If you are keen on personal privacy, you might have come across Brave Browser. Brave is a Chromium-based browser that promises to deliver privacy with built-in ad-blocking and content-blocking protection. It also offers several quality-of-life features and services, like a VPN and Tor access. I mean, it’s even listed on the reputable PrivacyTools website. Why am I telling you to steer clear of this browser, then?
This is a very well written an thorough article and I highly recommend reading it. If you don’t want to however, here is a summary of the key points:
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- Brendan Eich donated to anti-LGBT political organizations, politicians, and initiatives such as CA Prop 8 which banned same-sex marriages.
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- Brave promised to replace ads with privacy friendly ads that would actually pay publishers and even users with a volatile cryptocurrency while keeping a cut for themselves. This never actually came to life and was criticized as “blatantly illegal”.
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- Brave collected donations for popular content creators without actually involving or seeking consent from said creators. In short they accepted donations in crypto for creators, but would only pay out if it reached a minimum value of $100. When called out, Brave said refunds were impossible.
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2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets
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- Brave injected their own referral links for services such as Binance without informing users or asking permission.
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- Brave turned their home screen image rotator into a place to serve ads, many of which were suspicious or crypto related.
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- Brave added a Tor feature which exposed users DNS requests
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- Brave refuses to disclose their crawler bot to websites since many websites want to block Brave Search. Brave will only chose not to crawl a website if it also blocks Google’s crawler.
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2024 - So-called “privacy browser” deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection
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- Brave removed a the Strict, Block Fingerprinting privacy feature from their browser.
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- Brave paid for targeted ads for users searching for Firefox in the Play Store and ran a campaign to “Forget the Fox”. When called out on this the VP publicly denied it and claimed it was photo-shopped.
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- The VP of Brave, Luke Mulks, frequently posts about all things crypto, from NFTs to FTX, and uses AI-gen images to promote them. He also frequently re-tweets right-wing activists.
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- Brendan Eich’s feed also frequently contains right-wing content and Republican propaganda despite his claims to be “independent”.
Edit: corrected a mistake noted below.
Prop 8 was not merely proposed, it was approved by voters and actually banned same-sex marriage for several years before it was ruled unconstitutional.
Brendan Eich contributed to the actual banning of same-sex marriage in California for several years.
Corrected the mistake, thanks.
Thank you!
Oof. It seems that most of the users simply don’t care.
Might be nicer if they just didn’t care.
Check the comment section for the video version of this article by Niccolò, or the comment section of the post on r/browsers, or the replies whenever these issues are mentioned on Twitter, and so on, and you’ll find a bunch of brave people saying stuff like:
you unintentionally just made me like brave over firefox. now i can switch to a chromium based browser and not even feel bad about it
Yes i am installing Brave after this advertisment!
Thanks to this video I deleted Brave then redownloaded it
These were taken directly from the video. They’re on the mild side. Throw in also some “stop inserting politics (other than mine) into tech” comments, and a few homophobes not even trying to hide it. Rather than not caring, many of them like it a lot, especially the right-wing politics.
I don’t think every Brave user is a cunt, but fucking hell, are loud cunts seemingly attracted to Brave.
To folks bothered by this: know that the lead developer of Ladybird is a big fan of Brendan Eich.
Every time I mention that brave is a bad choice that is basically the response I get.
I don’t care about the personal life of the CEO, and I don’t care about crypto, and everything else is a giant pile of nothing. Ads in the home screen? Like who gives a shit??
So the CEO of the company funding Prop 8 to overturn gay marriage is nothing? Stealing from the creators it claimed to be funding? Being a right wing hotspot is cool with you?
Good to know that’s where you stand.
As long as his personal life doesn’t influence the product, I’ll just throw him on the pile with all the other Nazi supporting CEOs. which is most of them.
Okay but the very fact that Brave is a crypto-riddled mess that REPEATEDLY SCAMMED ITS OWN USERS (in what world do you think that’s stopped, and it isn’t just ‘we haven’t found out how they’re still doing it in 2025 yet’) is absolutely influenced by his views. His views are baked in to everything about that browser, up to and including YET ANOTHER bloody built-in LLM constantly popping up on interaction and trying to sell you on AI hallucinations being the future while wasting heck knows how much electricity (Leo).
