Brave is essentially just Chrome with an adblocker, a bunch of bloatware, and a bunch of controversies.
Brave took BAT donations in YouTuber’s names without their consent, with them keeping the money if the YouTubers didn’t claim it. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-browser-no-longer-claims-to-fundraise-on-behalf-of-others-so-thats-nice/
Brave’s search engine crawler hides itself from websites by pretending to be Googlebot, and Meta (Facebook) buys API access from them to train their AI. https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai-training/
The business model of Brave rewards as a whole is to block all other ad networks to replace them with their own, which is unfair as only YouTubers and websites that have joined can make money from most Brave users.
If Brave actually cared, they would create an acceptable ads style feature which was free for everyone and allowed simple contextual banners while blocking ads which track you, take up most of the page, or have NSFW content.
Their approach is monopolistic as they have full control and can strangle YouTubers and websites by dropping pay at any time.
And Brenden Eich has said on Twitter that he plans to release “Brave Origin”, which is a paid version of Brave without the bloatware. That name is ironic as he is admitting that his browser is commercialised and bloated, which is similar to when gorhill gave uBlock way to Chris Aljoudi who commercialised it, which led him to create uBlock Origin.
If you use Brave, ditch it and look at using Librewolf or Helium instead, which both include no ads nor tracking and don’t have Brave News, Rewards, Wallet, Talk etc bloatware.
I always use and recommend hardened Firefox + Ublock. As a search engine, I use Qwant, which is based in the EU and uses its own search engine whenever possible rather than Google, Bing, etc. And there is another reason not to recommend using Brave. Among its investors is Peter Thiel, the most controversial figure in the investment world. Search for Peter Thiel’s controversial statements in your favourite search engine and you will see for yourself.
An extra reason: Eich is a homophobic asshole and an anti-masker
…and? Are you going to stop using the transistor?
Man’s dead.
Don’t matter what he thought when he’s rotting in the ground.
Does when you’re still alive
Oh I see, outrage of convenience.
I am pretty set with Firefox in Android and desktop to be honest.
I cringe a little when users praise Brave as being the best ad-less YouTube solution (especially android users since we have revanced here!), no bro, there is no way using the web version of YT is better than revanced, or any other apps on mobile.
Their shields AdBlock is very good though, it’s done in ram in a memory safe way, arguably doing it through an extension like ublock is not great. I can’t wait until a project facelifts shields and puts it on top of an unbloated security focused chromium (or Firefox grows some balls and builds it in). Vanadium pls 🥺
Firefox (and threfore Librewolf) has enhanced tracking protection which is similar.
I’ve been trying out Helium for the last month. It’s still in beta but so far it’s working well and works the way I want.
It comes with ublock installed and just for an extra measure I installed priv badger and noscript.You can do a lot of tweaking in here too helium://flags/
I’m too ready to ladybird browser to be ready in a few years.
I was looking forward to ladybird until I saw social media posts from the person who runs the project, like:
In recent years I’ve attended multiple software conference talks that had unrelated extreme political rhetoric in slides, such as “fuck [name]” and “punch [group]”.
Whenever this happened, some of the audience would clap and cheer, I’d roll my eyes, and the talk would get back on topic.
Fast-forward to today, and look at how many people in our industry are openly celebrating the murder of someone they decided was a “nazi” and “fascist”. Turns out these people were more serious than I thought.
As someone who’s repeatedly been called a “nazi” and “fascist” myself for disagreements with far-left ideology, I know how easily those labels get thrown around. And honestly, this is making me seriously reconsider which conferences I attend.
There’s a hateful rot within our industry. It shouldn’t be socially acceptable to cheer for murder. We need to do more than roll our eyes.
source: https://nitter.net/awesomekling/status/1967178708852097278
Can you really discount and avoid a whole project because of that statement?
It reads like: “Can we keep politics out of software?”
Which I agree with for the most part.
I’m not sure I have experienced enough of life to make this statement, but it feels like in recent years a lot of people are becoming radicalized through social media, etc, which is seeing its spread into every conversation and space. Maybe he is done with politics and doesn’t want to keep hearing about it in unrelelated spaces (software conferences). What’s wrong with that?
I’ve seen the guy on a podcast where he explains ladybird, he seems like a good dude doing it out of love and to see competition in the browser space, I can’t fault him for this (nothing burger).
Do you think differently?
Honestly what do people have against Firefox that can’t be fixed with plugins? It’s the only decent browser that isn’t chrome based, and I think that deserves support. And with plugins and sync it’s a great experience.
Firefox is great. Mozilla, however, is making some weird moves every now and then. A lot of people don’t quite trust Mozilla to have their interests at heart anymore.
The obvious solution is to use a Firefox fork. I have no idea whether there’s a meaningful difference between the various Firefox forks, and would welcome a summary.
I switched to LibreWolf, which is a Firefox fork that prioritizes anonymity and privacy. I like it, but there are definite quirks:
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it will tell every website your time zone is UTC+0, which breaks some stuff. Proton Calendar works if you tell it your actual timezone.
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no password saving and cookies delete every session, so you have to log in to every website every time you restart. This is intentional but I don’t understand the rationale. You can install a password manager though and self-host it if you want.
