What Keeps the Browser Free
SMRTR summary
Every browser is free because someone else is paying for it — and that funding shapes what the browser actually does. Chrome serves Google's ad empire, Firefox depends 85% on Google payments, Brave's crawler ignores robots.txt to build a search index sold to AI companies, and Arc pivoted entirely when venture capital demanded it. Knowing who pays determines what compromises you're accepting.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to Hacker News.
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