They’ve never scammed their own users.
trying to sell you on AI hallucinations being the future while wasting heck knows how much electricity
Hello, I see you’ve been living under a rock. Welcome to 2025. This is literally every company. My pdf reader is trying to push an AI assistant on me.
Every time someone uses Brave, I know I can ignore their opinion. They’re either a useful moron who is too dumb to look around them, or they support every single one of these things.
It’s no wonder why 4chan’s /g/ loves Brave.
I don’t use Brave as my main browser but I think some of the accusations are not fair.
- TOR Feature. I don’t think it was deliberately done. Similarly Firefox revealed your up address even if you used VPN while using. As long as there was no malicious intent we can’t say anything other than that they software has big bugs.
- Yes, it is questionable what they do for getting money but same can be said for most donations or schemes that FOSS use. There was long discussions about the money Mozilla receives from Google, or things Opera did (basically similar to Brave)
- Getting news from right wing is useful if you ever need to do research, I had a course in uni about anti-islam and getting really right wings news was difficult. We all knew the same 2 sites.
- The political opinion of the CEO is concerning but not important enough. In that case I’m wholly on the same boat as the developer of the Factorio, if Hitler were to make good Browsers I’d use them.
- It is also important to note most of the problems are in the past. Sure it means there are likely a lot we could not find and it is annoying to use a product where they would exploit you if they are given a chance.
That said Brave is still #1 Browser I’d recommend someone installing. If I can I’d install Firefox myself, but on the phone it is what I recommend. I don’t trust my uncle to install Firefox and install uBlock etc. on top of it. But I trust him to install Brave and use it.
Most privacy minded Browsers like Libre Wolf have restrictions, like not enabling WebRTC out of the box, meaning using Zoom, Meet etc is not possible. There are people who are forced to use such software and not able to tweak with config files. Some people think just because they can do it, everybody should be able to. I think it is a good choice to recommend to people, very good in place replacement for Chrome, you can even take your bookmarks and addons with you
Brave search allows misinformation goggles for anyone that believes 2 + 2 = 5.
I mean Daily Mail should set off an alarm for any sentient being.
Am I misunderstanding something? That’s what I would expect to see from any search engine when you search for “vaccines” and “news from the right”.
Yes, the feature is working exactly as intended, and therein lies the problem.
So people would rather Brave doctored their search results than showed them what they searched for? I genuinely don’t know what else right-wing news outlets would write about vaccines 🤣
That’s crazy. Fuck them
Of course Brave would so something like this. This isn’t surprising whatsoever. It’s still horrible they’re even choosing to enable this whatsoever.
Edit: I just checked what kind of shit they pull up on Transgender issues when using those goggles. It’s as bad as I thought it would be. Fuck Brave for enabling this garbage.
Yep it’s literally half of the results. I’m astounded that this is legal. Well not that astounded.
Does Adblock even work in Brave any more since Google blocked them?
Brave has their own built-in ad blocker that still works
Last I used it, it didn’t have nearly the functionality that ubo does
It barely block most ads
I’m mining bat.
To someone non technical you sound like you are introducing yourself like a DC villain.
Good article other than I am unsure on the reputation of the PrivacyTools website.
Thank goodness that we can post things in here without Braves astroturfed PR community galavanting to save face like what happened when any story against brave posted on the other site
Which other site? Twitter?
I’m almost certain they mean Reddit, but there are a lot of sites that aren’t lemmy.dbzer0.com … like lemm.ee and infosec.pub … even some sites that aren’t Lemmy instances like infosec.exchance or hachyderm.io.
What about infosec.pub? Been my home instance ever since .world blocked piracy discussions, and I never had any issues there.
You would be right with your first guess
The CEO of brave is a homophobic bigot if that helps push anyone over the edge for changing their browser. It was the last straw for me.
This post shows that it’s much worse than that.
That was the headliner reason for me.
The rest was just ‘Alright, it isn’t enough this guy is a piece of shit, he’s pushing a shitty product.’
That pretty much does it, yes. Staying away from brave.
Edit: that Netscape team, holy fuck, Andreesen also came from that cesspool, what a fucking drudge of parasites.
