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Former Mozilla CEO Launches Brave, a New Adblock Browser

Celestial writes:

Brave Software, a new startup by Brendan Eich (creator of the JavaScript programming language and former CEO of Mozilla), unveiled the new Brave browser today for Windows, Mac OS X, Android, and iOS. The Brave browser is currently in beta, based on Chromium, and aims to block most advertisements, while still potentially making money for publishers.

Brave will block all non-native ads, trackers, analytics scripts and impression-tracking pixels. However, the browser will eventually insert advertisements of its own, but which Brendan Eich claims to be unintrusive, with no persistent user id or highly re-identifiable cookie. The aim of Brave isn't to create a list of approved advertisers, or to aggressively pursue ad dollars: "We hope our users will form a valuable enough audience that our browser-side anonymous targeting will get ads from the buy side organically. We don't want to play games."

Beyond privacy protection, Eich promises Brave's browser will come with a speed boost: It loads pages two to four times faster than other smartphone browsers and 1.4 times faster than other browsers for personal computers.

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Opinion: Eich's "Brave" Browser Is More Complication Than Solution

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Brendan Eich's recent announcement of the Brave browser seems a bit too good to be true, especially considering that it's coming from the creator of JavaScript, the backbone of most modern dynamic elements in web design, and especially the backbone of the modern "death of a hundred cross-site-scripting loads" that causes webpages to take as long as their Year 2000 equivalents on hardware of the era, and for security to be thrown to the wind. But consider that the Brave website is half-broken when viewed via Firefox with NoScript enabled (script count at 42, only ytimg.com allowed via default ruleset). That doesn't speak well to the privacy-minded web user, but at least it's better than the page not rendering at all, which seems like a sadly escalating trend with highly-dynamically-scripted webpages these days. That superficial detail aside, there's also the question of the revenue cut hinted at by Kieren McCarthy's article on The Register. According to McCarthy, "the company hasn't said how much of a cut it would ask for, and of course the entire approach requires that there be a significant number of Brave users. To be viable, the company would need to become more popular than Opera (with 1.5 per cent of the browser market) and on a par with Safari (3.7 per cent). And that means between five to ten million users." Pitching Brave to the mass market seems like the best way to build market share, and surely Eich has been investing in a marketing plan to attract the privacy-concerned-but-technologically-novice user, which could easily cement the 10 million users necessary to turn a profit.

A bigger question is what the reaction from the web advertising industry will be, and if we are to go by the opinion of IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg titled "Ad Blocking: The Unnecessary Internet Apocalypse". Rothenberg recently (and perhaps personally) dis-invited Adblock Plus from the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting (SoylentNews coverage), so the reception will probably not be rosy. While IAB isn't taking a fully anti-ad-blocker stance (Ghostery senior VP Scott Cunningham is slated to speak at the conference), Rothenberg's diatribe calls ad-blocking "robbery", stating, "Some websites, particularly those with millennial audiences, are already losing up to 40% of their ad revenue because of ad blocking." Being the head of an industry organization, Rothenberg will probably not be enthusiastic with the idea of revenue sharing, or of "ad anonymizing" technology poisoning advertising analytics. He advocates "lean ads", the end of annoying autoplaying video and intrusive interactive ads that are "not worthy of a profession that aspires to cultural significance," and that "publishers must take control of their site experiences, and turn down advertising that doesn't meet their standards for user engagement." I expect that Rothenberg will want any ad content control to be on the terms of the IAB and its members, and not any third parties such as Brendan Eich.

As for myself, I've already seen the start of the "Internet Apocalypse", and it's not that bad. NoScript has been one of the best plugins I have ever installed, as it blocks JavaScript execution from all but approved domains, subdomains, and servers. It does make for half-broken (and sometimes fully-broken) websites, but I can eventually figure out the mechanics behind granting access to the subdomains necessary to enable a CDN or a merchant service provider, but not the external ad network. Locally hosted ads work fine, and perhaps that's the way things should be from now on, holding the website itself liable for any malware that is spread from its ads, instead of shrugging it off as coming from their ad provider, who does nothing, or close to nothing, since they barely curate ads for acceptable display and code content. I won't be downloading Brave, as the sales pitch seems too creepy and prone to being attacked by ad publishers or ad industry groups. (Rothenberg did say in his article that he could "contemplate suing unethical ad-blocking profiteers out of business.") I will, however, be sharpening the arsenal of privacy-protecting tools, especially with RefControl, a utility that allows per-site HTTP referer rules.

The one saving grace of Eich's efforts with Brave is that it adds another player to the Internet advertising battle. Aside from allowing plugins, Google's Chrome team and The Mozilla Foundation haven't been approaching the problem of adverspamming and malvertising, possibly to avoid backlash from the IAB.

Former Mozilla Boss Brendan Eich Brandishes Brave Ad-Blocking Browser

takyon writes:

Brendan Eich, former CEO of Mozilla, has released a beta version of a privacy-oriented Web browser based on Chromium:

At Brave, we're building a solution designed to avert [an ad-blocking] 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.

Coverage at The Register :

Rather than simply acting as an ad blocker, the company hopes to provide a more nuanced approach. It recognizes that many websites are reliant on advertising in order to provide their content for free, so it is planning to utilize a user's browsing history to fit them into standard advertising segments – and then provide that segment information to websites and advertisers.

The idea is that advertisers will still be able to reach users but they won't have the same depth of information on an individual user. Nor will Brave. The result, in theory, is greater control over privacy and none of those ads for products you recently looked at that make you feel as though you are being watched.

Of course, to make that approach work, Brave would act as a gatekeeper and take a cut of the ad money, which is what would fund the company. The company hasn't said how much of a cut it would ask for and of course, the entire approach requires that there be a significant number of Brave users. To be viable, the company would need to become more popular than Opera (with 1.5 per cent of the browser market) and on a par with Safari (3.7 per cent). And that means between five to ten million users.

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