Intrusive advertising in, & inappropriateness of, tab descriptions

Brave Feature Requests Desktop Requests
1

On-hover tab descriptions/previews/card/tooltips

Table of content:

  1. Advertising
  2. Inappropriateness
  3. Conclusion

1. Advertising
Websites (say XYZ) misuse tab descriptions, to advertise, where, for instance, instead of an actual description, they may say “Buy Now! 100s of products at your fingertips!” for just the homepage.

That is intrusive self-advertising. And, it is not what Brave is about.

The appropriate description in such a scenario is just the URL, which is applicable to all homepages of a website. Homepages, almost always, are generic and gateways to other more specific pages. Such a page, can’t be described any better than just it’s URL, especially considering the associated high percentage of tab-description exploits.

2. Inappropriateness

The below arguments define the criteria of appropriate descriptions. Plenty of instances are found online of their violations.

  1. Descriptions are supposed to be descriptions, nothing more.

    • An example of inappropriateness, here, include the usage as a communications channel. (i.e., “You’ve got 1 message!” or any variation thereof, including an originally appropriate description, now prefixed with a numerical representation of the same, as in “(1)”)

  2. The semantic purpose of a description is identification. And as such;

  • 2.1. Descriptions must be cohesively structured. As a lack of such obstructs understanding, and brings about convolution. Specifically
    ;

    • 2.1.1. Descriptions must be syllogistic. (In other words, instead of starting with the end-specifics, a background first is preferred, as is also commonly inferred through the phrase “WHO DID WHAT, NOW?”).

    • Example,
      Tab 1
      =
      example.com/shdbkn/sc
      This is the title of the article
      ,
      where the URL is the background and the title is the specifics, as opposed to :
      Tab 1
      =
      This is the title of the article
      example.com/shdbkn/sc
      .
      Especially, considering most hover over a tab to identify the webpage (identifiable only through the URL), not the content
      .
      Not adhering to the above condition is paramount to abandoning objectivity and inseminating bias through undeserved emphasis on third-party content.

    • 2.1.2. Descriptions must be coherently formatted (i.e., example 1 above, as opposed to the two lines merged into one).

  • 2.2. Descriptions must be complete, however to account for realism, as complete as is realistic. As incomplete descriptions obstruct understanding. This includes displaying the full URL.

  1. Tab descriptions must be customizable. To account for realistic shortcomings of imperfect descriptions. Therefore, for instance, the extent of a description must be modifiable up to the bare minimum (i.e., the URL) to eliminate semantic noises and other imperfections, deemed by the reader.

3. Conclusion
It is in Brave’s ethos to counter such an issue.

Please don’t be Google. Have a paid version, that includes all this, if you want.

2

We have no control of this type of request. There would so many grey areas. There is easer fights. Tooltips can’t be block, since each webpage on each site can change, if a site has 50,000 articles, how would we moderate this?

Imposing rules/descriptions/formating on a website isn’t realistic. How we cleanup the site with filters is something we can look at. Should install Annoyances List in brave://adblock which will remove much of the website cruft, leaving just the article alone. Maybe in time we can roll some of these changes as a default option, but thats a work in progress.