[liberationtech] Does anyone know anything about the Brave Browser?

[John Ohno]

I haven't used Brave myself, but I'm aware of a couple things about it
(other than it being, like almost all browsers, a reskinned chrome).

One is that, from what I understand, it supports DAT out of the box & so
it's popular with folks who are using the DAT ecosystem.

The second is that there was a fracas a couple years ago about the basic
attention tokens. Specifically, BATs were being allocated to popular
creators who themselves weren't aware of the system at all, based on
time-on-site, & there was a bunch of confusion when users of the browser
tried to interact with those creators about it. Brave developers stepped in
& claimed that if the tokens were never claimed they'd just disappear, &
that there was no way for some third party to siphon away what was
allocated to somebody like Tom Scott even if Tom never actually signed up
to get a payout, but the misleading UI design that led people to believe
they were paying these folks who hadn't even signed up made the project
look scammy.

The third issue is that the continuing involvement of Brendan Eich worries
a lot of people, because of fears that he'll push the project into
supporting specific political directions.

On Tue, Jan 28, 2020 at 2:38 AM Deepak Shah <kalopatthar at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have been using Brave Browser for a year now. I really like it. Since it
> is Chromium-based, it is not very different in terms of shortcuts/bookmarks
> with Google Chrome. Actually bookmarks get properly exported to Brave. It
> also blocks trackers and ads, does not automatically share the location and
> also saves amount of time. I am not a Brave Developer but would love to
> hear more from the developer.
>
> On Tue, Jan 28, 2020 at 12:54 AM Tom Ritter <tom at ritter.vg> wrote:
>
>> I think there are Brave developers on the list; but if not I can speak
>> to the overall well intentions of the project, and that it is a
>> reasonable choice of browser for general purpose browsing, and not
>> some scam and not some insecure scary piece of software you should
>> avoid... Is there something specific you are wondering about it?
>>
>> -tom
>>
>> On Tue, 28 Jan 2020 at 06:35, Yosem Companys <ycompanys at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave
>> Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. The browser blocks ads
>> and website trackers, and provides a way for users to send cryptocurrency
>> contributions in the form of Basic Attention Tokens to websites and content
>> creators.
>> >
>> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)
>> > https://brave.com/
>> > --
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