I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever.
Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.
Edit: Please be aware that the spyware article on Brave (and the rest of the browsers on the site) is outdated and may not reflect the browser as it is today.
After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes into URL’s. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators.
Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I’d say the answer is a very clear no.
One last thing, Brave illegally promoted an eToro affiliate program making a fortune from its users who will likely lose their money.
Edit: To the people commenting saying how Brave has a good out-of-the-box experience compared to other browsers, yes, it does. However, this is not a warning for your average person, this is a warning for people who actively care about their privacy and don’t mind configuring their browser to maximize said privacy.
Firefox + Startpage is really cool. I like how their searched don’t include the search parameters in the url + the built in proxy
If nothing else, I would recommend Firefox over Brave for the sole reason of the latter being yet another Chromium browser. It would be nice if we could eat away some of the browser marketshare from Google.
Not reading all that, still sticking to based Brave 😎
Lol isn’t eTrash considered a scam anyways? They are the reason i got ad blocker - dumbest ads on youtube 24/7.
Anyways sounds like you gotta be quite brave to use Brave lol
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Past behaviors are what companies are judged on. If you want a good Chromium option use Ungoogled Chromium or just don’t use Chromium based browsers.
For the mobile thing, if you are on an iPhone you can use AdGuard with Safari, and if you’re on Android you have pretty much unlimited options. (If you’re on an iPhone you’ve pretty much given up on privacy anyway.)
I’m not trying to start a pissing contest- but how is iPhone a give-up on privacy? If memory serves, the App Store was the first to call out all the permissions app requests and allow you to block, first to do massive tracking blocks that fucked Facebook, first to offer Secure Enclave on the device for encryption, built in private relay, email address obfuscation, usb port locking, emergency lockdown mode, remote wipe, etc etc etc. I don’t really understand how android is anything other than a Google data collection box. If you’re just talking about the software based browser/plugin ecosystem being limited on iOS, I totally agree, but it sounds like that’s gonna change finally- otherwise could you elaborate?
An iPhone is a give-up on privacy because you don’t get alternatives. If you don’t like your stock OS on an Android phone you can just switch OS (for example GrapheneOS, a very privacy-centric OS.). If you don’t like the normal YouTube app you can just sideload a different one. You don’t get this kind of freedom with an iPhone. A prime example of this is when, during the Hong Kong Riots where Apple pulled an app that assisted protesters…
Alright- those are fair points. I will point out that the YouTube thing was more about Google than Apple- I never used stock YouTube app until Google shut down the APIs a few years ago. There used to be many alternatives but since they were ad free, Google didn’t like that.
I hate Brendan Eich, I hate the constant annoyances of Brave adding cards and sponsored backgrounds, I hate the dominance of Chromium, and I hate cryptocurrency.
But this is a fight I’ve lost.
I’m one of those insufferable Linux nerds who has spent $50+hours/month setting up a Nextcloud VPS, calling my friends Nazi-adjacent for using Twitter, etc. I’m horribly opinionated about software. I WANT everyone to use Firefox.
But I just don’t have the spare time for Firefox anymore.
I’ve had irreconcilable, breaking issues with vanilla Firefox installs on almost every major desktop and mobile OS (excluding KaiOS and Apple WatchOS) every time I tried to switch to it during the past few years. This is not exaggeration.
From crashing because it can’t handle keyboard-arrow down on iPadOS, lacking good built-in adblock controls (like Brave Shields) on Android and iOS, to being unable to load hCaptcha on desktop even after hours of user.js flitching. This is on top of the inconvenience of not having a good alternative to Chromium’s Profile UI, the inconvenience of needing to test on Chrome when doing webdev, etc.
Brave is a putrid steaming pile of shit, but it’s the best choice I’ve found. This post exaggerates a lot of the very real issues Brave has. This isn’t praise for Brave, but rather an indictment on the state of browsing and personal-computing.
I write here very sparingly. With this comment, I hope someone will tell me I’m an idiot who’s missing a wonderful browser out there.
I would be very curious what other browsers people recommend. I use Brave solely because of the profile feature it offers, which for my use case is an order of magnitude better than Firefox’s containers. Is there something more private/better than Brave that still has profiles?
I understand why people don’t like Brave, but for me it’s the least shitty out of all of them, I dislike Mozilla (not Firefox) way more than I dislike crypto, and Firefox has awful out of the box privacy, and before you leave all of the comments about user.js, know that isn’t ideal because it leaves you with a more identifiable fingerprint because all of the specific modifications.
The day Firefox has good defaults and leave all unnecessary crap with tracking (google default, pocket, etc) is the day I’ll switch.
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How about we just let users use what they want? I don’t use Brave, but it has some legitimate anti-fingerprinting tech.
Brave behaving like Win XP era browser with gazillion toolbars installed, with a pinch of crypto and crypto promoting ads should be a giant red flag.
FOSS =/= trusted by default. Why are there so many FOSS evangelists, but such a damn tiny part of them are programmers, let alone programmers able to examine a source code behind such a giant codebase as web browser?
I use Vivaldi, at least their business model is clear, and developer is kind of trusted, and not crypto scammer and homophobe.
its open source tho, show me the spyware and i will belive you
Or just use Edge cause Microsoft is already syphoning your data so you might as well go the whole hog and use Edge
