeps away from the HTML5 kitchen sink, in order to push innovation away from the spec committees and back out to the community. Vital technology like TCP, UDP, DNS, and the filesystem is being locked up behind a fascade of poorly implemented APIs.
A browser with a small, efficient core, optimized for rendering, and with a brilliant app install system, and brilliant native cross-platform integration. The time is ripe.
Plus, as a developer I would really like this model, as it allows the browser to open up even more of the operating system functions, especially the file system, leading to less workarounds.
The APIs you describe are not 'locked up' by 'spec committees'. They're typically implemented by browser developers within the community, based on the demands of developers and users, grow towards standardisation cross-browser, and are eventually developed into official specifications.
I love the idea - and it strongly appeals to me as a developer - but what would make the average user switch to it?
"The new Brave browser blocks all the greed and ugliness on the Web that slows you down and invades your privacy. Then we put clean ads back."
