A mundane reason for why donations to the 501c3 parent Mozilla Foundation can't go to Firefox or Gecko engineers is U.S. tax law. We found out the hard way after the IRS San Jose office said we could run only as a foundation and take "sponsorship income" tax-free. They reneged and litigated; this led to the creation of the arms-length Mozilla Corporation that's wholly owned by the Foundation. Per IRS regulations, it cannot be funded by grants from the parent Mozilla Foundation.
The corporation could let users pay for Firefox, and pay tax on that revenue. While I was there, no one thought this would help enough to be worth the effort, compared to just working on other things while taking Google search revshare.
With Brave, I've pushed for user-pays as an option. We let a user buy Premium Search (no ads, but this is possible for free) to support us. It's a small but non-negligible amount of revenue per year, and growing slowly, but we did it on principle. Same will go for buy-once zero-telemetry Brave Origin, stripped down Brave coming in a month or two.
Rewards has always been opt in, so you don't need to get past it to use Brave. We would not be here without it, but use Chrome or Firefox if you prefer. IMHO "really gross" applies to the Google spyware embedded in Chrome, and Firefox has had its share of "gross mistakes" since I left.
For those who don't want to free ride, we will offer Brave Origin soon. One time payment for stripped down Brave, no opt-in UX of any kind.
Thank you for signaling you had no idea this was happening. I wouldn't make such a thing up, if that's what you're asking. If you have no idea this happened that's one thing - but I am telling you the truth in saying that is what I saw.
You might also want to evaluate what kind of people are attracted by your image. Your actions have spoken far louder than any accusations I have made here. Hint.
> it's easy to make unfalsifiable "There's probably archives" b.s. claims on HN.
The grapevine literally called them (not my words) "brave shill threads". Companies have been scraping the text based web for decades. Of course there's archives. They may not necessarily be indexed by search engines.
In fact, Brave was the first browser to block nasty crypto-jacking/mining scripts (e.g., CoinHive) when they began to appear on the scene, nearly a decade ago.
The grants came from our token fund, not users' tokens (no way to buy BAT then).
The issue which I found out about late, and fixed right away, was infringing on right to publicity, nothing to do with donations from users' own tokens.
That blog post is about a partnership (which ended), but you probably saw some sponsored images at the time, in new tab pages (1 of 4 then, I think; the rest are just art images).
These are non-tracking, carefully designed (including vetting by Brave), brand advertising images. They are not ads (we never did this) inserted into publisher pages, or (opt-in only) push notifications.
Brave has been working to find ways to sustain ourselves, and these sponsored images are still a good revenue line, although lesser now vs other lines. If you want, turn them off.
Free riding is always an user right, we don't try to stop it on principle, as if we ever could with open source. But there's no free lunch: if you use Firefox, you are Google's product. If you use a Firefox fork, you're free riding on Gecko which costs a lot to maintain. HTH
I don't know what "semantic HTML enrichment" means, but there wasn't time. The alternative was VBScript and DHTML. DHTML and Netscape's DOM forked Web content based on `if (document.all) /* IE code here */; else /* netscape code here */`, and only with Firefox, Opera, and Safari founding whatwg.org and start HTML5 did we unify everything.
The corporation could let users pay for Firefox, and pay tax on that revenue. While I was there, no one thought this would help enough to be worth the effort, compared to just working on other things while taking Google search revshare.
With Brave, I've pushed for user-pays as an option. We let a user buy Premium Search (no ads, but this is possible for free) to support us. It's a small but non-negligible amount of revenue per year, and growing slowly, but we did it on principle. Same will go for buy-once zero-telemetry Brave Origin, stripped down Brave coming in a month or two.
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