yeah. the bad old days. i am doing it with gemini 3 pro and OMG - wow. I mean it's mind blowing. I love Jack Reacher novels and can't get enough but they come out once a year or 18 months, so i created my own :) and it's actually really good to read. surprisingly good.
I never did understand the national security fear mongering it’s literally just people sharing short videos Anyone can build this in like a day now with ai The real issues is big tech lobbied to have it shut down in the USA because they were eating away all their ad revenue
I didn't say "they shoved it in my face". I said "I'm not interested". For example, I don't want a browser to come with a "wallet", so it's entirely appropriate to say I'm not interested.
I don't have the technical skills or interest in examining if a browser is working for me or working for someone else, and therefore I have to trust the people developing the browser. I don't trust people who associate themselves with crypto, therefore I don't trust the software they write.
Brave's funding model always included ads [0], but these are supposed to "respect privacy" (ie not collecting personal data and targeting). Not sure how they are there right now. I know there was controversy in the past due to their "ads replacement" scheme where they were replacing ads in websites with their own ads, and my impression is that all this "brave rewards" thing did not go through much.
Similar notion of "privacy respecting advertising" has also been stated in mozilla's texts about firefox several times, eg [1], and that goes a long time back in general [2]. I don't think that any of these attempts from brave or firefox have actually worked.
In general, this is the business model (or part thereof) of many/most "privacy focused" services, ie serving ads while "respecting users' privacy". Duckduckgo does that for example. A few of them are even owned by advertising companies (eg startpage). Alternative models are subscriptions (eg kagi) and/or sponsorship/donations (eg ladybird?).
> Similar notion of "privacy respecting advertising" has also been stated in mozilla's texts about firefox several times, eg [1], and that goes a long time back in general [2].
Yea; it seems pretty dead as an approach. The ads are the problem. We need alternative models to advertising. It's absolutely baffling how there simply hasn't been any real competition for thirty years.
I cannot currently test the Mullvad browser, can you tell us whether it supports Ublock Origin or another competent ad-blocker (is there even another?). Because, frankly the ad-blocker is a make-or-break for me.
It really just is Firefox with more privacy tuning. As far as I'm aware all the add-ons work as expected. I've used it as a trial and can confirm ublock works perfectly fine but that's the only add-on I tested.
Also, it is bundled with a mullvad add-on, but it is easy to remove.
You should also go to the Privacy and Security tab in the browser. By default it is set to Max Protection with Mullvad DNS by default. Even their lowest security is better than Firefox. But I would suggest editing this the "Mullvad (Ad-blocking)" option. I believe this is the same DNS as adblock.dns.mullvad.net (194.242.2.3)[0], which (base.dns.mullvad.net (194.242.2.4) is better) will be pretty similar to PiHole style ad-blocking.
I haven't tested in browser (I did test when setting up my PiHole) but Mullvad DNS can be a little slower compared to quad9 or cloudflare. But I don't think those two have ad blocking (and DNS ad blocking can be better in a lot of ways because it is not being blocked user side)
Btw, you can do this DNS stuff in vanilla Firefox too.
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