In defense of Brave. The dangers of fundamentalism

Older Linux users remember what it was surfing the Internet up to 15 years ago.

Internet Explorer reigned over the web, and, Due to lack of time, interest or budget, the developers only worried about making the pages compatible with the Microsoft browser.There is a story about a server manufacturer who wanted to have as a client the Norwegian company that then developed the Opera browser. He lost the sale because the evaluator found that every time he tried to access the configuration web interface, he received an error message and the suggestion that he install Internet Explorer.

Linux users did that often. Pages that required some complexity used proprietary Microsoft components and if they detected that you were using Firefox they showed the fatal message.

At that time we had two partial solutions. Install the aforementioned Opera (which had a Linux version) or change the browser settings to make the web believe that we were using Internet Explorer. Anyway, it didn't always work

The new kids from the neighborhood

An old Internet maxim holds that there are two kinds of people; customers and products.

Microsoft made money selling software licenses and was a leader in that sector. Google needed another business model if it wanted to compete. And, he found it in advertising.

But to sell advertising you need people to see it. And, that a possible competitor cannot block you. If Microsoft decided (as it later did) to get into the ad business, it could well cause its near-monopoly browser to block Google ads from showing.

This quasi-monopoly had to be broken. And that's where the Mozilla Foundation came in with its flagship product Firefox.

Google was for a long time the main financial supporter of the Mozilla Foundation. It was impossible to enter the search engine without suggesting you install Firefox. The thing turned out so well that Over time Google decided to launch its own browser. Chrome.

Thanks to Google's immense promotional power, Microsoft's lack of reaction, and the Mozilla Foundation wasting time on failed diversification, Google Chrome became the new de facto standard for websites. Much helped your competition start experiencing problems when users pretended to use other Google services such as YouTube, Docs, or Gmail.

The infamous Mr. Brendan Eich

First of all, a clarification.

Like all human beings, I have opinions on many issues. Those that have nothing to do with technology have nothing to do in this blog, and, any deductions about them that they intend to make based on this article, they will surely be wrong. They just need to know that I believe that freedom of expression is a right that should not be restricted and that harmful ideas are like vampires. In the sunlight they destroy themselves, in the dark they grow.

Brendan Eich, the head ofl Brave project was Javascript language creator, one of the tools that made it possible to get rid of Flash. He also headed Mozilla's research and development division for 10 years. and briefly became president of the foundation.

He had to resign because someone found out that he had made a donation to the NO campaign in a referendum for the approval of gay marriage in California. It should be mentioned that there is not a single complaint of discrimination against a gay employee and that disagreeing with gay marriage and campaigning on the issue is a position protected by the United States Constitution.

However, Eich had to resign and there is a small but very active sector of the world of technology that hates him.

His new project was create an open source browser that would bring together positions between content creators and surfers. The former, to create quality content, need an income that allows them to live. The seconds have the right to navigate without their movements being tracked or having to close annoying pop-up windows.

In defense of Brave

Brave (based on Chromium) blocks all types of tracking and cookies. Its private mode uses the Tor network and not only blocks advertising from websites, it also pays you to see non-invasive advertising if you activate the option.

And, the navigation is very fast and smooth.

But, what makes it interesting is that allows you to reward content creators using a digital wallet and their own cryptocurrency.

It was this that made Mr. Eich sCreate new enemies. Companies that sell Internet advertising and large content providers. The former know that ad blockers are inefficient in the long run and that not everyone knows how to install one. The latter don't want anything that puts individual bloggers or small media outlets on an equal footing.

It was then that the Brave developers they screwed up big and the people who hate him came out to beat him up.

One user discovered that when I put the address of a cryptocurrency service, this was completed with a referral link. The same happened with 3 other sites in the same industry.

Eich gave a technical explanation.

We made a mistake, we are correcting it: Brave by default autocompletes the word "http://binance.us" in the address bar to add an affiliate code. We are a Binance affiliate, we refer users through the opt-in business widget on the new page, but the autocomplete should not add any code ... The default autocomplete was inspired by the customer's attribution of the search query they do all browsers, but unlike keyword queries, a typed URL must go to the named domain, without any additions. Please excuse this mistake - we are clearly not perfect, but we corrected course quickly.

Let's nuance things a bit

1. Even assuming it was a mistake, there are mistakes that are criminally stupid.
2. The error occurred with services with which Brave has affiliate agreements.
3. The referral code addition was made on sight and corrected.

What also seems to me to be criminally stupid is that many users have decided to uninstall Brave and campaign against its installation.. What Brave brings to users is much more than what the "binancegate" hurts. If their model works, it is the possibility for creators to make quality content without depending on the whims of a search engine's algorithm. And hisNavigators stop being a product to go back to being what they should never have stopped being. Clients or users.

And, let me tell you, if you never had a great idea in your head at work that resulted in a monumental fiasco in practice, it is because either you have a pride greater than Everest or your parents continue to support you.