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.
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.
As I stated in a previous post, if you are using an iPhone you've basically given up on having privacy. For ad blockers you could use AdGuard and Safari, it's better than nothing. You could also use something like Mullvad VPN, it has DNS ad blocking.
That’s the most ridiculous statement I’ve seen today. iOS has infinitely better privacy than Android lawl
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, CalyxOS, ect.). 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.
Stock for stock, yes.
The difference is iOS is iOS, and there is only one. Whereas Android is open source and comes in thousands of flavors. You cannot install another OS on your Apple devices. You get what Apple gives you, and nothing more or different because that's the way they like it. They want control over your devices.
Some flavors of Android are Graphene or Calyx OS which are not only better and more usable than iOS but also 10x more secure and private.
As I stated in a previous post, I am using AdGuard on safari. And since I’ve basically given up on privacy, I also use Brave at times.
I haven't tried it but there's also Kagi's Orion browser which looks interesting.
Thanks I didn’t know about that one and I thought I went through all the alternatives. Currently I’m primarily watching YouTube vids through invidious in safari but will use brave when I watch my saved playlists.
Sideloading either Yatee or uYou+
Or use Piped as a PWA
This is why I use Brave on iOS devices. It is the best option I found. Others mention Adguard home and pihole. They just don’t work as well at blocking ads.
Brave was also made by a guy who got kicked out of Mozilla for being homophobic. The cryptocurrency stuff is brave also a major scam, it's a crypto that must first be converted into another crypto before it can be converted into real money. How is that a "currency"?
Personally, I trade my monopoly money into beanie babies and use that to pay my rent. I'm homeless.
As I stated in another comment, I didn't bring up the CEO's controversies because they are subjective. Some people might be fine with what he thinks. It also doesn't really impact the software in any way.
Also, and I hate to defend a homophobe here, but if we're going back to the details...
It all sprang up because he gave $1000 to the Prop 8 campaign for banning same sex marriage in California.
Scummy, to be sure, but it's not like he orchestrated the whole campaign or fully financed them. $1000 is barely enough to pay for one TV ad to play exactly one time on a local California TV station. I understand, yes, that when you add that to the rest of the donations, it was a juggernaut, but it still felt a little like punishing someone for having different politics. I also understand that it would be hard to work under someone like that knowing what his politics are, and questioning if that was going to impact fellow LGBT employees. Super valid reasons to be upset that he was put in the top leadership position.
His politics are shitty, to be sure, but a single $1000 donation definitely always seemed a little overblown to me. Especially since he chose to resign after just 11 days, while Mozilla had tried to convince him to stay on in a different role. No one in leadership roles stepped down over him, he made the choice to save the organization instead of himself. That at least showed some sense of humility. So I don't know, not the greatest guy, and his current trajectory with Brave hasn't been so great either, but he at least showed decorum in that situation.
However, that situation also put Mozilla on the defensive, having to put out a FAQ about how they weren't turning into an activist organization, or how you didn't have to ascribe to and agree on every political issue to work at Mozilla.
It was just bad business all around.
Thanks for clearing everything up along of other threads always just said he was homophobic and that's the only reason to not use brave.
No problem. I remember being mildly irked about it at the time, because while I disagree with his choice to make that donation to that group, and understand the feelings of LGBT people working at Mozilla and how knowing his politics impacted them... He handled the public response to it professionally. He didn't double down like conservative politicians these days and start shouting about "gays are groomers" or something. He owned it and stepped away, which should at least speak to him not being completely homophobic and able to take ownership of how his personal politics affected others. You see so little of that these days, that when someone acts professionally after perceived wrongdoing, it seems sad when people don't recognize it.
Also, I never saw any news of him being proven to have made any discriminatory moves while in Mozilla at all. I could be wrong, but I don't remember employee complaints of being treated differently before the news of his donation broke. Like I said, I can understand how that news can change how you feel about your boss, but if your boss never made an outward show of it in a work environment and a news report on his political donations is what it took for you to know his politics... it means he was probably being pretty fucking professional at work and trying to not let his personal politics infect how he treated his coworkers and employees. *shrugs
Prop 8 was also awhile ago so it's possible he changed his mind. People forget how common it was to be shitty on this issue in the 2000's. The public consensus only flipped in like 2013.
I have no evidence either way though
That said, Brave is worse software than Firefox imo so it's a moot point.
Let's not forget one of the biggest investors is a right-wing billionaire who runs a corporate intelligence agency that contracts with the DoD. And the only proof we have that he doesn't collect data on Brave's users is the questionable word of the devs.
Brave has been off limits for me ever since I saw my QAnon nutjob father using it lol.
I would appreciate if we don't bring politics into the conversation. They are completely subjective and only serve to stray away from the original point.
Edit:
Yes, I'm aware I'm in the wrong here.
I would appreciate it if conservatives stopped trying to strip away our rights, including the right to privacy.
untrue, politics affects the shape of everything, if we don't 'make it political' we let whatever political lean already is there continue. thats not apolitical, thats apathy
that said thanks for the post, good to know!
