LWN: Comments on "The Brave web browser"

Chromium versus Firefox

ssmith32 — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 19:01:03 +0000

Also, Google + Chrome has office apps that break in subtle, not subtle, always annoying ways in any ecosystem not their own.

The Brave web browser

Wol — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 15:02:46 +0000

"Legal Tender" as I understand it was introduced by us Brits when we moved from Gold Coin to Pound Notes.

There was a problem with lenders refusing to accept notes - despite them prominently containing a notice that the Bank Of England would swap them for gold on request - "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of one pound".

So Parliament created legal tender. If a debtor proffered "legal tender" in settlement of a debt, the creditor *had* *to* take it - or forfeit their right to take the debt to a court.

I've actually used this to my advantage on one occasion - I ordered a load of goods mail order, and the supplier completely cocked up taking payment (I tried to pay by debit card). After a couple of requests for payment, which I tried to comply with, they sent the matter to their lawyer who sent me an email nastygram. I replied "I've tried to pay. Here's the details. I wouldn't see me in court if I were you - legal tender you know. You need to talk to your accounts department and tell them if they've got any sense they'll write the debt off." They did :-)

Cheers,
Wol

The Brave web browser

davidgerard — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 10:16:23 +0000

Emin Gun Sirer sets out a pile of attacks a selfish miner can make on a proof of work blockchain, from 25% of hashpower up:

http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/06/16/how-a-mining-mon...

The Brave web browser

davidgerard — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 10:14:47 +0000

Ethereum is already showing transaction clogs - it's about 3 TPS average (capacity is presently 14 TPS), but the Bancor and Status ICOs both rendered the network unusable for several hours.

Ethereum is not going to cope with an even slightly popular dapp, and that particularly includes BAT on Brave if it gets any appreciable number of users.

You could postulate BAT hopping from crypto to crypto as they fill, I suppose ...

Chromium versus Firefox

flussence — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 20:01:10 +0000

Safari is the new Opera; it seems to serve its users instead of third party companies, and there's a very vocal minority fanbase, but the price of admission will forever keep them a minority.

This generation's IE6 is Chromium, no room for doubt. Beneath that surface veneer it's horribly buggy, it claims to support web standards but half-asses them (the *first* css-grid layout I tried didn't work in 60.0), and it crashes both itself and graphics drivers frequently. If not for the massive speed difference it brings, I wouldn't put up with any of that at all.

Chromium versus Firefox

k3ninho — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 16:25:45 +0000

> Safari is WebKit.
Safari is currently the 'Internet Explorer 6' of contemporary browsers. Someone has to be the most-quirky and least-easy to use. It's also the one from the vertically-integrated-ecosystem company.

K3n.

The Brave web browser

khim — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 15:59:31 +0000

And that is something that is e.g. much more true for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is too scarce. Gold is hard to produce (by mining) but also very hard to destroy. It's high per-volume value pretty much guarantees that if it's stolen and/or lost it could be returned with some effort. Bitcoins... not so much.

Chromium versus Firefox

flussence — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 06:55:28 +0000

Projects that try to build on Firefox as a base have historically turned out badly: most of them just tweak the branding, settings and addons.

The only real forks left are Pale Moon, which is lagging years behind on web standards support due to how much it's diverged; and Seamonkey, whose volunteer maintainers are already struggling to keep up. With the impending death of XUL neither are likely to survive the winter - not a very good advertisement for the platform.

Crypto currency and The Brave web browser

neilbrown — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 01:30:54 +0000

> All money is is a commodity that becomes very widely accepted.

True, but that doesn't tell the full story of why it is considered to be valuable.
Begin easy to divide, easy to transport, easy to store, short in supply and hard to forge are necessary conditions, but they aren't sufficient.

I think that understanding the dynamics of value is important for understanding stability, and hence long term value. Some of the things you listed only worked as money in localised settings (local in both time and space). Others work more broadly.

I'm particularly interested in value from the perspective of stability - probably because I'm hoping for a comfortable retirement in a few years. I can see that while bitcoin clearly has value (to some people), it is no where near as stable as, e.g. the US or AU dollar.
I imagine that if a crypto currency was backed by a more solid currency, then the low transaction cost could be expected to raise its value a little above the underlying currency (2% discount if you pay in bitcoin), but as bitcoin is backed by nothing and the *only* value is in the low transaction cost .... I won't be using it for my retirement savings.

The Brave web browser

drag — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 17:15:21 +0000

All money is is a commodity that becomes very widely accepted.

