For whatever reason, this never bothered me. The service wasn't any worse for it, I didn't really feel taken advantage of... technically they were part of how I might have gotten to one of those links.
I guess there's the loss in privacy where it's known what browser I use, but that's not the kind of privacy loss that worries me.
They've got to pay the bills somehow, and while they should have been more up-front about doing it this way, and it is a breach of trust, it still landed in the realm of "reasonable asking for forgiveness" to me.
> I don't trust their promises.
Maybe I'm just not seeing which promise it was that was broken so badly.
> Maybe I'm just not seeing which promise it was that was broken so badly.
The unspoken promise that web browsers should be impartial user agents that render the content as its authors intended, rather than man-in-the-middle agents that modify the content as they see fit.
The fact this change also benefitted Brave authors directly is an additional breach of trust.
Inexcusable in my opinion, and with the other shady cryptocurrency dealings mentioned in a sibling comment, it's enough for me to never want to use their browser or anything associated with them.
I appreciate they're trying to change the status quo of how the web works and is monetized today, but they started on the wrong foot and their reputation is forever tarnished in my eyes.
- It alters the content that is served to you. It violates the expectation that your browser is a neutral agent.
- It monetises the content created by other people. As someone who lives off the content I create, I'd take offence to that, particularly if it changes already monetised links.
That's incorrect. Brave added a feature to the browser which would list Affiliate Links, if any, in pre-search UI. As the user typed something into the address-bar (e.g. 'Bitcoin'), Brave (the browser) would check local data to see if there were any relevant affiliate links. If it found one, it would enumerate it among the other search suggestions in the address-bar dropdown.
Note, affiliate links were not inserted into pages. Links on pages were not modified. Requests en-route were not re-routed. There were many ways people described this feature; most of them were incorrect. So what was the problem?
Our implementation of this feature had a mistake; it matched against fully-qualified URLs. As such, if you typed 'binance.us' into your address bar, and Brave had an affiliate code for that domain (which would be visibly shown before the user navigates), the browser sent you to the affiliate link instead of the non-affiliate link.
When this issue was brought to our attention, we confirmed the (undesired) behavior, owned the mistake, fixed the issue, and confirmed that no revenue would be made from that affiliate link. Mistakes do happen in software, and they will happen with Brave (try as we might to avoid them). What's important is that we moved quickly, fixed the issue, and maintained transparency.
Traffic attribution is not uncommon in browsers though; open Firefox and type something in your address bar. When you hit Enter, you'll find that Firefox adds a traffic-attribution token to the URL too (although they do this only after the request is being issued; Brave showed the token before navigation).
I hope this helps provide a bit of context to a very misunderstood bug in Brave's past.
That's not true. It was never replacing links in webpages. It was redirecting if you typed the URL. Which, I would honestly be okay with. It's at no cost to me, and I understand Brave needs to make money. I could see how Binance would be upset, but not me myself. Virtually all browsers make money by search referrals, and I don't see how that would be different from my point-of-view. That seems extremely mild to me.
Also, when people got upset, Brave changed it too. It's not like they promised to never make money. I don't see that as a reason to trust Brave any less. It seems like a good influence on the web.
Sure, but it's probably a good thing he's not at Mozilla now, because he would have also pulled Firefox down the same path Brave has gone with micropayments using BATs, which isn't exactly uncontroversial.
See the Tom Scott and BAT incident. Kinda shady how it was handled.
The entire development team would have walked if he stayed. Nobody wants to work with someone who hasn't done anything technically relevant in 30 years and can't seem to stop pushing his far-right views in places where they are irrelevant.
Just a few weeks ago he went on an anti-Fauci and anti-mask conspiracy rant in the thread about him appearing on Lex Fridman's podcast, when nobody was even discussing politics.
The entire development team would not have walked. I know this because many told me, and even sent letters and cards after I left. But such a claim is false on its face: people do not all act in unison in such a circumstance.
Your second paragraph is easily disproven. I didn't bring up Fauci, someone else did to derail the discussion about my conversation with Lex:
I've flagged your comment here, it is either dishonest or else just sloppily malicious in the wishful thinking mode with which you led in the first sentence.
I don't trust their promises.