Their point is not that there is an adblock counter, but that brave injects ads on their own homepage to inflate the apparent usefulness of their browser. It's similar to labeling a casino a buffet and saying you don't need to gamble.
On one side, Brave come with an adblocker that will remove any ads from the website you're visiting. On the other, they provide their own ads through the reward program.
So it can be seen as "replacing website ads by its own".
I approve that line of reasoning, but I think that what the author meant.
Brave's ad blocking and advertising are separate things - the adblocker is basically pretty much like uBO, but written in Rust and integrated as part of the browser.
Brave Rewards is a separate module that lets users watch ads that get delivered as toaster popups. Brave uses a part of the revenue to buy BAT from the open market and gives it to users who viewed the toaster popups. The company also operates a tipping service that lets users give those crypto tokens to content creators they like. (Since Brave buys the tokens, the tokens will have a buyer who pays with real money from the real, normal advertising business).
Second, the browser did actually start being built on top of Gecko - as far as I know they had an Electron-like solution just with Gecko, and used that for the first versions of the browser. Later they transitioned to being a Chromium soft fork.
I guess we disagree, since to me, serving ads with my page is making my position about wanting to show ads with the page pretty clear.
But even if it wasn't, Brave has special filters for sites that have anti-adblock measures, and it's spoofing the user agent to make it seem like regular Chrome.
The headline and post title are misleading. Brave is not an ad-blocking browser. It is an ad-replacing browser. Blocking ads is useful and ethical. Replacing ads to capture revenue is bad and unethical.
Do you have a citation for this? Why would brave users be less likely to click on ads than a normal user if they weren’t using a browser that blocked ads?
No other reason for Brave? Some don’t want to or care for blocking ads and others don’t do it at the browser level. Does Brave have anything at that point?
I don't agree here with your premise. You claim not to care if people block ads, but that's the default behavior. "Brave Rewards" is opt in.
Additionally, as they show ads as system notifications, I've never equated them whatsoever with what I'm browsing, and I'd assume that's by design.
I use Brave because (for me) Firefox is slow, and Chrome is Google. As someone who's quite fond of you for example on HN, I'd love to not be blocked, but I'm not switching browsers for the privilege...
It is the users who are censoring the pages by choosing to use an ad blocking browser. I don't think the fact that Brave is offering an alternative revenue stream taints their browser's ad blocking capabilities. It is a feature that is available on almost all other browsers, natively or through a plugin.
Which is funny considering that Brave is a for profit company and nearly all of their money comes from displaying ads. It's popular for blocking a thing that the company needs to survive, while not caring about all the websites they block ads on.
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