Former Mozilla CEO Chased Off by SJWs Announces New Internet Browser ‘Brave’

[Miss Annie]

Former Mozilla CEO Chased Off by SJWs Announces New Internet Browser ‘Brave’

I can't express how excited I am about this! I have always loved Firefox and REFUSE to use Chrome because it is a google product. Since switching over to Linux for my OS I am feeling like I have less choices for a browser. I am SOOO excited about this! I hope they make it for Linux!

Former Mozilla CEO Chased Off by SJWs Announces New Internet Browser ‘Brave’

Ousted Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich has a new Internet browser, and it’s nothing less than you’d expect from the creator of JavaScript and co-founder of the company behind FireFox.

Brave is a new browser that aims to “fix the Web.” How? By blocking everything except the content you explicitly want. That means no ads, no cookies, nothing that you haven’t personally requested from the Internet. The exceptions are extremely specific, and the approach is as aggressive as the ads themselves.

In a letter to potential users on the Brave Software website, Eich says:

Everyone’s talking about ad blocking. Blockers can make the user experience of the Web much better. But as Marco Arment noted, they don’t feel good to many folks. They feel like free-riding, or even starting a war. You may never click on an ad, but even forming an impression from a viewable ad has some small value. With enough people blocking ads, the Web’s main funding model is in jeopardy.

At Brave, we’re building a solution designed to avert war and give users the fair deal they deserve for coming to the Web to browse and contribute. We are building a new browser and a connected private cloud service with anonymous ads. Today we’re releasing the 0.7 developer version for early adopters and testers, along with open source and our roadmap.

Brave browsers block everything: initial signaling/analytics scripts that start the programmatic advertising “dirty pipe”, impression-tracking pixels, and ad-click confirmation signals. By default Brave will insert ads only in a few standard-sized spaces. We find those spaces via a cloud robot (so users don’t have to suffer, even a few canaries per screen size-profile, with ad delays and battery draining). We will target ads based on browser-side intent signals phrased in a standard vocabulary, and without a persistent user id or highly re-identifiable cookie.

To accomplish this, Brave Software has raised a reported $2.5 million from “angel” investors. It doesn’t sound like much, considering the height of Brave’s ambition. In November, Eich told C-Net that they’re “trying to innovate in dimensions that a lot of incumbents won’t innovate, where the user will have more control and maybe bargaining power.”

Alongside Brendan Eich in this endeavor are long-time allies Brian Bondy and Kevin Grandon. The former worked on FireFox at Mozilla, and the latter worked on both the FireFox OS and WebVR’s internet virtual reality technology.

Eich left Mozilla in 2014 after a targeted campaign against him once it was revealed that he had donated $1,000 to efforts to pass Proposition 8 in California in 2008, which banned same-sex marriage in the state. While celebrated by authoritarian progressives, Eich’s ouster was roundly criticized by proponents of the 1st Amendment, including ardent leftists and proponents of gay marriage like Bill Maher and Andrew Sullivan.

Brave makes a bold statement, and even its just-launched 0.7 version is already turning heads. If Brave Software succeeds, advertising agencies will be forced to approach web-based content in a whole new way. Very soon, all-but-required ad blocking browser enhancements may be rendered obsolete by this altogether new browsing experience.

 

[youngbuck]

Good, anything that helps protect people's privacy online is a good thing in my book.

 

[dannno]

Sounds like Firefox with Noscript addon built in - that's been around for a long time.. But if somebody that valuable was run out a company that big and important to the tech industry for donating to a political cause like that then it sounds then turning away from that company would be a great option - all the better that the same guy is running the new company. I actually voted the opposite of the way he donated, but it's not like he was trying to start a new war in another country or trying to take away our basic rights.. Really legalizing gay marriage to me sounds more like a semantics change and is largely symbolic. Of course it has some negative legal implications, ask the cake bakers in Colorado.. pretty sure it has some positive legal implications for gay people as well despite what some say. All the better reason to get govt. out of marriage.

 

[Ronin Truth]

Sounds good. Thanks for the heads up. I'll check it out.

