If you are keen on personal privacy, you might have come across Brave Browser. Brave is a Chromium-based browser that promises to deliver privacy with built-in ad-blocking and content-blocking protection. It also offers several quality-of-life features and services, like a VPN and Tor access. I mean, it’s even listed on the reputable PrivacyTools website. Why am I telling you to steer clear of this browser, then?
A Web browser is a complex piece of SW that needs to provide many, many, features and work with great performance. Therefore you need a large team of experienced developers (full-time and maybe volunteers) collaborating on the development and testing. This is cost in labor and infrastructures (servers, storage, internet connection, hosting of platforms, etc)
One such feature that is a must-have is playing videos, from YouTube, Netflix, Prime, Twitch and what have you. Most widely spread video codecs are proprietary, you need a license to implement the decoder and these licenses are expensive. H.264 is one such codec, very widely spread across many content and platforms. You wouldn’t want a web browser that lacks the ability to decode H.264 videos. There are many such codecs that are considered essential, and this cost a lot of money in total.
In conclusion, this is an argument as why developing a web browser costs money and requires a sustainable financial plan, even though it is open-source and developed mostly by volunteers.
My personal opinion: advertisement sucks. I don’t want it anywhere in my life. I would prefer to pay upfront for my web browser if it come to this.
Yeah, no, I understood all of that. I think we all do. I’m just not sure why you felt the need to explain it?
[email protected] is supporting your argument.
Oh. Okay.