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I tried Brave. Didn’t like that it had a crypto ads on the new tab page. I also didn’t like that it has some weird built-in point system that you can turn off but randomly turns itself back on and glitches out. Back when I used to use Twitter (formerly X) dot com, it would show weird point counters next to every Tweet and the ability to disable it didn’t work.
Peter Theil is the primary investor in Brave.
For those not in the know, Peter Theil is a MAGA Christian-Nationalist fascist, and owner of Palantir.
Palantir, is the military industrial complex company Trump has entrusted to create a mass surveillance network on US citizens, completely against the 4th Amendment, and dwarfing the NSA spying that was exposed by Snowden.
You can garuntee any activity you do in Brave is being tracked and sent to that network.
You can garuntee any activity you do in Brave is being tracked and sent to that network.
Source:??? BTW, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JNg4Ox2Hvc
I prefer Vivaldi - despite letting you install Adblock extensions (sicnce it’s a Chromium browser), I really like how it has a built-in ad-and-tracker-blocker. Seriously!
But why should i use proprietary software in the first place, when a perfectly fine free alternative exists?
IIRC it’s not exactly open source, but you can still view the source code.
I’m confused what the differentiation is. Ipen source means the code is open to be viewed
Open source typically means that the code is public and comes with extensive freedoms to use, modify, and distribute (the degree to which these are allowed is governed by the software license).
Source available, on the other hand, generally means that the code is publicly available for review but is otherwise proprietary and/or restricts the freedoms that an open source project provides.
The differences are more nuanced than the above summary might suggest, as they come from different philosophies on what open source should mean and how people should be able to interact with and use open source projects.
Open Source ultimately means the code can be sold without modification. But then you can get tricky so for instance if you use this (particularly licensed) open source code, all other code you use in conjunction with this open source code also has to be open source.
Here is a fun thing:
Linksys (Cisco) and the GPL Enforcement (Early 2000s): Context: Linksys used Linux, which is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), for the firmware of the WRT54G wireless router. The Force: The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the open-source community discovered Linksys was not sharing its modified code, which is required by the GPL. Outcome: After legal pressure and a lawsuit in 2003, Cisco agreed to release the source code. This led to the creation of popular third-party firmware like OpenWrt and DD-WRT. (ai overview)
I like to suck cock of corporations that spy and profit from my data?
Not just that, it’s that Brave has this cult-like following for being out-of-the-box, Fisher Price My First Privacy BrowserTM easy to use.
Oh…oh, hey, Apple, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.
Imagine criticizing an app just because it is usable and useful for the normal user, instead of thinking that is such a big goal. Fucking elitism and snobism devours leftism.
Literally just use Firefox for Android with uBlock. People act like this is difficult.
*uBlock Origin
Objectively more insecure and underperformant than ANY other chromium based browser.
Got a source for that incredible claim?
If you’re going to make wild claims that most people would disagree with, you better be able to back it up with objective facts
I just searched for
chrome vs firefoxand just about every article from the past year or so say firefox is more secure. Not that it matters a lot either way. Two party system is crap.How so? at least on Android and Linux there is a lack of sandboxing and site isolation. This could be fixed up to a certain point but anyways it would be more insecure than chromium.
Firefox is objectively more insecure than any chromium based browser.
https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html
The article you linked is over 3 years old at this point. You can’t use that as the basis for your argument for software that’s likely had hundreds of patches since the time that article was published.
So, can you tell how much the situation turned up into? Seriously, I want to know. This time it is not sarcasm.
*which is also still chrome
Normal browser icon vs incognito browser icon comes to mind
Used Fennec
Brave is fine. But it is more due to my employer tolerating it instead of insisting on Chrome. I really like how you turn the privacy setting up to 11 and make websurfing borderline impossible.
Sadly some of it is that the folks at Brave are very good at burying their bad reputation under marketing
Under marketing? I’ve seen a steady growth. The last Eich report told that It have 100 millon active users. duplicated in just 2 or 3 years.
Sorry why are we mad at Meredith?
