this: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/brave.html
this: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/blob/master/app/trac...
also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...
then this: https://teddit.net/r/FoamList/comments/q4z5js/brave_browser_...
In Each Firefox download has a unique identifierbrave
browser-laptop
JavaScript2016–2022
brave / browser-laptop · Archived
browser-laptop
[DEPRECATED] Please see https://github.com/brave/brave-browser for the current version of Brave
35Distinct people
44Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
7.9KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
[DEPRECATED] Please see https://github.com/brave/brave-browser for the current version of Brave
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- brave/muon · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- brave/brave-browser · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year44 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-01-20 16:01:34 UTC to 2022-03-18 11:02:54 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 1 | 7 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 1 | 11 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 0 | 13 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Brave Browser
Desktop browser for macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Deprecation notice: this repository is for the older Muon (our fork of Electron) version of Brave.
The newer version of the browser (brave-core) can be found here.
Development is being wound down on this version as issues are migrated to the new code-base
If you're experiencing issues with Brave or would like to contribute, please check out the new code-base instead
For other versions of our browser, please see:
iPhone - brave/browser-ios
Android - brave/browser-android-tabs
Downloads
To download the latest release, see our releases page.
You can also visit our website to get the latest stable release (along with a more user-friendly download page).
The Muon version of Brave has only one active release channel: Release. This will be deprecated as we move to brave-core. Both the Beta channel and Developer channel are already using the brave-core code-base.
Community
Join the Q&A community if you'd like to get more involved with Brave. You can ask for help,
discuss features you'd like to see, and a lot more. We'd love to have your help so that we can continue improving Brave.
Useful documentation
See CONTRIBUTING.md for tips and guidelines about contributing.
See docs/style.md for information on styling.
See docs/tests.md for information on testing, including how to run a subset of the tests.
See docs/debugging.md for information on debugging.
See docs/translations.md to learn how you can help us with translations (localization).
See docs/linuxInstall.md for information on installing the browser on Linux distributions.
Running from source
If you're setting up using Windows, please see the Building on Windows wiki entry for a full walkthrough.
For other platforms (macOS, Linux) You'll need certain packages installed before you can build and run Brave locally.
Prerequisites
the current LTS version of nodejs
Install from your package manager, nvm, or download from https://nodejs.org
npm version 5 or greater (to make use of the package-lock.json)
On Debian / Ubuntu /Mint
apt-get install build-essential rpm ninja-build
On Fedora
dnf install rpm-build
dnf group install "Development Tools" "C Development Tools and Libraries"
Installation
After installing the prerequisites:
Clone the git repository from GitHub:
# For beta testers:
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop
# For devs over HTTPS:
git clone https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop
# For devs over SSH:
git clone git@github.com:brave/browser-laptop.git
Open the working directory:
cd browser-laptop
Install the Node dependencies:
npm install
Instead of npm install you may also install with yarn running yarn install.
Troubleshooting
Additional notes on troubleshooting installation issues are in the Troubleshooting page in the Wiki.
Preconfigured VMs
Some platforms are available as pre-configured VMs. See the readme for details.
Running Brave
To run a development version of the browser requires a few steps. The easiest way is just to use two
terminals. One terminal can be used just to watch for changes to the code
npm run watch
Now actually run Brave in another terminal
npm start
Some errors related to brave/electron update can be fixed by doing a clean install:
rm -rf node_modules/
npm install
If this does not work, please clear out your ~/.electron first and try again.
Running webdriver tests
To run the webdriver tests
npm run watch-test or npm run watch-all
Now run tests in another terminal
npm test
See docs/tests.md for more information.
Port
Brave uses port 8080 to communicate between its client and server sides by default. If you are using port 8080 for something else (e.g. a web proxy) then you can set the node config to make it use a different one.
e.g.
npm config set brave:port 9001
Additional notes on troubleshooting development issues are in the Troubleshooting page in the Wiki.
Running inside of a development version of Muon
By default, we provide pre-built binaries when you npm install with our own fork of electron-prebuilt.
If you want to modify the code to Muon (Brave's Electron fork), then you'll need to build it. An example of why you might do that would be exposing a new event to the webview (from Muon).
To start this process, you'll want to check out our browser-laptop-bootstrap repo. From there, you can follow the steps in our wiki to get up and running.
Packaging for bundles, installers, and updates
Please see our wiki entry for more information about packaging.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
44 sources>Google bought widevine last year.
Google bought widewine in 2010
>Google didn't invent that particular DRM, but now that it's widespread, they have bought it outright.
It invented most of it, in the last 10 years it owned widevine.
As for how open widevine is:
>I'm sorry but we're not supporting an open source solution like this
https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/widevine/gmail-thread.html
Or as Brian Bondy, of Brave, put it:
>This is a prime example for why free as in beer is not enough. Small share browsers are at the mercy of Google, and Google is stalling us for no communicated-to-us reason.
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/10449#issueco...
So yeah, you can fork chromium and make your own nifty browser. But do not expect being able to play any video from any paid streaming service any time soon or ever.