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because your device fingerprint is generic, a lot of websites incorrectly assume you are a not. I have to use FF for GrubHub, for instance, as they won’t play nice with LibreWolf due to restrictions on the HTML5 Canvas element, for instance.
You can turn off the fingerprint protection in the Librewolf tab of the settings page.
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For me it’s a combination of Mozilla making strange business decisions (removing of the “we never sell your data” policy) and the fact that a lot of websites take forever to load on Firefox.
I’ve tried forks, LibreWolf pisses me off. Too many settings to change just to still have a broken browsing experience in the sake of privacy. If I need that level of privacy, I’ll use I2P/Tor.
I hate the fact that chromium has won, but it’s getting difficult to avoid the fact that web developers don’t give a rats ass if the website doesn’t work well on Firefox.
Brave was my primary for a while, but I switched to Vivaldi after reading about some of the BAT bait and switch.
I agree that LibreWolf’s default settings are too strict as Mullvad Browser serves the best privacy niche, however all you have to do is turn off cookie clearing and ResistFingerprinting, then enable WebGL.
I won’t use a chromium based browser at all, especially Brave.
You need to stop using Brave
No thanks, buddy.
…he plans to release “Brave Origin”, which is a paid version of Brave without the bloatware.
Use Group Policy to get it for free.
Am I the only person who uses mobile tab grouping and sees it as a must-have? Its ridiculous that Firefox is over 5 years behind on this incredible QoL feature. To me it’s almost as bad as if a browser didn’t support bookmarks. It’s just ridiculous at this point.
What is this feature?
I posted an insane rant with a video here :
I never used it specifically because of it being run by Brenden Eich. I have no intention of knowingly throwing my towel in and helping to enrich someone who’s thrown his money around to strip people of the right to marry who they want because he finds it icky.
I’m sure there’s other bad shit from him but after that I just treat him and anything he does as pure toxin.
If that sounds harsh, well, I don’t give a fuck.
But brave still has the best fingerprint resistance of any browser. Except for tor which is too slow for me. If mullvad browser ever gets on android I will use that, for now I will use brave.
I already use librewolf on desktop which is a great experience. But Firefox on mobile is just so horribly laggy and has a dated UI, the only offering it has is ublock origin and reader mode. Brave is the only real mobile browser choice I have since it has pretty good tracker blocking and I can disable nearly all of the problems you’ve mentioned here.
After decades of being a Google fanboy and using nothing but Chrome, my bf proudly told me he’d installed Brave after he got tired of his favorite websites being nothing but ads. I wouldn’t use it personally for the reasons you mention, but I think it’s a positive step for some people.
Brave is the browser version of Honey. It blocks 3rd party ads and inserts its own, taking the money. Either block the ads or don’t but this is shitty.
I’m just glad people are finally starting to mention LibreWolf as the first go-to.
Do people realize that if Firefox dies (in the many ways that could be interpreted), all of these downstream forks will also die right?
Like, the work to in essence remove unwanted parts of a code base is admirable but its an utterly miniscule fraction of the work that goes into maintaining a modern browser, keeping up with standards, sending people to be voices at conventions, etc.
The beauty of open source projects is that if they are abandoned, other people can pick them back up. Sure it may be difficult, but if it wasn’t FOSS it wouldn’t even be possible.
Thats the beauty to silly idealists who pretend they can’t understand that hundreds of employees getting paid full time wont materialize out of thin air to keep a massive project like a web browser alive in the absence of that structure.
Ok, but which browser should we use.
I am on opera
Literally Firefox.
I feel like the reasons are obvious and I am constantly amazed at people who choose offshoots that end up having problems jsut as bad or worse than Chrome.
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Firefox actually uses an engine independent of Chromium
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Firefox keeps developer documentation for the actual open web in a a clear fashion better than anyone else with MDN.
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Firefox is responsible for all of the heavy lifting for any of the browsers downstream of it that people seem to want to switch to so that Mozilla is less supported and the browsers they are on also break (which is bizzare footgun behaviour in my opinion, and exactly why the people who are idealists inherently can’t win. They shoot themselves in the foot with idealism so hard that companeis don’t even have to care about their opinions).
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Firefox has more resistant than the engine makers of any other browser to anti autonomy web changes like Chromes manifest 3, tvarious new tracking mechanisms and more.
Excuse a little bit of snark at hypothetical responses below, but Im just so frustrated Ill let off a little steam here:
bUt Ai.
So they have a few AI features you have to purposefully find or stumble into, and that means you are going to do everything in your power to make sure your last actual chance to avoid completely Google domination dies too?
You are basically begging for the even more intense enshitification that will come if Firefox actually dies.
bUt SoMeOnE eLsE cAn CoNtInUe DeVeLoPmEnT
Oh yeah? Someone else is going to take on this project with a massive amount of legacy code, inside knowledge and hundreds of people working on it constantly to keep it completely up to date??
You must have been confused when I mentioned above Mozilla does the heavy lifting for the browsers down stream. Just because someone makes a fork that removes features doesnt mean they are equipped to handle the level of work done in the code they are downstream of.
Anyways, the bottom line is, for now, if you actually value open source, the answer is Firefox.
Or one of Firefox forks. I like waterwolf due having a mobile app
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