You do know that Firefox is essentially Netscape rebooted, right?
Also I don’t really know what you are trying to say here. Netscape was definitely a better option than Internet Explorer.
God damnit.
Every browser I switched to since Firefox has been a good user experience, and then I find out some horrible bullshit.
Is there any safe browser that isn’t run by hateful assholes?
FF is starting to enshittify because they depend on Google for their revenue
I’m waiting on Ladybird to come out next year into alpha
deleted by creator
i found one called waterfox that is a nice little firefox fork ive been using. super chill.
I’ve been loving it.
I was about to say something about Waterfox too! It feels like old Firefox.
Might give this a crack. Been waiting on Ladybird to come to PC.
Edit: OK it really doesn’t work well with bitwarden on mobile. Normal FF works fine but not this one.
Firefox? Mozilla are just stupid, not really hateful
Probably also has some right wing bias as well. That’s probably one of the reasons they included goggles in Brave search for right wing content.
That’s not even his worst crime. His worst crime was inventing JavaScript.
Especially when the alternative they were considering was having Scheme in the browser.
I didn’t know that, thanks for the tip : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich
Wow, what scummy bastards. I used the browser for a little bit, and I kinda figured they were up to some shady shit when I noticed a crypto-wallet was included, but I ignored all that shit and it was fine. But if I’d known what the CEO or the company in general had been up to I’d have dropped that shit like a bad habit long before I did for other reasons.
I just installed Brave on my Ubuntu OS on my laptop to replace Chrome. It is running better than chrome was so far. Is there a way to setup Brave to safeguard against some of things mentioned or should I go with something like DuckDuckGo instead?
Also don’t use Opera. They’re opera-ted by chinese mafia.
Chinese Mafia aside, opera GX sill benchmarks faster than any other browser, except maybe thorium
Thanks. I read an article yesterday about how it’s one of the best privacy browsers out there.
I prefer either TorBrowser or Waterfox.
TorBrowser is, hands down, the best privacy browser out there but it’s a bit slow because it operates like a decentralized VPN.
Waterfox browser is built on Mozilla’s Gecko Engine just like firefox, but it isn’t managed directly by Mozilla.
Is waterfox compatible with all or most firefox extensions? Also, can you import a firefox profile, and share between devices? I’m fairly invested in firefox, and would hate loosing functionality
I don’t use very many extensions, but it works with all of the ones I’ve tried such as uBlock Origin.
Thanks for Waterfox. Looks awesome. :)
I haven’t heard of waterfox. I use TorBrowser sometimes. But mostly I use LibreWolf. Its based on Firefox also, but without Monzilla
it isn’t managed directly by Mozilla
I was about to make a snarky comment about how it is, however, owned by an advertising company, but then I found this.
What the frick?
Thank you for posting this! I had a vague recollection there was something scummy about Brave, and I was surprised to see it recommended in so many of the “Which browser should I use?” posts. It’s really handy to have a chronical of bullshit like this to point to when it comes up
You could make a similar “chronical” about any other browser. They’re often recommended because in many ways they are the least shitty and most sustainable.
“Other people are assholes too” is a terrible reason to support an asshole. Expect better.
Which asshole do you support?
Brave bought ad space on YouTube, and showed an ad on how to block ads on YouTube.
Mozilla could have done something similar with UBO but they just keep missing so many golden chances.
Mozilla has millions of reasons to not rock the boat with Google.
Thanks, but I’ll keep using it.
I don’t agree politically with the CEO nor I’m I fan of the crypto stuff, but I find it better than any other browser right now. And I don’t want to support Mozilla in any way, so FF and its forks forks are a no-go.
Here come the downvotes fro the supposedly tolerant
idiotsgood people out there, lolDude, you showed up to a post about how brave is an ad-riddled crypto scam and responded with “yeah, but fuck Firefox” with no reasoning given. Then cried about how anyone who disagreed with that assessment was an idiot.
What kind of engagement were you expecting/hoping for?
I’m just tired of these shitty posts about… A perfectly fine browser! But no problem, I’ll just keep blocking idiots who endlessly parrot bullshit while pretending that the fediverse is a paradise.
I have been using Brave for many years hands up