FOSS hacks the copyright system to build a software commons independent of corporation, guaranteeing the freedoms of users and developers - what part of that statement isn't political?
aren't you on a fucking anarchist instance, ding dong? shut the fuck up, we don't do "apolitical" theatrics here.
how can privacy ever be stripped of political content? it's inherently about social forces - ie politics.
And the only proof we have that he doesn't collect data on Brave's users is the questionable word of the devs.
And...the source code?
If the devs aren't trustworthy, I'm sure as hell not trusting that they didn't add something extra.
Brave is not spyware. That website you linked is horrible and full of misinformation. They also claim that Firefox, and even Tor Browser, are spyware. They act as if any and all connections a browser makes are automatically bad and used for spying/tracking.
I won't disagree with the other criticisms of Brave that you made, but just wanted to point that out. That website is just highly unreliable and makes verifiably false claims about the browsers it reviews.
Just commenting to let you know I've clarified a bit in the post. Also, stock Firefox is spyware so.
Stock as in out-of-the-box.
For the comments, can anyone give me an actual reason to use Brave over Firefox (and it's forks)? I guess the cryptocurrency aspect is a reason, but I wouldn't say it's a very good one.
Brave has been hyped as a privacy browser despite having several major privacy failures baked into it repeatedly. It's 100% hype. You get the same level of privacy on paper by installing Chromium with an ad blocker and tweaking a couple settings. Firefox has better privacy defaults and is better with an ad blocker installed. Chromium has a slight edge on security (FF needs to really push tab isolation harder) but if privacy is your main concern I would always recommend FF.
My guess is because Brave is a relatively known Chromium browser that's been degoogled. Along with built in ad and tracker blocking, and it's an easy less evil of the two.
I want to like Firefox, both as normal user and as web developer, but something about it keeps bugging me. The UI feels sluggish, sites seem to be slightly less performant, and I can't seem to get used to it.
That said, I've started using Vivaldi, and while it can be considered bloated, I really like the tab options it has, while also offering a degoogled chromium that's being kept to date.
Because all the web devs optimize for chrome because they dominate the market. If more people use Firefox then devs will start to care about performance in it
(You're a dev so I assume you know this. This comment is mainly for other people)
I'm not sure what it is. I suppose this is the case for the heavier web-applications, but the average website (which is where my expertise is, not actual applications) also feels slightly worse on FF. And as far as I know, I don't use any chrome-specific tricks or optimizations.
Defaults. Install Brave and you're done. Site doesn't work? Report non-working site. Wanna support creators? Top up your Brave Wallet or turn on Brave ads.
I've a limited budget and limited time to tip websites. I ain't gonna tip manually every other rando on the internet. Brave takes care of that. Small amounts, yes, but better than just ad-blocking [yes, website owners have to opt-in to it].
Completely uninformed take follows: Also, Mozilla seems to be trying to ramp up their ads department -- search for Mozilla Ads. And no-one gonna convert because they already have Google Adsense.
TL;DR: Firefox is faster but using recommended tools like uBlock Origin leaves websites without income.
You can always use something like AdNauseam to give website owners ad revenue and still block ads.
I don't use brave, but I use Vivaldi.
The main reason for me is native mouse gestures. They are so much better than addon mouse gestures.
And speed dials. Addon ones are okayish, but I prefer the Vivaldi implementation.
If Firefox would ever ass native mouse gestures, I would swap in an instant. Until then, no can do :(
Personally I can't say anything about Vivaldi, but it's proprietary and owned by people who used to work for Opera.
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Proprietary, yes, from a Foss pov it's not good I guess
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Owned by ex opera ppl: that's a good thing tbh. Old opera was fantastic. New opera is more fishy after they were acquired by a Chinese group.
There is a lot of browser love in Vivaldi tbh. They are very open and transparent. Haven't found a single red flag about Vivaldi (aside from not being FOSS, which for me isn't a red flag per se)
They even run their own Mastodon servers for their community ;)
Proprietary software is generally frowned upon in this community, however I personally don't mind that much.
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Firefox is actually NOT a private browser. I don't know where it gets this reputation because clearly those people haven't read their privacy policy where it plainly states that they gather and sell your info to a data mining company.
For better or worse, Chromium browsers work better because the vast majority of people use Chromium so that's how people build their sites.
Brave has tons of privacy features and settings. Including built-in ad-blocking just like uBlock so your extensions can't be used to fingerprint you.
If you want a private browser and insist on but using Chromium there are dozens of Firefox forks that are much better for privacy.
If the (supposedly) privacy preserving ads and crypto really upset you, you can simply turn them off.
This isn't a reason to use Brave, this is just a reason to not use stock Firefox.
There's really not a difference. At the end of the day you need a browser so a reason not to use one is not terribly different from a reason TO use another. And the one that constantly gets recommended in these communities is Firefox, which is not as bad as Chrome but still worse than just about any privacy-preserving browser out there.