In FLoC Away from ChromeThe Widevine team themselves suggested building the same exact system on top of a proprietary Electron fork.
> The Castlabs Electron implementation would be your only path of support. Otherwise, we don't have the resources to support at this time.
So Electron is not the reason this request was denied.
You're not wrong that Google is blocking login from embedded webviews, but the thing is that Google is separately blocking logins from embedded webviews. It's a different situation that's unrelated to their Widevine licensing. If what you were saying was correct, then the Castlabs Electron framework[0] wouldn't have Widevine support, and it does.
It's not about embedded engines, it's about Open Source.
----
> which is why the inclusion of DRM in webstandards was widely debated in the first place.
My take on this is that you would be right -
Read the rest
- it would be weird to complain about Google refusing to set up a licensing scheme for Widevine -- if not for the fact that:
A) they were a part of the campaign for DRM inclusion in the first place, even while people argued that it would hamper browser innovation, so the problem we're in is in no small part their fault,
B) the fact that they control both Widevine licensing and the dominant desktop browser (and the fact that they have used that control to harass even mainstream browsers like Brave[1]) constitutes something at least adjacent to anticompetitive behavior,
and C) the fact that they're willing to license Widevine to Open Source browsers like Brave and Firefox suggests that there isn't a fundamental problem with Open Source that means it couldn't interact with this DRM in a way that's acceptable to Google.
Add those 3 points together, and I feel like it's reasonable to ask Google what they're doing and why they're doing it, and to expect them to have some kind of answer as to how they're going to maintain control of Widevine without cutting off the legs of browser innovation and using web standards to shut out competitors.
[0]: https://github.com/castlabs/electron-releases
[1]: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/10449#issueco...
Brave also started out this way—building a browser on top of Electron. [0]
Building something on top of the Chromium project is still building a browser. You're right that it's not building a rendering engine and JavaScript interpreter though.
[0] https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop
In I tried creating a web browser and Google blocked me (2019)Well, it's Chromium, and that's the caveat: In the past, there has been at least one DRM-related issue[1], which needed to be resolved by - Google, because they own Widevine. So you need your competitor to be able to provide an adequate product. Let's say that's kind of subpar.
[1]: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/10449
In Cliqz is shutting downHi, I do privacy research at Brave. Our fingerprinting protections are still being improved (our second round of FP defenses should hit nightly in Jan), but the comments here are wrong; our defenses are much better than Firefox and Chrome.
We don't consider as part of our threat model preventing sites from knowing you're using Brave. I'm not aware of any browser or tool that considers this as part of their privacy threat model either (including the terrific Tor Browser Bundle). Our goal is to prevent sites from distinguishing between Brave users.
My claim is that our fingerprinting protections are strictly stronger than Firefox and Chrome. A partial list of fingerprinting protections that are enabled by default in Brave are at [1].
Fingerprinting is tricky, and we're tacking the problem in on multiple dimensions. We need to go further,
Read the rest
and expect to have v2 of our defenses in nightly in the next month or two [2], but we're also leading efforts in W3C to address fingerprinting in standards (I'm snyderp, those are my / Brave issues identifying privacy harm in standards) [3], and we're pushing hard to prevent web standards and privacy efforts from being eaten up by vaporware [4].
So, all that is to say, Brave has the most aggressive fingerprinting protections of any general purpose browser, and is getting better. The naysayers are welcome to backup their claims ;)
1: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/wiki/Fingerprinting-...
2: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/5614
3: https://github.com/w3cping/tracking-issues/issues
4: https://brave.com/brave-fingerprinting-and-privacy-budgets/
Not only that, but he has another account, @BraveSampson, which links to this one, @jonathansampson, but not the other way around. They used to have a nearly-identical pictures, and, IIRC, linked to each other, but not anymore.
Would I be the only one to find it fishy for someone to post such reviews for your competitors whilst pretending that you're an individual not on a payroll from Brave? Why should Mozilla proxy requests to Google through their own servers like Brave does? And the better question: Why IS Brave MITM proxying requests to Google and other services?
BTW, having multiple Twitter accounts is not against the rules if each account is for a separate purpose, but for someone working in the browser industry to be having two separate accounts where they write about browsers on each one, all whilst hiding their affiliation an
Read the rest
d pretending to be an unaffiliated individual on one of them?! Seriously?
---
Keep in mind that Brave and Chrome are the ultimate privacy violators, as it's not possible to disable autoupdates on either one; Brave developers repeatedly (see https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/1877) disregarded community's complaints about this issue (ironically, going against https://brendaneich.com/2014/01/trust-but-verify/); so, you're basically running a self-modifying binary, whether you like it or not. Any review anyone does is kinda meaningless, because there aren't any versions per se, and it can do whatever the hell it wants the next day, without any public record of what it did yesterday. With Mozilla, there's a public ftp directory with all the versions at `ftp.mozilla.org` — haven't seen anything like that for neither Brave nor Chrome.
In fact, many folks used various official guides from Google to disable Chrome from autoupdating itself, e.g., because the newer versions broke font support or other system-level features, only to find such officially-sanctioned settings completely ignored down the line.