I switched to Vivaldi recently and it’s alright. I’ll say the Brave ad blocking is solid and the android app works better than Firefox mobile.
Firefox mobile fucking hurts!
Yes! Thank you! I mentioned Vivaldi in a different post on the same topic, and almost got eaten alive by rabid GitHub neckbeards. It’s not fully open source, but who gives a fuck? It’s a great browser.
It’s not fully open source, but who gives a fuck? It’s a great browser.
You forget what corner of the internet you’re commenting on lol
I’m old and jaded. Every corner of the internet is doomed.
I have faith we will be one of the last holdouts.
I think a lot of people don’t know any of the controversy related to brave and just use it because they know it as the most private chromium browser
I know of the controversies, I just don’t think they’re all that big when you actually examine them.
Homophobia
I’m part of the LGBT community and I just think there are bigger fish to fry. One of the guys involved made a $1k donation to an anti-prop 8 campaign like 15 years ago. That’s it. That’s the controversy. Like, yea it’s shitty, but there was a lot more hate toward the community back then. People have grown and changed their views a lot in the years since. If we boycott every single company or individual who ever did anything even remotely homophobic, no matter their actions since, we’d essentially have to be living in a commune growing and making literally everything ourselves. Btw, this same guy is the one who developed JavaScript and I don’t see even remotely the same level of hate for that, so it really feels like people are just being selectively upset.
Cryptocurrency
It’s opt-in. It asks you once, and then never again. It was developed at a time when crypto was popular and was a feature people wanted. It was seen as a good thing when it first came out. Public opinion on crypto has soured, but plenty of people who wanted it still use the feature on brave. They have no good reason to scrap it. Especially because, again, it’s opt-in only. Don’t like it? Cool, don’t use it. They aren’t pushing it on you. But people hear the word crypto and immediately break out the pitchforks.
Do you even know what the goal of their cryptocurrency was? I think it’s safe to say its failed at this point, but the goal was to completely rework how ads function on the internet. It would have killed the modern advertisement methods where ads are shoved in your face and you get nothing for it. Instead, it would have directly paid you a tiny amount any time you saw an ad, with you being able to choose how many you saw, or even if you saw any at all. Then you’d either be able to either keep the money for yourself, or donate it to websites/content creators of your choice. Take away the crypto part of it, and that’s actually a pretty admirable goal in my book.
Ad affiliate links
Brave’s biggest, actual, controversy is that they replaced some affiliate links with their own. Specifically links to binance.us, which is a crypto market. When it was found, Brave changed their code extremely quickly and claimed it was a bug. Now, companies have often lied through their teeth and claimed malicious actions were a “mistake” or a “bug”, so maybe that is the same case here. But considering it was one site only, it was fixed almost immediately, and when you look at how it was actually replacing links (suggested auto fill in the address bar, pulled from browsing history) I am leaning toward it actually being unintentional.
Conclusion
I think people just like to hate things, and will find any reason to continue to do so as long as their little corner of the internet tells them they should hate it. People most vocal with their complaints rarely take the time to dig into the facts and see if it’s really as bad as they claim; or they fully know it’s not as bad, but never want to let the truth get in the way of a good ol’ fashion, hate-boner, circle-jerk.
Is Brave the best browser? Hahahaha no. It’s still a chromium fork and has been a little too eager to integrate AI in my opinion. But it’s FAR from the worst and is the probably the best privacy focused browser for those that don’t understand technology and struggle to use third-party ad-ons. It’s just a little ridiculous that while there are legitimate things to complain about, most people’s arguments seem to always stem from the 3 topics above.
Now cue the downvotes because I’m clearly some crypto fascist boot-licker for daring to believe “nuance” isn’t a made up word.
A couple points: Brendan Eich, the one that made the prop-8 donation, is the current CEO of Brave, not just “one of the guys involved”. In a related problem, I find it a little difficult to believe that someone who doesn’t still hold their anti-gay views would be quite so eager to take cash from Peter Thiel (via his Firm Founder Fund) and I especially do not want to be involved with a browser supported by Thiel when the terms of his investment are private (like, does he have access to brave’s user data? We’d like to think no, but boy are they shaking hands with the devil while asking us to trust them.)