 

[Ronin Truth]

• By Brendan Eich
• President and CEO
• Posted January 20, 2016

How to Fix the Web

The Web is always in trouble for some reason or other. I remember when Microsoft came after Netscape and threatened to lock Web standards into IE. Only the Web is so big, with such reach to billions of users, that no one owns it. This means it will always be contested ground.

But the Web today faces a primal threat.

Some say the threat to the Web is “mobile”, but the Web is co-evolving with smartphones, not going away. Webviews are commonplace in apps, and no publisher of note is about to replace its primary website with a walled-garden equivalent. Nor can most websites hope to develop their own apps and convert their browser users to app-only users.

I contend that the threat we face is ancient and, at bottom, human. Some call it advertising, others privacy. I view it as the Principal-Agent conflict of interest woven into the fabric of the Web.

You use a browser to find and contribute information, but you generally do not pay for the websites who host that information. Across billions of people, for most sites in most countries, it isn’t realistic to expect anything but a free Web. And as Ben Thompson points out, “free” means ad-supported in the main. Yes, successful sites and apps may convert you to a paying customer, but most won’t.

You might object: “Hey, I’m ready to pay for websites I support”. I’m with you, but many people are not so well-off that they can support most of the commercial sites they use. Also, the Web missed an opportunity back in the early days to define payments and all they entail as a standard.

Once you grant this premise, that the Web needs ads in the large, it follows that your browsing habits will be surveilled, to the best of the ad ecosystem players’ abilities. Also, depending on how poorly ads are designed and integrated, you may become blind or averse to them. Since the ‘90s, I’ve seen several races to the bottom along these lines.

The Principal (you) uses a browser (one of a layer of agents, both software and humans) to browse the Web and keep its lights on. Consider your primary agent, the browser. It’s a complex piece of code, but now thanks to Mozilla, WebKit, Chromium, and even in part Microsoft, this billion-dollar investment is available as a mix of free and open source software.

Yet thanks to tracking options that are inevitable with anything like the Web, your valuable and private user behavior and browsing intent signals can be extracted via your current browser. And that may not be a fair deal.

Everyone’s talking about ad blocking. Blockers can make the user experience of the Web much better. But as Marco Arment noted, they don’t feel good to many folks. They feel like free-riding, or even starting a war. You may never click on an ad, but even forming an impression from a viewable ad has some small value. With enough people blocking ads, the Web’s main funding model is in jeopardy.

At Brave, we’re building a solution designed to avert war and give users the fair deal they deserve for coming to the Web to browse and contribute. We are building a new browser and a connected private cloud service with anonymous ads. Today we’re releasing the 0.7 developer version for early adopters and testers, along with open source and our roadmap.

Brave browsers block everything: initial signaling/analytics scripts that start the programmatic advertising “dirty pipe”, impression-tracking pixels, and ad-click confirmation signals. By default Brave will insert ads only in a few standard-sized spaces. We find those spaces via a cloud robot (so users don't have to suffer, even a few canaries per screen size-profile, with ad delays and battery draining). We will target ads based on browser-side intent signals phrased in a standard vocabulary, and without a persistent user id or highly re-identifiable cookie.

The browser sees everything you do, including actions to stop that annoying phenomenon of retargeting where an ad chases you around the Web, often for something you just bought or decided not to buy. We keep user data out of our cloud Brave Vault by default. It’s better for you and us that we don’t store any of your data without your permission.

Thus we are a browser-based ad-tech platform, with high precision and privacy. What’s more, we aim to solve the Principal-Agent problem wherever it arises. Brave is the only approach to the Web that puts users first in ownership and control of their browsing data by blocking trackers by default, with no exceptions. The same could apply to other kinds of data, and with your help, we hope to grow big enough to serve users’ interests above all others’.

In evolving systems like the Web, many players get stuck optimizing locally, no matter how much they think globally.

Ad blockers may hope for better ads, but so far they seem to be having little effect. Publishers trying ad-blocker blockers may get a few local wins, but that path is an arms race. Brave brings innovation to bear across the whole Web system.

Join us. With your help, we can fix the Web.

https://brave.com/#about