Tell HN: Lobste.rs blocking the Brave browser

15 pointsposted 7 months ago
by prmph

Item id: 44557717

16 Comments

kesor

7 months ago

As the message says, this is not new.

When you want to open this website using Brave anyway, you have to change your User Agent. You can do that by opening "Network conditions" in the three-dotted menu in developer tools, and setting a different User Agent value.

runjake

7 months ago

Changing the user agent doesn't work for me. I remember pushcx saying (on one of his Twitch streams or something) that they do additional fingerprinting to block Brave.

prmph

7 months ago

I see. And I thought Brave was quite trustworthy, maybe not so much now. Firefox not working well for me: It is resource hog. Guess I'll need to keep looking.

kubanczyk

7 months ago

> Firefox not working well for me: It is resource hog.

Anecdata to the contrary: on my Android devices I've switched from Brave to Firefox maybe a year ago (exactly because of the Lobste.rs story) and I found out performance to be completely acceptable for my needs.

And both solve youtube ads, which is how high I set the bar.

prmph

7 months ago

I see. Firefox is the only browser on my machine (Macbook Air M1) that regularly consumes massive amounts of RAM, typically like 4 GB or more.

curtisblaine

7 months ago

I have a proxy http script in val town that simply fetches lobsters with the right user agent and returns the response as is. I have a bookmark to scriptname-lobsters.web.val.run.

It works for now. Hopefully this doesn't turn into a cat-and-mouse game, but if it does I'm ready. I understand Lobsters' POV, but I also suspect they had an axe to grind with Brendan Eich back from the Proposition 8 donation.

switknee

7 months ago

I suspect it is just political pettiness. None of their complaints about brave seem to hold water. Why should Lobsters be bothered by brave ads? That only happens if the user tells their user agent (brave browser) to show extra ads, in order to earn a worthless cryptocurrency. If the user wants to see extra ads or otherwise modify their browsing experience it isn't a concern of the website. Lobsters also doesn't seem to value the brave token, so why is it a problem if they can't access less than $100 in brave token?

Brave leaking DNS to cloudflare in tor browsing, compared to google Chrome leaking every request to google at all times? Why not block Chrome?

al_borland

7 months ago

I never trusted Brave. This validates my skepticism.