Another big piece of criticism that was excluded: Brave created a bunch of profiles for content creators without telling them then used those to solicit donations on behalf of those content creators, then not only refused to refund users who were deceived they kept all the money they said would go to the content creators.
I think people just like to hate things, and will find any reason to continue to do so as long as their little corner of the internet tells them they should hate it.
Trying to present aspects of this as overblown is possibly true - their affiliate link scam was just to binance.us and that gets left out of a lot of this, but at the same time that’s a damned difficult thing to sell as just having been a mistake when it was auto-replacing the links to something they were the beneficiaries of.
Btw, this same guy is the one who developed JavaScript and I don’t see even remotely the same level of hate for that, so it really feels like people are just being selectively upset.
Well sure, but he’s not actively the CEO of javascript, and as far as I’m aware hasn’t ever been involved with javascript since it was rolled into the OpenJS Foundation.
(Also: Brendan Eich shared a bunch of covid conspiracy theory / misinformation stuff. Sure that’s a minor point, absolutely everyone sure was doing that back then and why should we judge, but still it’s not a great look.)
Trying to present aspects of this as overblown is possibly true - their affiliate link scam was just to binance.us and that gets left out of a lot of this, but at the same time that’s a damned difficult thing to sell as just having been a mistake when it was auto-replacing the links to something they were the beneficiaries of.
And this is why an Open Source browser is so important. Because we can audit it. You are saying like it is a bad thing to audit it.
(like, does he have access to brave’s user data? We’d like to think no, but boy are they shaking hands with the devil while asking us to trust them.)
You can audit it. actually there is this video doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JNg4Ox2Hvc
A wireshark audit isn’t relevant to their reasons for having included the link redirect in the first place, and even a full code audit wouldn’t turn up a user datasharing agreement with Thiel? Obviously auditing OS software is a good thing, I never made any claims about that being bad or presented like it wasn’t possible?
I’m really not sure what you’re trying to say here, none of that refutes any of the points I made.
datasharing agreement What kind of data they could be collecting if they just connect for checking the version and 1 or 2 connections more, as shown in the wireshark scan? Really, oh a computer downloaded Brave, big deal. Even assuming the worst that everything goes to Thiel it just doesn’t matter because it is not relevant for tracking.
What?
Now the 3-year-old strat: Lalalala, I can’t hear you!
Dude you are the most logical and coherent person in this thread, congrats. I should add that most of the bloat Brave has can be disabled via policies, even IA things.
Wow this is so… sane.
Being childish and reductive I wanted to downvote anything supporting Brave, but I find you’ve challenged my views on this.
That said, I think I’m just going to re-frame my dislike for Brave users by assuming they’re all crypto-weirdos.
Appreciate the write up!
That’s really well said.
In the end they are just browsers. It’s great to have people that inform others and lead them to better alternatives and Firefox has many of them who are very passionate. But then many of them are way too passionate.
Calm down with this logical and thought-out response.
Marketing has really worked for Brave.
That is the sad state of the world. Mass manipulating sentiment like some commercial psyop is a built in “feature” of the system.
we live in an era where you can make a puke like prime the most desired drink in the world, so yeah.
Which it isn’t, and also Chromium sucks, so they’re really just mag dumping into their foot
Chromium sucks? chromium is objectively more secure and performant AND compatible than gecko could be.
Based on what?
The web sucks, because of Google’s EEE approach with Chromium; there just isn’t a good way to use the web anymore. I use librewolf, it’s okay.
Librewolf breaks some site and other FF features, I don’t think if it’s usable enough for day by day.
Yup librewolf for all the stuff I can. Google Meet has all kinds of wierd problems on firefox, especially in Linux. Whne you’re hosting you can’t share just one tab with sound and in linux getting the video/mic to authorize is hit or miss and takes a good 20 seconds on my boxes to authorize even when it works.
Google really needs to be kicked out of the W3C and have Chrome taken from them.
