Giving it a try

Hello,

I just started trying out your browser. I gave it a try because of the built in adblocker and the prospect to maybe one day get paid content based on blockchain technology (which I am interested in)

It is convincing in the first try, and the handling is quite similar to chrome. I use macOS Mojave 10.4.1, and I did not yet find a way to activate synchronisation. (This is not a support request, just a hint that it might not be so obvious how to do it. But sync is a must!!!)

All in all it will take some days or weeks to find out if this is really an alternative that I can live with.

Concrats for your bravety! It will be hard to compete with Chrome and IE. Go for it!!!

Hi @alex89,
Thanks for using Brave.

First, please search for existing thread before open a new one. Keyword “Sync” with “Latest post” sorting will show similar topics. :slightly_smiling_face:

Brave Sync is not yet available for Brave 0.56.x and higher. It’s still in the works and testing phase.

Thanks for your patience
:slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi all and thanks @eljuno for the reply!

I wanted to add a comment about adblockers, but I could not find a fitting thread to join. So please excuse if I continue with this one …

There are some sites where adblocking is noticed and the content is not shown in return. What is your policy in such cases? Is the adblocking meant to be somewhat anonymous, so that the site should not notice about adblocking, or do you think that adblocking should always be “in the open”?

Remaining unnoticed seems tricky to me: A server could even block a request just by looking at the “user-agent” header of the request. One could fake the user-agent and download adds but not show them (performance killer ). I do not see any other way for an adblocker to remain unnoticed.

What are your plans/goals with that?

Edit: I just saw that the user-agent header for brave does not include “brave”. So this seems to be somewhat “anonymous” …

cc @Mattches. Maybe he know who will have a proper answer.

For now Brave using Chrome user-agent. That’s why you will not see “Brave” in the UA and sites will think that you’re using Chrome.

There’s a plan to use Brave own UA. And some site already whitelisted. Example, if you search “What is my user agent” on DuckDuckGo, it’ll recognize Brave. :slightly_smiling_face:

There’s an issue for adding a unique UA to Brave:

Let me see if I can confirm an answer regarding the ad-blocking techniques.
cc @luke.mulks as well who can probably answer this.

Hello!

This is a good question.

With regard to the topic in general, let me provide some context.

  • Publishers have different ways of detecting ad blocking. Some will add “bait” by including a 3rd party request, or will detect if an attempt to set a 3p cookie is blocked, and if there’s an error, will throw up a message that you’re using an ad blocker. Others will attempt to detect from certain DOM elements, or attempt to detect an extension, etc.

  • Defensive measures in these cases vary. There are some go-to approaches we have for certain cases, and in other cases we apply more of a site-level hack to bypass the notice.

In general, our policy is that if an ad blocking detection message is thrown in front of a user, we want to remove that friction. The user has decided to use a product that blocks 3rd party ads and tracking. In a lot of cases, this is for security and privacy protection.

Some cases that are exceptions are those in which you get a message for a paywall / subscription. We don’t want to circumvent traditional paywalls per se, but if the reason content is blocked is due to an ad blocker being detected, we like to remove that friction.

If you observe these instances, please report them to us so we can open issues and fix them. Thanks!

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Here are two adblocker aware german news sites that do not work:


www.aargauerzeitung.ch

I had a look at their HTML. For me it is not obvious how they are detecting the adblocker. But they do. It must be some work to overcome this! You ARE brave trying!

So, for a publisher, your preferred way to go would be for him to register as a publisher on your site, stop using adblockers. I tried registration. It is a smooth process. But is it smooth enough?

Some brainstorming about decentralization:

  • Any site could register in a blockchain, getting some blockchain address that would basically be a cryptographic key pair.
  • There must be some proof that the address belongs to the publishing site,
  • Any visitor also possess a blockchain address

What brave could do: Provide the infrastructure. Automatically trigger a payment based on the request. Use smart contracts. Evade third parties and centralization.

( … just an idea under development …)

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