Brendan Eich compares the murky world of online advertising today to his daughter’s fish tank: full of algae and other mysterious gunky stuff that clouds the view and isn’t that great for the fish either.
Which is to say, online ads–especially banner ads that get delivered to millions of websites via automated ad networks and exchanges–are full of malodorous stuff like fraud, bots, malware, code scripts that slow down your computer and phone, and all manner of trackers that follow you around the Web pitching stuff you already bought or decided not to buy. In short, even if these ads do support all these websites from the smallest niche site to the New York Times, they’re such an annoying mess that nearly 150 million people have installed software to block them.
Eich’s new startup Brave Software aims to clean up online advertising with a new ad-blocking Web browser it released today for software developers and early adopters, along with a connected cloud service that will enable placement of select new ads that don’t track your online activities. Eich , who invented the Javascript language that is the basis for Web programming, is a cofounder of the independent Web browser project Mozilla best known recently for a short-lived stint as CEO of Firefox browser maker Mozilla Corp. It ended in 2014 after intense criticism of his 2008 donation to the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in California.
Now Eich is making an impossibly ambitious play to remake online ads with the new browser and cloud service, which will be available starting today at Brave.com and the software repository Github . First, the browser, based on Google’s Chrome, not Mozilla, will block all display ads by default, though users can turn that off. And it will block not only the ads but the signaling and […]