How about doing a review of how much it costs in roaming fees to have Chrome/Brave download updates without your permission whilst you're travelling? Or how many hosts Brave does MITM to without any good reason?
That line is three years old, so how is this news now? And what's this "i wonder," do we not know how to use git here?
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/commit/c4cd7c1dc41a0...
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/commit/6edf56775f256...
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/commit/4c30cd08af9dd...
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/commit/0652274db0aee...
In Brave Privacy Browser Is Whitelisting Trackers of Facebook and TwitterThe related commits are years old. This isn't new. Last commit to that line was 3 years ago with the comment "unblocking embedding of twitter timelines".
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/commit/c4cd7c1dc41a0...
Also I just realized that is an archived repo that isn't used any more.
I took a quick look through the newer repos and couldn't find any kind of hard coded whitelist like that.
Am I missing something?
In Brave Privacy Browser Is Whitelisting Trackers of Facebook and TwitterBrave Privacy Browser Is Whitelisting Trackers of Facebook and Twitter
36 points · Open discussionJust by reading source-code.
Every day the browser downloads from "laptop-updates" server a list of hosts and list of headers to inject.
This is supposed to help websites to identify that the user is running Brave (but there are other exceptions in the code, like at https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/blob/master/js/data/... ) but in practice, the Brave developers can inject any header into any website remotely.
Every single Brave installation is uniquely tracked by a "download-id" which makes the backdoor even more powerful.
In Brave browser can inject headers in HTTP requestsBrave doesn't have a unique User-Agent.
"Removed Brave from the User Agent HTTP header to reduce fingerprinting"
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/blob/master/CHANGELO...
In Has Chrome fully taken over yet?The level of irony is even deeper.
Brave is supposed to protect the privacy but in reality, their business model is about ads.
It's like pedophiles giving advices on how to protect your kids from danger.
Of course they know about it, and I wouldn't give my kids to them.
Brave is essentially trying to become a mix between a pay-to-surf and an rogue ad replacement software.
They have dozens of millions of dollars raised (= in debt), this is very big money to pay back at least 5 times.
By definition, since they are an ad company, they are ok to block the trackers, just not the ones that affects them.
For example, Brave doesn't block Yahoo & Bing ads and trackers, why ?
Advertiser pays Microsoft Bing, who pays Yahoo, who pays DuckDuckGo, who pays Brave.
To verify it, you can make a search on DuckDuckGo using Brave and check where the ads link
Read the rest
point to by copy-pasting it ;)
Of course technically they could block these trackers but they are never going to do it.
The is the main revenue source of Brave, and this is one of the big reasons why DuckDuckGo is growing fast.
Monetize your search history like the old school toolbars.
Looks like they forgot to disclose this little conflict of interest.
If you check the commit history, there are really funny discoveries (woops adobe.com is whitelisted)
https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/10020
Almost all their commits in some other repos:
https://github.com/brave/browser-android-tabs/commits/master
are around analytics and tracking installs.
Good marketing speech, shady business.
Code links:
JS implementation in Muon-based https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop product:
1. https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-client/blob/master/index.j...
2. https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-client/blob/master/index.j...
3. https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-client/blob/master/index.j...
From Marshall Rose: "the first deals with the delay in before asking for ballots (after a contribution) and the second deals with each delay between submitting each ballot."
New "brave-core" (chromium refork to get front end but w/o Google accounts/sync), the new implementation; narration by Serg Zhukovsky:
"""
here we make a first call https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-native-ledger/blob/reconci...
which calls that function https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-native-ledger/blob/reconci...
after the random wait it calls that function https://github.com
Read the rest
/brave-intl/bat-native-ledger/blob/reconci...
and in it’s callback it goes all over again if there are still votes to send
if you are interested in the function that does the randomization, it’s here: https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-native-ledger/blob/reconci...
"""
The C++ is all new code, not yet released -- bug reports welcome! Thanks.
To be frank, I think the ship has already sailed.
* Where were all these cryptography engineering folk when Google decided that it didn't have to ask any permissions to install autoupdates to Chrome?
* Subsequently, instructions were published on how to disable the autoupdate — published by Google itself, mind you — yet somehow after some time has passed, the same versions of Chrome that were supposed to have stopped looking for updates were somehow able to magically automatically update themselves in the end after a number of releases anyways — so much for the browser being secure against remote execution attacks by a powerful-enough party!
BTW, if you think Brave is any better, they refused to disable the autoupdate. https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/1877 TBH, between the lines, I got the impression that it's part of the
Read the rest
business plan, where an outdated browser is basically worthless to them as an investment anyways, so, spending any engineering resources on such causes is fundamentally not worth it. Who cares about the good-will of the user if there are so few alternatives anyways?! So, I basically stopped using Brave at that point, as I didn't feel like being the product.
Mozilla may have gone away with asking for your permission to download and install the update as well, but at least there's still a clear setting in the interface which lets you be the boss, and, compared to the quirks that Brave may offer, at least once configured, you do know they won't go behind your back to do the dirty work anyways.
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