Ignore the people criticizing you my friend, backlash is expected in a community of power users that use Hacker News- because they favor power tools. But you've made something really nice and quite useful, and you've solved a real-world problem.
I hope to see an operating system with these scripts as built-in, because they are so intuitive and helpful! Which OS will be the first to take this on?
> it really can become the Year of the Linux Desktop. Gnome has genuinely gotten pretty great in the last couple years, and I think a lot of former Windows would genuinely like it if they gave it a chance
This comment could have been written at any point in the past 20 years.
I ran Enlightement + GNOME at work... on OS/2... circa 1999/2000. Wasn't even that bad. Also on linux of course.
Since then it comes down to someone wanting to go deeper than the surface and that's not for everyone, particularily if they are busy.
Pain can get the attention of even the busiest people so I really hope they keep making user suffer like this because that is the best driver away from windows and off the plantation.
I wouldn’t say 20 years, I think the tides turned somewhat when AMD opened up their drivers around ~10 years ago and really turned when Valve released Proton in 2018. Prior to that it was still kind of hard for me to recommend Linux to people.
A browser being based on Chromium has nothing to do with how private it is. Yes you are furthering an internet monopoly by using chromium. But there is noncorrelation between being based of Chromium and Privacy.
Yes it has, unless they plan to do significant changes to how the relevant JS APIs function, which is usually prohibitively expensive to maintain. Standard Chromium allows websites to fetch a lot of fingerprintable bits, this is even true for Brave. Tracking protection on Chromium is a joke.
Firefox on the other hand is better in this respect and even has a setting explicitly for resisting fingerprinting.
Calling Brave "best-in-class for resisting fingerprinting" is quite bold. Especially when it's so easily disproven.
Try some good fingerprint testing sites on Brave and see what comes up (those results alone should chock you). Then try the same sites on Firefox with privacy.resistFingerprinting=true. Unless some truly revolutionary initiatives have been taken at Brave since last I checked, you will see Firefox do A LOT better than Brave.
Brave suck at resisting fingerprinting. It may be better than other Chromium-based browsers, but it's still pathetic.
> Try some good fingerprint testing sites on Brave
Um. Have you tried this? Because obviously based on my comment I've done this before (and I've of course included Firefox).
I just did this again and sites tell me Brave has a randomized fingerprint. Firefox's is "unique". A specific example: the EFF Cover Your Tracks website[1] said that both browsers convey 18.21 bits of identifying information.
Additionally, if you need to enable a certain setting for best performance, that browser is obviously worse for purpose, given that the vast majority of people don't change settings.
I actually did, but admittedly it was maybe 4 years ago. Brave vs Firefox. Brave gave the fingerprinter a lot of information about my hardware including the exact model of my GPU, while Firefox did not.
I think I wrote some report at one time about this issue, so it was a bit more than just surface level testing. Chromium was always a disapointment whenever I attempted a comparison.
I think a more fair comparison would be today's Brave vs some hardened Firefox such as Librewolf, Mullvad Browser or even Tor Browser. Because the issue is not how vanilla Chromium or Firefox perform, but how well they can be hardened in practice.
Worth noting is that Brave does better when it comes to compatibility, because it leaves WebGL and other APIs enabled, while something like Tor Browser will disable those for privacy reasons. It hints at different priorities between these projects.
These points should be addressed first on the website.