Lots of stuff has been money in the past... cows, goats, wheat, tobacco leaves, various stones, feathers, etc etc. Some of them, like tobacco, ended up being the basis of paper money will some fairly sophisticated schemes to allow trade and movement of tobacco and savings in tobacco without it going bad while in storage.

Metals, as you can imagine, has some advantages over those things. It's divisible... you can take a gold coin, cut it in half, and it's still worth the same as it was before. You can't do that with a cow.

It also doesn't rot, doesn't really tarnish. Gold and other precious metals don't tend to rust. Gold is extremely chemically stable. It's also convenient to store and move. You can have a lot of wealth in gold and still be able to lock it up or carry it around with you. Can't do that with, say, granite.

Prior to regulation typically you had multiple competing currencies, though. Silver was far more popular then Gold ever was for most the history of the USA.

The Brave web browser

drag — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 17:01:27 +0000

> So presumably you're no longer considering Bitcoin cryptocurrency,

No longer _successful_ cryptocurrency. I never had high hopes for bitcoin.

> I'm saying it's a pyramid scheme because the exponentially declining mining rate is an obvious way to ensure that whatever value Bitcoin gets is predominantly funnelled to early users who mined or hung onto coins before it got popular.

That's not really anything that is unique to bitcoin. You are just describing that is commonly called deflation. When the supply of money doesn't rise to meet the demand then the value of the money tends to rise. People are then incentivized to hold onto the money, which then (when the money gains acceptance) tends to get used in the form of loans and whatnot.

The creation of alternative 'coins' is then a good thing because it's a way to inflate the supply beyond the built-in limitations of bitcoin, but is still going to be something that is predictable. It encourages technological development in cryptocurrencies and discourages people from hording 'alt-coins' as long term investment. If people manage to create a technologically excellent 'alt-coin' then they can be rewarded by being a early-in.

The Brave web browser

niner — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 10:53:11 +0000

You may have noticed that I even mentioned that fact by talking about fiat money.

FWIW I responded to this: "I have wondered where the value of money comes from... once it was gold", which assumes that gold has some inherent value.

Chromium versus Firefox

epa — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 09:30:17 +0000

But here they are not embedding a web control into something else, but making a whole browser. That could be done by forking Firefox as well as by forking Chrome.

The Brave web browser

Sesse — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 09:13:20 +0000

You may have noticed that the world has moved away from the gold standard.

The Brave web browser

cladisch — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 07:23:09 +0000

> I have wondered where the value of money comes from

Money is a universal medium of exchange, i.e., its value is that everybody else accepts it. This usually requires that it is hard to counterfeit and easy to transport and exchange.

(Please note that "value" is a subjective measure. The price of something is what somebody actually pays for it, and this is objective; the value is what what some specific person is willing to pay for it, and in the general case, this cannot be measured without the transaction actually taking place.)

> I read a suggestion that the value of "legal tender" currency is that the government accepts it to pay taxes

"Legal tender is a medium of payment recognized by a legal system to be valid for meeting a financial obligation." (Wikipedia) So this applies not only for debts to the government, but to all other debts (because you would ultimately use the courts to enforce contracts).

The Brave web browser

niner — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 07:11:24 +0000

I've always found it curious that people accept the value of gold but not the value of fiat money.

Why is gold valuable?

People think it's sorta pretty, but certainly not _that_ pretty. It's a reasonably good conductor, but there are better. As metals go it's relatively soft. A cool property is that gold leaf can be beaten extremely thin, but that's hardly enough to give it the value it has. Gold is one of the few noble metals and that is certainly worth something. But frankly, silver beats it in most applications.

No, really the factor that contributes most to gold's value is its limited availability. And that is something that is e.g. much more true for Bitcoin.

The Brave web browser

neilbrown — Sun, 18 Jun 2017 22:18:33 +0000

> The low transaction costs are key and are the value that the money has in itself.

What an interesting claim...

I have wondered where the value of money comes from... once it was gold, but not for many years.
I read a suggestion that the value of "legal tender" currency is that the government accepts it to pay taxes, and that seems credible, at least.

But "low cost of transactions" being the value.... If that is true - and I do see sense in the idea - then it explains the instability. There seems to be a positive-feedback in the idea that "it is used because it is used", and positive feedback is bad for stability.

Chromium versus Firefox

MattJD — Sat, 17 Jun 2017 18:13:04 +0000

>> Too many sites assume something related to WebKit especially on mobile
>I've been using Firefox for Android ever since I got my first Android phone and don't remember any issues with websites.
It's been somewhat rare (and especially rare of late), but I have seen sites broken/not render as mobile because it wasn't Webkit. I've also had a little trouble getting both Chrome and Firefox to behave on Android for a site I was developing, though nothing major and nothing like dealing with IE.

