I used Brave for a few years but recently switched to LibreFox. I really enjoyed Brave as a browser but couldn't handle all the sketchy shit that seems to keep coming up
The only reason I haven't switched to Firefox from Chrome fully is because for some reason Firefox for Android still doesn't have tabs for large screen devices. Mozilla says it's not a priority. 🤷
If you think the things brave has done are bad, go read through the list of things microsoft has done. You really don't want them to ever have a browser again, and certainly don't want to personally use it.
It was because of 'security', which was never explained. And it doesn't make much sense when other browsers can and do alow it. I'll see if I can dig up some historical links if I remember tomorrow.
Last time I checked,there was still no acknowledgement of it and appeared to be no intention of ever addressing it. The fact that they're now telling people to run a webserver suggests that nothing has changed ☹️
White list firewall. Because this is the real reason everyone has a right to ad block. Ads are hidden links to other websites. It's like walking through a gauntlet of pick pockets bribing the credit card company just to make it to the checkout at your local grocery store, or some asshole you invite into your home that goes to the bathroom, opens a window, and lets a dozen random people in your home if they pay a dollar for the access. The entire system is based on stalking people. It is criminal.
It changes many default Firefox preferences in about:config to be as private as possible. The main selling point is resist fingerprinting (RFP). I highly suggest reading the wiki. It can break some websites, but you can configure it to fit your needs.
Every now and then, you'll see some journalist uncovering the great revelation that Mozilla is doing unthinkable things, but I have never these stories actually being relevant, if you do more research on the topic.
And telemetry by itself is not evil either. It depends entirely on what data is actually being sent. You can look at what Mozilla sends by typing "about:telemetry" into the URL bar. In my opinion, that is perfectly fine.
Ultimately, though, they enjoy so much trust, because they have no profit motive. The Mozilla Foundation is legally a non-profit and the Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary of the Foundation, so cannot pay out profits to anyone either.
Any 'evil' shit they do to make money, they do it to pay wages and to invest further into Firefox & their other projects.
You can criticize that the CEO takes a salary she can't possibly spend (yet is below industry-standard, to my knowledge). And you can argue whether they should be taking so much money from Google rather than other sources.
But all in all, that still leaves them far above companies who need to exploit users as much as justifiable, to make the maximum amount of profit.
They like to play the "user and privacy friendly" company. Meanwhile they are hemoraging users, and laying off staff needed to actually build a great browser.
Mozilla ceo pay increase + layoffs in 2020:
In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.
I am using Brave on iOS mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.
Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It's because he donated $1,000 in support of California's Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California's state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
I want to try a thought experiment. Imagine that you observe this comment in reaction to the above:
I just don’t get why the author is so pissed about their political contributions. Guess what, people who are involved in big business are usually right-wing and support right-wing organizations. Shocking. Who could have known. I don’t even want to imagine how the author comes to the conclusion that this is some big conspiracy but I think we all know what political spectrum that guy belongs to.
What I just wrote is a mirror-image version of the top rated comment on that article from a few days ago about the Mozilla foundation funding left-wing organizations. Do you agree with one of those statements and not the other? If so, why?
It is one-sided to say that someone involved in Brave should only be "allowed" to do so if he doesn't support anything conservative. Just as would be one-sided and wrong to say that Mozilla shouldn't be "allowed" to support left-wing organizations. Flipping it around, and looking at the reaction when it's the other way around, is an easy way to analyze your own internal reactions on it.
(Generally, I'm in agreement with the idea that you shouldn't use Brave because of all these other shady things; just this one part jumped out at me as one thing that's not like the others.)
Very good observation. The issue being, the way I see it,
he supported a generally accepted hateful conservative rhetoric. Most left wing organizations do not promote hateful rhetorics.
Yeah, it's one-sided. Prop 8 was stupid and CA rightfully rejected that shit later.
It's good to be one-sided against stupid shit that is a crime against humanity. Gay marriage is now legal federally. Same as interracial marriage. Nazis got beat the fuck up in WW2. Slavery is over. Deal with it.
You're not going to want to hear this, but this logic (i.e. "But MY side is the RIGHT one, so it's different") is exactly why the right wing thinks Trump shouldn't go to prison and it's okay when they cheat in elections.
I do agree with you that the left wing is the right side of history. That doesn't mean someone who's on the other side suddenly shouldn't be an executive of anything.
Supporting politicians you like and supporting basic human rights being taken away on the basis of completely arbitrary factors outside one's control are two very different things.
You're not going to want to hear this, but this logic (i.e. "But MY side is the RIGHT one, so it's different") is exactly why the right wing thinks Trump shouldn't go to prison and it's okay when they cheat in elections.
I do agree with you that the left wing is the right side of history. That doesn't mean someone who's on the other side suddenly shouldn't be an executive of anything.
It's not even about sides. There is no left wing party in the USA - the Democrats are a right wing party. The problem with the GOP is not that they are right wing, it's that they are extremists. A lot of their "policies" are not policies, they are crimes against humanity. 'People who are demographic X shouldn't have the basic human right of Y" is not an opinion, a policy or justifiable in any way.
And boycotting people as Eich is first and foremost an act of self-preservation.
Eich is, evidently, a hateful cunt who invests into destroying the human rights of random people. By exposing your e-mail, bank accounts, your communications and your identity to him (by using his browser), you are inviting him to violate your rights as well.
By using Brave's shit, you giwe Eich money. Thot same money he later uses to fund the atrocities he and his peers commit. Thus, by using Brave's shit, you are not only complacent in these crimes, but actively participating.
