I think my favorite and the best browser is google chrome, its just preference and i dont think most of you guys like chrome but its my favourite
Install privacy badger and an ad-blocker, and you’ll be done; Chrome will not show you ads ehoch are annoying.
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i did install those extensions, needed for every browser
I have just read in the last issue of this newsletter
that BRAVE browser exists.
I installed it with
…
sudo apt install apt-transport-https curl gnupg
curl -s https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/brave-core.asc | sudo apt-key --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/brave-browser-release.gpg add -
echo “deb [arch=amd64] https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/ stable main” | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install brave-browser
…
There were no errors.
I rebooted the computer.
I saw the addition in my apps and I was able to come here at https://itsfoss.community/ and jump at the search function to see if BRAVE was used.
I have a question : What are BRAVE rewards ?
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In Brave, you can earn little amounts of e-currency if you click on certain, supposedly privacy-respecting, ads. In order to get them, obviously you have to register and have some e-currency account. For me, the mere existence of this option, is a feature, I despise and my main reason for not using this browser, but this is my very personal attitude and should not be taken as a discouragement to use it.
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I think they aren’t about respecting privacy but about being “ethical”. Perhaps in my entire life I have seen maybe 10 ads in total that I found perfectly acceptable. All the other trillions of ads I have seen are utter dishonest crap, that are basically non-governmental bullshit propaganda.
This one of the reasons I don’t use Brave. I cannot support ads, in any way. I find the whole advertisement idea a fundamentally bad thing. If you really want something, you don’t need an ad to tell you that.
Did anyone notice how all browsers right on the spot disabled miners running in the background, when you visit websites with mining JavaScript scripts enabled?
I have never met anyone who was annoyed by that or even visited such a site ever, yet this mining features was blocked right from the beginning, when this idea started to exist. They wanted to kill it, before it even started.
Hmmm, I wonder why they wanted to block miners from websites, whose owners wanted to remove ads from their sites in favour of miners, that use a little CPU, but at least do not try to brainwash people into buying something they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.
Does anyone here have an idea, why browsers block all mining scripts on websites by default but they do not do that with ads?? 
Hi @Mina what is your favourite colour, sorry browser - just list it - no matter - whatever. 
use it to jump the list
Just been testing two popular lightweight distros on a 2GiB RAM old laptop and both come with FireFox installed. I mistakenly fired it up and there was a tab with privacy policy. One quick look reminded me of why I got rid of it way on back in Vista days when they changed their privacy policy. 
They give or sell your data to third parties - end of 
Well not quite our @Ankush_Das has just been singing praises of
…without mention of privacy policy - just how good - With Total Cookie Protection.
Just what is the point if you have no control of your own personal data 
OMG 
Just use Abrowser and then read gnulinux privacy statement 
it might take 10 seconds to read
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I have no idea what the Brave awards are, I have never used them. I use Brave because
of the way it handles adds, I’m sure it may be cutting into Chrome and Chromium popularity.
I also use Edge, when I am logged into W10, and Firefox when I am logged into PCLinuxOS,
but only as second browser. Since Edge is now chrome based, it would not surprise me if
Google pulled the plug on all chrome based browsers.
The thing is: Advertisement works, so it makes perfect sense for companies to use them.
This is not the way, capitalism works.
On the other hand: Ads pay for the free services, people use. So, I believe, service providers, aka web-sites, have every right to use them in order to keep their business running.
Nowadays, most ads on the internet are pretty unobtrusive, unlike in the old days when they used pop-ups, so what’s the big deal? If you feel, you’re not influenced by them in any way, they shouldn’t bother you at all. Wanting to have an ad-free net, is to me, wanting to have the cake and eat it.
Using a foreign computer to do work for you without explicit consent, seems to be ethically dubious to me, to say the least. However, the reason why web-browsers block such scripts, is obvious: It was technically possible.
Blocking ads, generally, is technically far harder. There is no way to determine technically which content is “real content” and which is placed for commercial reasons.
With the wide-spread use of ad-blockers, things have become even more problematic: Whilst “classical ads” are fairly simple to identify from a user’s point of view, “disguised” ads which come in the form of manipulated search results, sponsored content or simply biased reviews, are difficult to spot.
The widespread use of technical barriers against “honest” ads, including context and history based targeted ones, has directly led to the rise of more sublime and dishonest advertisement techniques.
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Sure, it makes perfect sense, if you are a company. It also makes perfect sense Roundup to be used as a herbicide, even though it literally causes cancer within people who work and/or live near areas where Roundup is used. However, it still makes sense for a company to use this product, as they don’t care if people around it get cancer, since profit is all that matters to the company.
