It gets my goat that people think it’s a good option. There are plenty of articles explaining some of the many issues with it, but a few are:
- It’s run by anti-LGBTQ+ crypto bros.
- It has ads right out of the box.
- It collected donations towards people who never signed up for them - then held them to ransom in exchange for the kind of information you should never share on the Internet.
- They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
I think a lot of pro-Brave people are astroturfers, or heavily influenced by astroturfers. They are definitely not a first choice by any privacy advocate worth their salt.
It’s a for profit ad company making a “privacy first browser”.
Thinking for literaly a second about that sentence should tell you all you need to know.
you can do privacy friendly ads, it’s not because the entire industry has evolved to an horrible point that the good way of doing it can’t exist
This is true. Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics used to run and maintain a good sort of ad service called Project Wonderful, that catered to webcomics and blogs and didn’t track users. Sadly he shut it down in 2018.
Currently I know of Comicad Network that’s trying a similar kind of thing.
Did it gettoo hard to run or what?
it’s the best browser out there right now. did you know it has the TOR net and ad blocking built in? great huh?
where does firefox make its money
IS IT FROM GOOGLE SEARCHES?
so what have the owners done to the lgbtq+ community in the last 5 years?
Also, the Brave defenders in this section… holy moly.
Some folks simply cannot admit they made a questionable choice. They picked it and use it, so everyone else must be wrong.
I’ve met people like this in real life.
I use Firefox. I know it’s not perfect, but it’s not that bad.
And if I didn’t, I’d use Vivaldi. Only reason I don’t is I do prefer open source whenever possible and, well, Firefox isn’t Chromium.
Firefox is the only browser that has mobile extensions, making it the only choice
But it kills the battery on mobile, even scrolling it choppy.
I switched to the Samsung browser a few years ago, I don’t know what black magic they do but it’s super smooth and light on the battery. It has some plugin support but I don’t use it so can’t comment much about it. It’s chromium based.
What phone were you using?
I I’ve never had any issue with firefox, with regards to battery or scrolling, but i use 8 year old flagship (Got it used, I’m not Mr.Moneybags)… which is probably still better than a budget phone of today, though.
This is one from 2 days ago…
- it’s fucking Chromium
Go use some Firefox-derivative like Librewolf or Fennec, like a sane person.
Yeah, this is important. Fuck Google. I will only ever use a chromium browser if I have to for work or for a misbehaving website.
I will reject the misbehaving website rather than resort to using Chromium.
Librewolf’s defaults are so bad, and changing them basically entirely removes the anti fingerprinting features
I agree, I know why they do it and I can appreciate it, but it’s just not for me. I do not want my history and cookies cleared when I closed the browser, for instance. That is massively inconvenient and not really relevant to my “threat model.”
So I guess I wouldn’t say they are bad, but certainly not ideal for me.
They also tried to get away with URL injection. Do not use Brave.
Basically the thing that turned the internet against Honey, but when a homophobic piece of shit does it it’s fine
Use chromium build from source ? It’s the least if you want something chrome based. https://chromium.woolyss.com/
If not, use firefox. It’s still good for everyday task.
It’s because no-one knows any alternatives.
If one wants a Chrome-based browser that isn’t Chrome, Brave is the highest-profile one by orders of magnitude. Next is a bunch of high-SEO scamware before honest projects like Vivaldi or Helium are even a whisper.
…So I don’t really blame folks for using Brave. They aren’t omniscient, and an honest effort to avoid Chrome is still a positive.
You can literally just use ungoogled chromium
I don’t blame folks for using it.
I do blame folks for not reading up before recommending it.
I recommend(ed) it so people have a mobile browser with functional adblock. I don’t need to research further to know it does that well, which frankly is all most people will care about.
Congratulations for helping fund bigotry.
Plonk.
Ah yes, my massive endowment of $0 towards the Brave LGBT Hate Fund
don’t worry you just need to use it and it will generate money for them, keep the good (bad) work
Deep breaths stranger, I promise I’ll check out IronFox so Brave doesn’t get my $0.20 per year to destroy our rights
Do you pay taxes?
If so, good job funding genocide plonk.
…if not, carry on
I’m still mystified as to how Brave took any market share. I thought there’s two camps: people who care about browser privacy and people who don’t. The latter crowd stay with Chrome or whatever their PC comes with. The former crowd…did I miss a memo on what was wrong with Firefox?