Less relevant, but still, by using a Chromium-based browser, you help inflate Google's oppressive market share in the browser space, letting them push shit like Mv3 or WEI. If Brave actually cared about making a private and secure browser and fighting Google's monopoly, they'd base off Gecko or, better yet, build their own engine.
The two sides are not morally equal. Prop 8 was an awful, bigoted stain on California's history and he was unrepentant. I am glad he no longer is at Firefox. And Brave is a sketchy company that makes clear it was a good decision to give him the boot. I can support companies with moral stances I agree with and not support companies that do bad things.
At one point they were scummy enough to automatically add their referral codes to any Amazon link you see. Lots of people today still mindlessly recommend Brave, and that's what's wrong in general with the "but the UX is so nice" mentality.
How exactly does one accidentally insert affiliate data on links? At some point someone wrote that code, which is malicious in itself, even if the activation was accidental.
When I initially decided to drop Chrome, I moved to Brave because - as a chromium-based browser - it supported the same set of extensions I’d grown accustomed to.
That being said, the crypto stuff weirded me out enough that, once I’d weaned myself off the extensions, I switched to Firefox.
What extensions does chrome have which are useful that Firefox doesn’t?
My only recurring issue with Firefox, which may have been fixed I dunno, is it for some reason it “isn’t officially supported” or whatever exact wording to use hardware security keys (like yubikey, which I use on every account that allows it). It’s only certain websites that don’t want to work though. Like google, Microsoft and many others were fine but I think paypal didn’t want to work properly but it does work on Edge, Chrome, probably Brave. Overall annoying as fuck at times but I deal with it to be out of Google’s-world
Chromium has metric shit tons of work done that seems to perform great. What I would love to see is for Mozilla to fork Chromium, staff it with enough people to maintain it, add/remove the features they feel are appropriate/inappropriate, and thus reuse the tons of free work Google and others have already done. As a software engineer, I don't buy the argument that it's easier to correctly implement every new web feature anew than maintaining a fork. Every large org that ships anything based on Android for example maintains a fork of an even bigger codebase. It's not as complicated as people make it out to be. It's not a new problem and there are strategies to manage it. If Mozilla does this, they'll be able to play an active role in steering by far the biggest rendering engine's direction, instead of playing opposition with no stake in it. Now downvote away! 😄
The more market share chrome based browsers have, the easier it is for google to inflict their agenda for the internet on everyone. If firefox didnt exist, every web developer would be optimizing their sites only for chrome, and responding quickly to any change google wants to make.
The ceo is a bigoted asshole, Brave is chromium, it was initially funded by Peter Thiel and they're literally just trying to make their own adsense network.
The self-proclaimed privacy focused browser is tracking your browsing and want to serve you personalized ads, and I think they want to use that tracking data for AI training as well, meaning other people can potentially access it.
And lets not forget about their crypto currency that you can earn by turning on special ads. Which they seemingly unironically called it "Basic Attent Tokens"..
TL;DR: The company is basically a sham company trying to usher in a dystopia. Where you'll get paid for staring at ads, while having all your data stolen and sold back to you.
I am using Brave on iOS mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.
Brave is a marching band of red flags. It claims privacy while injecting ads, affiliate codes and crypto into the browser. It's kind of sad to see someone like Brendan Eich who should know better turn to the dark side and pretend this is all fine. It isn't.
Best advice I could give for anyone who wants privacy is use Firefox or a branch of it. Firefox is out of the box the most privacy conscious mainstream browser and add-ons make it more so. If you want absolute privacy you could even use a derivative like Tor Browser.
He made a thousand dollar donation in support of proposition 8, a constitutional amendment in California that strips gay people of the right to marry. He then proceeded to argue that such a donation does not make him a bigot or an enemy of LGBTQ+ people, because he's a delusional piece of filth.
This effectively prevented gay people from marrying in California from 2008 to 2013 until the fascists that supported it were finally done trying to argue how this doesn't violate the US constitution.
So yeah, may he, his browser, and any pathethic excuse that pretends to be human being who supported this abomination rot in the deepest depths forever.
I'm all for gay rights and advocate for same sex marriage. But if he doesn't then he's now boxed in with the skinhead kill-all-the-immigrants crowd? Where's the nuance?
That said, I don't really trust Brave the product. It's pushing its privacy agenda a little too hard for me to trust it.
First, I have been online for almost 30 years. I’ve led an open source project for 14 years. I speak regularly at conferences around the world, and socialize with members of the Mozilla, JavaScript, and other web developer communities. I challenge anyone to cite an incident where I displayed hatred, or ever treated someone less than respectfully because of group affinity or individual identity.
So I hid my hatred from everyone for 30 years successfully. Now that everyone finds out that I donated to a cause to strip them of rights everyone wants to say I'm hateful? Give me one example where I displayed hatred....how about the time you donated to strip people of their rights? That might be a big one for me.
I have absolutely no idea how Brave got the reputation it has. It's business model is disgusting and extortionate, it's like paying for warez. Been clear as day since day one.
Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It's because he donated $1,000 in support of California's Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California's state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
Besides this I cannot find another good reason not to use brave. Nobody point to a specific line of code that ruins privacy, not enough reasons.
Because Firefox on mobile is a pile of shit to be honest. It works great on desktop, but the mobile experience is subpar. For a chromium browser, Bromite used to be an option, but it seems abandoned now. Brave is one of the few Foss chromium browsers left that also supports adblocking.
