[kirb]

The arc of him resigning from Mozilla and founding Brave definitely is context that needs to be mentioned. Personally, I feel $1,000 isn’t much to be donating, especially as he would have been decently wealthy going from Netscape pre-IPO and pre-AOL, through to co-founding Mozilla and staying on for 15 years. But Mozilla employees saw it differently, he was forced out, and that’s all part of the story of why Brave exists.

The ways they’ve acted a bit on the sketchy side are perfectly reasonable to call out, even if the writing here is a bit thin. Some are sloppy bugs that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen (.onion DNS leakage), but the rest were intentional decisions (replacing ads, soliciting donations in creators’ names, affiliate injection).

I feel it’s quite difficult to recommend anyone ever use a browser other than the main 4 (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari), because of things like this. All of those have had between 16 and 30 years of experience poured into them, full-time engineers working deep in the JS/layout/etc engines, and they have a fat budget to keep it all going. Startups like Brave, Browser Company, etc. don’t quite have such resources, are very reliant on the benevolence of Google/Mozilla/Apple, and need to keep watching their back to make sure they’re still profitable. Completely FOSS community projects like Ungoogled Chromium, Librewolf, and Zen don’t tend to have any security experience on the team, or any auditing going on, nor the funding to hire for any of those skills. It doesn’t feel responsible to tell someone to download one of these browsers and then go and log into their email, bank, government accounts, etc. on it. As much as we want projects like this to succeed and beat the Google/Apple-centric monoculture we’re stuck with.

I think Mozilla’s past decade would have been very different if he were able to stay as CEO. He’s clearly managed Brave as a startup well enough that it’s still in operation - now imagine what he could have done with those Google billions. There wouldn’t be any need for BAT or new tab sponsored links or injection of affiliate links (this all may change soon of course). But in the current situation, there are some legitimate concerns with how Brave operates or did so in the past, which aren’t likely to be fixed because they require it to work this way to be profitable.

[eesmith]

> Personally, I feel $1,000 isn’t much to be donating, especially as he would have been decently wealthy going from Netscape pre-IPO and pre-AOL,

Plus thousands to Tom McClintock, Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, to list only the contributions listed in the article.

> As much as we want projects like this to succeed and beat the Google/Apple-centric monoculture we’re stuck with.

I've never heard even a whisper of Mozilla looking for sovereign tech funding.

You would surely think European countries want a way for their citizens to access email, bank, government accounts, etc. without US control, right?

My assumption is they want to be in charge of things, without some foreign government getting involved and saying that "no personal data collection" and "no AI".

[kirb]

I was calling out the $1,000 specifically because that’s what the poster above me mentioned, and I remember that coming up very often back when his CEO stint happened. But, yes, not the only donation he’s made.

And I’m sure Mozilla is furiously looking around for new funding sources right now, governments could be of interest, but I expect them to be very careful about letting money influence the product. They know their independence is a key feature, and Google has so far allowed them to remain independent aside from default search engine choice.