this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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I’ve no stake in either Kagi or Brave (and have my own issues with Brave and their CEO), but “partnership” seems like a stretch of definition here assuming this is in reference to the Brave Search API being added as another source for search results. Am I missing something here?
Kagi December 28, 2023 Release Notes
the part where Brave Search API is paid, and some people (including myself) don't want their money to contribute to Brave's business.
To better understand (and definitely not dismissing your opinion), was Brave where you drew the line as a customer or was Google, Amazon, etc also of concern where Kagi pays for services?
A lot of people really don't like Eich. When he was promoted from CTO to CEO of Mozilla, half of Mozilla's board resigned (one said it was because she refused to be a member of the board that appointed him, the other two didn't say why they resigned) and there was a massive campaign to get rid of him including websites showing popups to all FireFox users telling them to use another browser - specificially because of Eich.
He lasted 11 days as CEO of Mozilla, and founded Brave after leaving.
Since then, he's done things with crypto and said things about covid which have angered people even more.
You can count me as one of those people so don’t get me wrong; I’m all for not supporting Brave or Eich. I was just curious why this instance where Kagi is paying to use Brave’s search API (which, IMO, doesn’t carry the weight of being labeled a partnership any more than me being a partner with Sony because I pay for PS+) among many other companies/products is the dealbreaker for those that use Kagi. And there may be more to the story (or maybe there is an actual partnership I’ve missed) so I’m open to being more informed.
But if thats the root of the controversy, I can respect that even if I don’t necessarily align with the level of outcry here.
I dislike Brave because they cultivated a not-so-deserved reputation. I see newcomers to privacy being recommended this and it's just sad.
Brave is great, it even lets you sync your browser session without having to use an email. And their android app lets you watch youtube vid without ads and in the background.
It along librewolf are the only browsers that come with good default privacy settings.
Edit: Looks like I struck a nerve on some people lol
You're comment implied it's a good privacy centric browser, which is wrong.
It actually is, it comes with good fingerprinting protection by default.
https://privacytests.org/
That website is run by a Brave employee. And it skews its results in favor of any browser that happens to have an ad blocker.
Who is the brave employee that runs it? privacytest is actually a open source test that you can run in your browser and has its own repo.
Can you provide a source for the second sentence? After that, I can answer the first one.
https://github.com/privacytests/privacytests.org
Huh. You didn't check out the About page that actually linked to the source code? Because if you had, you would have seen the author's name and the statement of conflict of interest directly above the statement that it was open source..
No I did not, I knew the website because I had used the tool before, not the other way around.
Thanks for letting me know about the conflict of interest, do you have any suggestions of a similar test?
Good fingerprinting protection != good privacy.
Alright what makes a browser good for privacy if fingerprinting does not count? (it does but I want to hear what you will say).
TL;DR: All chromium based browsers are shit. Switch to hardened firefox or librewolf
I am not sure what you understand under fingerprinting (you literally can get the same fingerprinting protection by enabling the resistFingerprinting configuration in about:config in Firefox). Also fingerprinting protection, by ifself, isn't enough to make a browser private. Plus I am not sure how anyone can even trust Brave's browser when they are sketchy as fuck. Not only did they do creepy stuff like url injection, but also now have those weird ads and they are also into crypto which is not a good sign. I still fail to understand why people won't appreciate Firefox browsers. The same functionality can be achieved if you spend literally like 5 minutes on it. Is it an issue with being lazy or just being not informed about it. Though I still do not recommend the stock firefox you can get from the official site. You're better off installing something like Librewolf if you are someond that looks into "privacy" out of the box or hardened firefox with arkenfox's user.js for the most privacy you probably can get without breaking literally every website you visit.
I've used firefox for years, in fact I sitll have librewolf on my PC with a custom userChrome.css, but the browsing experience is only getting worse every year and mozilla only breaks userChrome with every new update.
I also mentioned librewolf in my original comment already.
They are open source lol
How do you sync your browser sessions without having to use an email? This is what mostly keeps me on brave.
Also it really took me a while to get librewolf to block the cookie prompts from websites, because I had to go into the ublock origin settings and find the filter that blocks the cookie prompts, brave on the other hand does this automatically for you. As well as already having a built in dark mode, you don't have to install 6 different extensions which is what I have on librewolf to get it to work.
Also on linux firefox maps the alt+number keys to change tabs instead of using control+number keys, again on brave this comes by default, on firefox that is also another extension that needs to be added to fix that.
In fact can you even change the background color of the new tab page in firefox? On brave it is super easy, it even lets you use an image, on librewolf I had to use a custom userContent.css for something so basic wtf.
Also you didn't go into details on what makes a browser good for privacy, brave can even block scripts if we are talking about going beyond the default settings, which on librewolf you have to use an extension as well to achive that.
I drew the line at Brave.
Fair enough. IMO, Brave isn’t a big enough player compared to many other companies in the enterprise space used by Kagi (both that we know of as consumers and wouldn’t know of without being an employee with knowledge of their internal SaaS agreements) that Kagi’s specific use case of Brave singularly would have been the deal breaker (for me).
Personally, getting that granular with money flow quickly becomes untenable as a consumer as every business will, to some degree, end up paying for some level of service from the companies we hope to lessen the power of. As a consumer example, I may really dislike how Google is influencing the standards of consumer data privacy in the world and choose not to pay for or use Google products/services directly, but I couldn’t imagine boycotting all companies that use Google Workspace internally for email, docs, sheets, etc.
Kagi seems to be a main player that’s opening the conversation of paying for internet search when the world is used to a standard of “free” search, so saying they can’t utilize the existing search data sources is going to make that experience dead in the water. We need ripples if we hope for change.
Edit: sudneo‘s comment actually summed up my thoughts pretty well.
That’s a really easy conclusion to come to when you weren’t the one being targeted.
And that’s a lot of words to say this isn’t your issue so you aren’t doing anything about it. Nobody needs the hand wringing. You can just say it.
Care to expand? Not sure how anything I’ve said is hand wringing nor what you’re implying I should be doing.
Your entire comment can be boiled down to "I don't find this "tenable" and the issue isn't important to me relative to other issues".
That's fine. You can think that. Just go the brevity route next time. It respects the reader more than a wall of text.
I mean, you’re focused on minimizing a concluding thought around an informative dialogue originated by me asking about the perspectives of those feeling impacted by this (of which I’m not). I didn’t find the responses to be a waste of time to read so not sure why you felt that detracting from the discourse was to be your contribution rather than sharing your own perspective to further the group’s discussion.
It will be easier to sympathise with you if you explain how Brave has targeted you or impacted your life.
I’m not trying to convince. I’m trying to say use less words.