While I’m sure you are right I think Brave also likely pays for maintaining opinion on social media and posting positive comments supporting it. Many others learned of doing that (for example musk has bots astroturfing its image pretty much everywhere.) Similarly for example you don’t see controversies section about Brave.
There is so much controversy with every browser and people working on them that I find is better just not to read anything about any browser anymore.
Maybe, if you’ve only heard of like 5 browsers.
I mean, yeah. I’m not a computer person, so
fivesix browsers seems like a lot to just know off hand. I don’t know as many cola brands or Russian Czars without looking them up (I clearly don’t know what a normal comparison would be). People do talk mad shit about Firefox, chrome, opera, brave, safari, and edge though, which have got to make up the vast majority of the browser market.Having to cross out 5 and make it 6 because you actually could name more than 5 off-hand really seems to undercut that point.
Maybe. I tried a lot and my personal experience is that Chrome is at least a level above all else in UX for general use. So chrome with some privacy features out of the box seems a good way to go.
Privacy features? Google harvests your data regardless of your settings. It also furthers Google’s monopoly on the web. I’m sure anyone can see the problem with an advertising giant hungry for data being able to dictate how you access the internet, and what the internet even looks like. Google has power over all of that, split between their influence in the W3C, their Chrome browser, their Android OS, and Google Search.
Google decides what you see, how you see it, and how the underlying technology functions; that’s literally their business model.
That’s the real problem with Chrome and any Chromium based browser.
Yes, it’s a big concern. Unfortunately I have a lot of those. I will have to leave it to other people to spearhead a better fairer freer alternative. One that will not only attract a select crowd, but a wider audience.
Chrome is the worst, there is no privacy with Chrome. The UX is also trash, it’s only good if you haven’t tried anything else.
Also Sergey Brin is in the Epstein files.
Well i respect your personal experience, but it doesn’t at all correspond with mine.
You can prefer the UX of Chrome, especially since so much of the web is designed for it. But it’s not a subjective personal experience that it is not private. Google exists to harvest your data. And the fact that everyone just accepts it is why the internet is so shitty.
We are taking about brave, not chrome. I don’t think you get any more harvested than you do with Firefox.
Not sure what that has to do with your claim that “every” browser has “so much controversy”, but okay.
In conversations humans don’t talk like robots or like they are writing a code. People often use lose expressions, colorful language, exaggerations and everything else that I have no idea about.
I didn’t think I’d need to explain that when I said every browser before, I didn’t really think every single browser. Yet here we are. That’s why I didn’t actually think you will call me out on it and just continued with other stuff. 😀
So yeah, not every browser 😁. Only a few. Although with so many new questionable ai ones, the percentage is going up for sure.
So by “every browser has so much controversy”, you meant, “maybe a few browsers have some controversy”.
Apparently it’s robotic to point out gigantic overstatements.
🥱
Alright yall, what browsers you using then?
Brave for the adblocker and sync of PC and Android. For the moment the best combo.
Librewolf on desktop, Vanadium on mobile.
I’ve been using firefox but I’m probably gonna switch to librewolf because of Mozilla’s ai bullshit. If you don’t mind me asking, what search engine do you use inside?
I use libre wolf with DuckDuckGo but no doubt there’s a myriad of concerns with them too.
I use StartPage. I like the anonymous mode of viewing sites, it lets me circumvent certain blocks a lot of times.
Vanadium on Mobile, Mullvad browser on desktop
Orion
Lagrange
That’s easy, it’s a chromium browser with built-in ad-blocking that hasn’t been kneecapped by manifest v3.
that hasn’t been kneecapped by manifest v3.
I have to disagree with this point. Brave Shields are not as performant as UBO MV2.
You mean Ungoogled Chromium? Vanadium? Chromium?
I’ve never been able to successfully compile ungoogled chromium from the git repo.
I’ve only tried twice. But it’s among my greatest failures in life.
Ungoogled Chromium is a thing of beauty. Google should’ve just endorsed it for shits and giggles.
I said what I said. Thanks for listing alternatives, though!