Chromium versus Firefox

zdzichu — Sat, 17 Jun 2017 15:52:28 +0000

Safari is WebKit.

Chromium versus Firefox

ibukanov — Sat, 17 Jun 2017 15:51:08 +0000

Brendan Eich (he was my boss when I worked for Mozilla few years ago) has mentioned it either it his tweets or on HN or similar.

Chromium versus Firefox

intgr — Sat, 17 Jun 2017 12:52:44 +0000

Do you have first-hand information that this was their reason?

> Too many sites assume something related to WebKit especially on mobile

I've been using Firefox for Android ever since I got my first Android phone and don't remember any issues with websites. And then there are the hordes of mobile Safari users.

The Brave web browser

nix — Sat, 17 Jun 2017 12:08:21 +0000

cryptocurrency makes sense. It really does.
The low transaction costs are key

So presumably you're no longer considering Bitcoin cryptocurrency, since transaction delays are now so huge that schemes have sprung up where you pay people to get agglomerated into their transaction, driving transaction costs up to frankly ridiculous levels.

As far as pyramid schemes go and risk.. It's not a real pyramid scam, but the risk is part of how speculation works.

I'm not saying it's a pyramid scheme because it's risky. I'm saying it's a pyramid scheme because the exponentially declining mining rate is an obvious way to ensure that whatever value Bitcoin gets is predominantly funnelled to early users who mined or hung onto coins before it got popular. (Of course, this only works if the early bitcoins doesn't get stolen by someone else, which given the state of IT security means they more or less have to be kept offline and disconnected from any powered-on device. So perhaps we should say that it is a pyramid scheme that funnels value to early users and miners, and thieves who prey on those people.)

The Brave web browser

drag — Sat, 17 Jun 2017 04:17:00 +0000

cryptocurrency makes sense. It really does.

The low transaction costs are key and are the value that the money has in itself. Even if people limit their use of cryptocurrency simply as a way to bypass electric money transfers (transfer dollars into cryptocurrency to send, and then back again when done) and services like paypal then it has inherent value and will end up as a success.

I always figured bitcoin was doomed for failure, though. Why? Because it's the first time people have been able to try this stuff on a large scale. As far as pyramid schemes go and risk.. It's not a real pyramid scam, but the risk is part of how speculation works. Risk is critical for discipline in the market.. if you make it safe and guaranteed then there is no limit to the amount that people will try to drive the market to excess and exploit issues.

It's going to take a while and quite a few people getting burned on these sorts of markets before people really figure it out.

For any sort of business model that depends on micropayments then trying to base it entirely on Euro or dollars or anything else is just never going to work.

The Brave web browser

ssmith32 — Sat, 17 Jun 2017 01:34:43 +0000

If 15% of the Brave ad revenue is going back to the advertising partners, where is the money coming from?

Or is it just a silly way of saying the ads are 15% off the second price?

The Brave web browser

MattJD — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 20:58:37 +0000

> the way the algorithm has been defeated by a majority stakeholder permitting falsification of the trust chain.

Are you talking about the design of bitcoin, where a miner with a majority share of the hashing power can create a false chain? Or is there some specific example? And if the second, can you provide a link? A quick Google doesn't reveal anything about someone actually doing that.

The Brave web browser

k8to — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 20:14:52 +0000

Yeah pretty much. I'd love to pay for content instead of being assaulted with untrustworthy byte streams, but bitcoin et al don't have my trust.

When I last looked into the hoops I'd have to jump through to be able to own some bitcoins (provide my banking account details etc, or jump through a large number of technical hoops), I realized I didn't want them badly enough. And that leaves aside the way it's designed for speculation, and the way the algorithm has been defeated by a majority stakeholder permitting falsification of the trust chain. And so on.

I'm all for finding a way around the unreasonably high fees of visa and mastercard, but it's unclear if there's a low-cost high-reliability path for achieving that.

The Brave web browser

nix — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 16:52:09 +0000

The primary problem with using real currency for microtransactions is the high transaction costs at payment processors, but frankly something like Brave (a single point through which all transactions flow) can agglomerate multiple transactions into one and reduce those costs greatly. However, precisely *because* real money is involved, piles of extra regulation would also land on Brave's desk -- they're basically acting as something between a payment processor and a bank (since they store agglomerated funds while disaggregating them) and obviously that means they can't be as wild and woolly as they might otherwise like to be.

But, alas, I suspect that this is going to be their real problem: neither their likely users nor the websites they want to interact with care about this cryptocurrency stuff, they'd like to be paid / pay in actual money. If cryptocurrencies become successful enough that a significant proportion of plausible users and websites are accepting it, wel, look, the regulation will come along with it. It *has* to, because no actual financial system will accept the sort of wild west mass theft nonsense that Bitcoin, Ethereum etc have been rife with up till now.