Why do businesses need to be evil to keep running? Perhaps the system in itself is faulty, because I would expect from a good system to result in good actions, not being forced to do evil.
What is the reason they got a bit more acceptable? Because the people forced them to become a bit more acceptable. If it weren’t for pop-up blockers, which are in every major browser now, the advertisements would be just as bad as 20 years ago. Or even worse. Just look at commercial advertisement in the US. It’s the biggest joke, because everything is advertised as if stupid children were the target audience of all the ads. And that is the case since pretty much 50 years or more in the US.
That is exactly the problem. Most people feel they are not influenced by them or not so much. But pretty much all the tests and studies in this area confirm always one thing: no matter how smart and aware you are, you are always being influenced by ads and you can’t do anything about it.
To me this sounds like someone gets inside your brain and manipulates how you think just for profit. This, to me, is a thing that should be not allowed to be done, especially if it is only for profit and not for something important.
This is a very narrow-minded view, that implicates that we need ads, to make the system work. This ignores alternatives to making profit. For example, you can be the best and nicest company on earth. If you are, everyone will know about you, without a single ad. There are tons of companies out there that everyone knows, even though the companies’ marketing budgets are as big as my pants’ pocket.
Wait, using a machine to indirectly pay for a service, as you emphasized earlier is very important, is much more worse and more unethical than literally going inside your brain and changing how you think? Could not disagree more.
I would be much happier if service providers, especially those who mainly use websites to provide them, would move away from ads and to usage of CPU power. This way, nobody is brainwashed, but the providers still get money.
And I cannot stress enough, that ads are not the only way. You can create paywalls, you can do the mining scripts, you can accept donations, like e.g. through Liberapay or other Patreon-like services; you can earn money in so many different ways, nobody needs to use ads. Ads just have become a very easy and at the same time bad way to earn money.
I am an avid Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin user pretty much since these extensions came into existence. Without them I would not be able to use the internet as much as I am. I would not be able to stand all the ads in my face, dragging attention from what I am trying to do, just so they can earn a third of a cent from my “impression”.
These are excellent extensions that work for years and years on and always work as they should. Only in the rarest cases some website didn’t work too well and the only website I know they can break is ebay.
So it is proven since years, that ads can and should be blocked. Firefox and Chrome for example could by default install these extensions on browser installation or, even better, hardcore integrate them into the browsers themselves. However, they do not want that, what a surprise…
I have seen on other people’s computers, that there are always sponsored ads in search engine results. I did not know that for a long time, because my ad blockers handle these “inline” sponsored things perfectly, as they should. So cannot confirm this assumption either. All inline ads can be easily handled, especially when they are Google relatred. And a huge variety of ads on the internet are all Google based, i.e. easy to identify and block.
“You didn’t like our brainwashing, so you dared to block it! Thou shalt not block ads! Now you have to pay because you made us increase the usage of ethically bad ads and that is all your fault, filthy humans!! My investors need even more money, now give it to me; any resistance is futile!!! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!”
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Well thought answer, my dear! I truly enjoy a good discussion with real arguments. I am aware that this is off-topic and actually beyond the intended scope of this forum, but I consider it to be relevant for nearly every internet user, so I shall not resist the temptation to spin this a bit further.
I couldn’t agree more: Capitalism, as we know it, is certainly not the best way to ensure the well-being of the planet and humanity in the long term, but unfortunately we might still have to live with it for a while.
No, it’s not worse, but blocking this kind of revenue generation was rather easy whilst it left the existing business model of selling products through ads intact. A monopoly will always try to protect itself.
I do agree that there are other ways to generate revenues than through ads (I am using ad-blockers myself), but I still consider them to be a minor annoyance compared to the many things that are wrong in our world.
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Sure, in the end the majority of things discussed due to public interest are up to perspectives. From the perspective of your example, I couldn’t agree more. I think it’s also obvious, that everyone has their own perception of reality and I doubt any human is able to see the real reality. So, of course, when I deem ads so evil and intrusive, then one of the main reason for that is how i perceive them personally. Sure, I also have philosophical, i.e. ethical arguments against ads, but people who aren’t as annoyed by ads as me perhaps don’t care so much about perceiving them constantly and additionally maybe do not care about the implied influence either, as these people would be, for example, influenced in one way or the other, anyway.
I have met people who actually know what, for example, Facebook and Google are doing (data mining, etc.) and they still said, that they do not care and accept that. I couldn’t ever imagine me doing that, but apparently such people exist.
I think this is a good example for what I personally can’t stand about ads. This is the only website I remember, where apparently the actual webmaster manually embeds advertisements into the website. This is the only way that I know of that can circumvent most adblocking measures, as the advertisements are literally built into the site, just as any other non-ad component of the site.