Because they pumped out ads for it and paid astroturfers to promote it like crazy. It’s not really that surprising. There are laws against deceptive advertising but they rarely get enforced, and when they do, it’s usually a slap on the wrist. Which is how Brave can lie about browser privacy, get popular, and never get called out for lying in any meaningful way.
With Firefox, presumably compatibility, AI stuff, and a string of lesser Mozilla controversies, I guess?
As for Brave, I think you’re underestimating people. They don’t want to be tracked, they don’t want to see ads. They won’t necessarily go seek a solution out, but if a one-click solution to fix that presents itself in front of their eyeballs, they might try it.
Helium browser.
If you absolutely need a Chromium browser (if you’re a privacy advocate, I don’t understand why. Using a Chromium browser means Google can do whatever they want with web standards), use Vivaldi or something.
I did not know Brendan Eich was ousted from Mozilla and launched Brave because he was a homophobe who funded anti-LGBT+ campaigns 😬
He also created JavaScript, but I don’t see people getting upset and telling others to not use JavaScript.
Well, JavaScript has a lot of horrible features, but it’s ubiquitous and we’re stuck with it for the time being. Certainly it’s another thing to blame Eich for, rather than something that mitigates his other shitty behavior.
Didnt know JS can collect data and transmit it to their creator.
Neither does Brave unless you specifically opt in to those services. It’s open source, you can check for yourself.
They added referrals to links you clicked. If there is one thing a browser should do its go to the link you click without modification.
As far as I remember, there is some browser with a feature of stripping tracking id from the URL, that is modification, but I find it good (if I can opt in, and if the feature is visible enough to know what to try if it doesn’t work)
And you chose to do that or it was a feature that was advertised to you. Adding referral IDs to links you click so the browser company gets money is not comparable to that at all.
Mind you, I’m not arguing that was crappy, just that not any modification of links is bad
I would argue that if you know your browser is stripping tracking info for links then the link you clicked on doesn’t have tracking information.
I had no idea about any of this. Have been using brave on android for a few weeks and very happy with it. What would you recommend instead?
A Firefox fork.
Fork? Uhg wtf is wrong with firefox now? This better not be about AI
A bunch of forks just add extra functions, patches or defaults on top of firefox. It’s not a hard fork as in they maintain everything themselves, they’re still based on the latest official firefox releases.
Removing AI is one of those patches yes.
Yea I’m going to go ahead and recommend against opinionated firefox. Oh yea I want some dweeb with misplaced anger and too much time on their hands to dictate how I use the internet. Bitch asses.
You (the end user) decide how you want to use the internet. The forks you’re probably angry about are the ‘hardened forks’, but whether or not you care about their goals and want to use those is a choice only you can make. Most of what they do is basically change some default configs and remove some ‘bad’(according to the maintainers and the users) features.
There’s also forks like zen that under the hood use firefox, but customize the user experience significantly.
Long way to say what is captured in two words: opinionated fork.
I feel like I’m getting too old for the Internet. I still fondly remember the times where you could create a Geocities page and add it yourself to the Yahoo directory, and other netizens clicked through categories to get to your listing, instead of using a search engine.
But I digress. I’m finding myself browsing the www less over time, and I’m already limited to only a hadful of pages I visit regularly. For me personally, Vivaldi is the best choice for a desktop, and Brave is hands-down the best choice for my smartphone. But I appreciate that others may have different use cases.
It’s also a chromium browser.
probably one of the best chromium privacy browsers, compared to the rest
Sure, it doesn’t have a really good background, but for the balance of features / convenience, it’s the best chromium browser
I couldn’t agree more, for me LibreWolf is my preferred, but with work, or syncing or compatibility brave just provides are good out of box experience. Is the crypto stuff garbage,? Yeah but breaking news, you can turn that stuff off.
Is the CEO a douche, yeah but most CEOs are.
I also find it ironic that ppl get on thier high horse, going this company said something that’s bad, which they post from thier iphone/macbook, which was built though child labour, modern slavery and worker suicides, by a company which actively has anti consumer practices. But they hit thier limit at “brave browser CEO said bad thing”.
which they post from thier iphone/macbook
Same can be said for any phone though. Default OEM Android is a tracking nightmare
We’re just okay with some things that people arent, and not okay with the thing some people are okay with.
Saying Apple is shit while most people seeing this will just decide to stay on their Xiaomi or Samsung is so dumb. Sadly this world is plagued with subjectivity.
I 100% agree. Apple was just an example. You could insert Microsoft, Google, Meta,…
They’re all as bad as each other.
My point is CEO says bad things and is a bigot, isn’t as bad as the harm some of these other big entities are doing.