Chromium versus Firefox

flussence — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 16:31:30 +0000

It's more likely due to Blink being the only embedding API in town. Nobody else wants people to use their browser as much as Google does.

Chromium versus Firefox

ibukanov — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 15:16:09 +0000

One of the strongest reason for using Chromium was web compatibility. Too many sites assume something related to WebKit especially on mobile.

The Brave web browser

dw — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 12:52:37 +0000

You're advocating for an online micropayments system based on real currency, there have been numerous attempts and I guess by now if a popular option for this doesn't exist yet, then perhaps there are some fundamental issues with this approach (and no, it's not an invitation for you to ask me to list them all out, it's a suggestion to go do your research).

As for whether the user ever need even know their $5 was turned into some magical sprinkling of bits behind the scenes, they don't, and this is firmly a UI problem.

As for the floating value of Brave's particular coin and how it may interact with the end user, I have no understanding of that, but Ethereum and derivatives are worlds onto themselves, at least I know that much

The Brave web browser

nix — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 11:12:03 +0000

So as a vitriolic hater of the current web ad infrastructure I was extremely strongly in favour of Brave when I started reading. I wasn't by the time I finished.

Using Bitcoins, or anything remotely like Bitcoins, is suicide for general adoption. That huge numbers of BATs were sold in seconds says nothing other than that there is a huge bubble in cryptocurrencies right now and a few people are trying to do something with massive numbers of bitcoin they made back in the early days (since bitcoin is brazely structured as a pyramid scheme to reward early miners). Unless you *want* the value of your currency to fluctuate crazily and for it to be usable only by a dedicated few, you shouldn't be relying on anything Bitcoin-related at present. The value of users' attention does not fluctuate by a factor of a thousand, and most users are not technically adept and/or do not want to go anywhere near the shark-and-theft-infested wasteland that is cryptocurrencies, so this is probably a bad decision. Using a major existing currency like Euros, which hundreds of millions of people have instant access to and the rest can get acces to easily, was far more sensible. (Also... the advertisers don't *want* cryptocurrency, they want real currency. The two are not terribly interconvertible, and the convertibility plunges whenever yet another massive cryptocurrency scam or mega-theft breaks open.)

And then I discover that they intentionally broke their browser by disabling installation of Chrome extensions. Yes, thanks, very secure, I'm sure, but that just means you're dictating that I not run my preferred ad-blocker but rather run yours and that I have to *change browser* to change that decision. (And I tried Brave a few months back and frankly its adblocker is much worse at its job than uBlock, so I'd be paying to not see ads -- if I could pay, which I can't, because I don't have a Bitcoin wallet because I'm not crazy -- but *still* seeing ads the adblocker is not smart enough to stop. The worst of both worlds. No thank you.)

Chromium versus Firefox

roc — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 07:49:20 +0000

It's less tied to one particular application, at least, since the Electron community is pretty large.

Also, using Chromium is lower risk because they don't have to worry about Google accidentally or deliberately making their Web properties favour Chrome.

The Brave web browser

ngiger@mus.ch — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 07:33:47 +0000

Thanks for the article. I was always annoyed that I could visit the NZZ (Neue Zürcher Zeitung), a very informative newpaper, for which I am subsribed in paper form. It has a lot of publicity on its site, which sometimes even obscures parts of a headline or picture. With brave loading was a snap and no ad was shown.

I needed to start it via brave --no-sandbox on my debian stretch client.

Chromium versus Firefox

epa — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 07:28:44 +0000

I find it interesting that even someone with deep knowledge of Firefox internals chose to start by forking Chromium instead of Firefox. Is the Chromium code so much easier to work with?

Comparison of economic models

Creideiki — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 18:28:42 +0000

It looks like Brave is doing pretty much the same thing as Flattr's current reinvention, with the only difference I can see being Bitcoins vs. Euros. Flattr has relied on a button added to each participating site since it started in 2010, but is moving to a browser-based zero-effort solution.

I assume, given the strong network effects, that it's easy to have such a system being wildly popular in one field and completely unknown elsewhere. In my corner of the Internet (which is inhabited by a fairly artsy crowd), Flattr's minimal-interaction model faded into obscurity several years ago, with the interaction-rich Patreon rising to prominence instead. Then again, the example screenshot in the article shows only news sites, and maybe Patreon has the wrong model for them.

Is Flattr still being used elsewhere? What other popular micropayment systems are there, and how are they different?