So, on this website, I do not find any ad very intrusive or unethical or “bad”. Yet, every time I visit this website, the ads are constantly grabbing attention and forcing me to think about the ads’ backgrounds. There always was an ad about some Linux telephone thing for the past decade or something and everytime I visited DistroWatch, I saw this ad and my attention was grabbed. Obviously, so many years passed since I have seen it the first time, yet it always re-grabs my attention, over and over.
And, as already mentioned, these are not even classic “unethical” ads. I find them fine and fitting into the website’s context. So can’t really complain from that perspective. Yet, even these acceptable ads are immensely disrupting my experience on the website. This is one of the reasons I do not stay for too long on this website and tend to visit it rather rarely.
Now, imagine how I perceive the classic “unethical” ads. It’s pretty much unbearable. If there are sites, that explicitly do not allow me to visit them, because I have turned on an adblocker, I simply do not visit them. I only turn off the adblocker for website providers who are truly in big need (Xah Lee) and just do not know any better than to show ads or if actual content is served as technical ads, even if they are not real ads, in the classic sense, as it is the case with eBay. Theoretically, all offers on eBay are “ads”, but the difference is, that I voluntarily visit the website to voluntarily buy something. It’s different from visiting a website for reading an article about how blue the sky is and then seeing an ad for breast enlargement or whatever.
I think I am drifting into the philosophical question of “what is advertisement?” and this is quite a reach out of this place’s scope, so we are good for now, I hope.
I think, the biggest fact I hate about that system is, that people arguing for this system always talk about theory and people arguing against this system always talk about practice.
In theory, capitalism is a very great system, that gives everyone the opportunity to have a very good life.
In practice, it simply does not work as easy, as the system can be exploited so easily and so harshly at the cost of millions of lives (i.e. not dead people, but people with really bad lives) and this is evident, for example, in the way how wealth is distributed across the globe and across single countries, continents, areas and unions.
Whatever, out of scope.
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That’s a very big argument @Akito and @Mina… I’ve never seen people arguing on something this long! 
I’m sorry if I’ve violated the rules.
Then you were definitely around boring people.
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Yeah, that’s true… No one inside my friends circle would be entertaining. Everything is boring nowadays. They don’t even know what’s Linux…
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You haven’t. If someone did, it was @Akito and me. Believe me, my dear, if I weren’t a moderator and somehow had to set an example for good behaviour, I’d be engaging in far more discussions than I already do.
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Ik use Firefox and form more privacy and VPN, Opera
I use Brave on Linux for years. It is open-source and you can view the source codes here: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser
From my experience, it is constantly updated, once per week or at least once every 2 weeks.
I turned off the ad tokens or Brave reward stuff because I am not interested in those.
Vivaldi is not open-source actually. If you read the Wikipedia article, Vivaldi is a proprietary software.
To be precise, Vivaldi is half open-source. You can view some of the source codes here: https://vivaldi.com/source/
I use Firefox as my first browser, Brave as the second and Vivaldi as the third.
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I’ve just started using Brave last week - on both Linux desktop and Macbook. Tried it a couple of years back and found it’s sync feature a bit too clunky and inwieldy (see below about remote computers).
Works well. Some of the annoying nags about doing bitcoin stuff, which makes me wary, is this thing doing other nefarious stuff in the background I’m not aware of or have visibility? Doesn’t seem to be chewing up suspect CPU cycles though… so far, so good…
Using Brave in combination with pi-hole, and I’m getting most ads blocked, not that they bothered me hugely in the first place (and it does provide revenue) for sites that weren’t sticking stuff in your face (and overlaying content - sorry Abishek - Brave blocks all the ads on itsfoss.com - not sure how to re-enable them in Brave).
Getting sync working was reasonably straightforward with two computers side by side (it gets hard when you want to sync a remote computer, and your several hundred character passphrase is time limited and the remote computer is at least an hour away by road or public transport).
Another thing I learned to my regret, on BOTH computers I let it import my Chrome settings, then when I sync’d the two - I got duplicate and triplicate bookmarks! Next time - don’t import from Chrome - sync with another Brave instance instead!
Brave is doing EVERYTHING I was doing in Google Chrome before. All my favourite extensions work in it too, “Faster Bookmarks”, “Recent Bookmarks”, “Gnome Shell Extensions”, “Darkness Pro”, “Dark Theme” for Wikipedia, MS Office…
I’ve stopped using Chromium since Google revoked the sync API - so when I’m using one of my RPi4 machines - I use Firefox (and sync that too - using my gmail account).
Haven’t permanently switched yet, I may yet revert back to Google Chrome.
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Brave works for me!!!
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