Rewards has always been opt in, so you don't need to get past it to use Brave. We would not be here without it, but use Chrome or Firefox if you prefer. IMHO "really gross" applies to the Google spyware embedded in Chrome, and Firefox has had its share of "gross mistakes" since I left.

For those who don't want to free ride, we will offer Brave Origin soon. One time payment for stripped down Brave, no opt-in UX of any kind.

> ... things like "Come home, white man" and other dog-whistles on image-boards

Wow, that's a new lie.

Do you have any evidence? This isn't something Brave ever did, but it's easy to make unfalsifiable "There's probably archives" b.s. claims on HN.

We never, as in not ever, offered crypto mining in the browser.

In fact, Brave was the first browser to block nasty crypto-jacking/mining scripts (e.g., CoinHive) when they began to appear on the scene, nearly a decade ago.

The grants came from our token fund, not users' tokens (no way to buy BAT then).

The issue which I found out about late, and fixed right away, was infringing on right to publicity, nothing to do with donations from users' own tokens.

That blog post is about a partnership (which ended), but you probably saw some sponsored images at the time, in new tab pages (1 of 4 then, I think; the rest are just art images).

These are non-tracking, carefully designed (including vetting by Brave), brand advertising images. They are not ads (we never did this) inserted into publisher pages, or (opt-in only) push notifications.

Brave has been working to find ways to sustain ourselves, and these sponsored images are still a good revenue line, although lesser now vs other lines. If you want, turn them off.

Free riding is always an user right, we don't try to stop it on principle, as if we ever could with open source. But there's no free lunch: if you use Firefox, you are Google's product. If you use a Firefox fork, you're free riding on Gecko which costs a lot to maintain. HTH

“Sponsored images”

What exactly do you think an advertisement is?

That's all b.s. of the ripest kind.

No. I wrote Mocha in C.

Where did you hear this CL fish story?

Oh. It was not you, and not the original.

It was Waldemar Horwat and js2 https://web.archive.org/web/20111217124744/https://mxr.mozil...

I don't know what "semantic HTML enrichment" means, but there wasn't time. The alternative was VBScript and DHTML. DHTML and Netscape's DOM forked Web content based on `if (document.all) /* IE code here */; else /* netscape code here */`, and only with Firefox, Opera, and Safari founding whatwg.org and start HTML5 did we unify everything.

I didn't pick LiveScript, Netscape Marketing did.

The original codename Mocha was Marc Andreessen's.

This is all in the HOPL IV paper and my Lex Fridman interview.

No, == was strict in the ten day prototype.

https://x.com/BrendanEich/status/1004425861410402304

https://x.com/BrendanEich/status/1922360598995534074