Most people recommend forks of Firefox, or Firefox with modifications to make it more privacy-centric. I don't think anyone recommends stock Firefox (it's spyware).
I've seen countless instances in this post alone of people recommending Firefox and its forks. Are we talking about the same place?
This falls under "not a good reason" because 90% of Chromium extensions have Firefox alternatives.
I don't want to support Mozilla, for a lot of reason I don't have the time or the will to discuss here. Is that enough for you? It is for me.
You either support Google or support Mozilla. Supporting Mozilla leads to a safer internet for all.
I don't believe Mozilla PR, I believe that solely using Chromium is bad for everyone.
On iOS, unlike Android, Firefox doesn't come with extensions. No ads are blocked. Even if I use Safari and Adguard extension, it doesn't block YouTube ads. Brave works like a charm in this regard. I've opted out of all telemetry stuff that I could find, and btw even Firefox opts into everything by default. Any other open source browser you can suggest that blocks ads including YouTube on iOS?
On iOS use Orion Browser by Kagi. As for blocking ads in YouTube, you can use AltStore to sideload a YouTube app with sponsorblock and ad block built in.
(Orion might block YouTube ads, I haven't tested it)
I mean that's a reason not to use Brave. It's a Chromium based browser.
Yeah I reread your question after I posted and realized you were asking something different. Tried to delete it before anyone read it but oops… 😬
If nothing else, I would recommend Firefox over Brave for the sole reason of it being yet another Chromium browser. It would be nice if we could eat away some of the marketshare from Google.
I see this exact thread every week now and it's between the same people:
"Oh ok i stopped using it" to "Naw i'll keep using brave"
At this point can we stop this? Brave is trash but people are either too stubborn or just don't care anymore (which is ironic). Either mods just pin this thread and treat this as a "brave is trash" megathread or I don't know.
I made this post because people in this community were suggesting Brave as a privacy focused browser. As far as I'm aware, no other post like this exists in this community specifically.
Fair enough. I respect the response. I've just been seeing some of the same threads throughout my time on lemmy and its essientially the same responses generally from brave users (which is their choice). Its not fully a waste but at this point the mods should just pin this thread.
I don't think this thread is detailed enough to be pinned, but thanks.
Might I add brave's BAT wallet is garbage. You had to sign up to some random exchange and upload your ID (I didn't), but even that you couldn't even backup your wallet into a new install, so hope that you would never have to format or reinstall or change devices - it'll be a pain to restore, if it was even possible.
Firefox over brave any day.
Guess what, Firefox also gets the same score on ghis site :)
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/firefox
Also they both seem to be the better option to Chrome https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/chrome
Not sure if this score applies to vanilla Chromium.
Firefox gets a high rating on default configuration.
The next line explains that with custom configuration, it becomes Not Spyware.
Yes they both get the same score, but Firefox also has a mitigation guide to make it Not Spyware.
Let me put it in this way – if Firefox were really a spyware, TOR browser won't be based on Firefox.
That's not the best argument tbh, bc you van remove all the spyware from brave AND Firefox sooooo
Tbf Tor is based on US military software. Could be a honeypot lol. But it's the best we've got...
That website is very bad and full of verifiably false information, they act as if any and all connections a browser makes are automatically bad and "spying". They even claim that Tor Browser is a "spyware".
That website is [...] full of verifiably false information
Could you please provide and example or two? I wish to verify it, since I didn't notice any last time I checked the site.
they act as if any and all [unprompted] connections a browser makes are automatically bad and “spying”.
They're very clear that this is their approach (bold text on the home page). Even if you disagree with their definition, that doesn't make the site bad. And there are many valid situations where a threat model should be this strict, consider anti-government activists in any country.
They even claim that Tor Browser is a “spyware”.
It says "Not Spyware". https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/tor
Could you please provide and example or two? I wish to verify it, since I didn't notice any last time I checked the site.
Sure, let's look at the page for Firefox. They claim that there are "Automatic connections to some websites you've visited, including their trackers" with the new tab page, and that they "couldn't find a way to disable it." Whoever made this website couldn't take 2 seconds to go to about:preferences and see the option to display recently visited sites?
They also have a section titled "Firefox tracks users with Google Analytics", which they're very misleading about. Instead of explaining that GA is only present in about:addons and that it can easily be disabled, they're extremely vague about it and just blindly say it "sends analytics to Google", which would lead people to believe its much worse than it actually is (i.e. Chrome level). There's an important distinction between: "Google Analytics is present on 1 page in the browser and can be disabled" vs. vaguely stating "Firefox send analytics to Google" without full info or context. Hopefully I'm explaining that well enough.
Its also disingenuous to consider Firefox's Captive Portal as "phoning home" without, again, providing full info or context. It has a legitimate purpose, to allow users to connect to public networks, and can be disabled for those who wish to do so. It doesn't give any data to Mozilla, all it does is detect if a captive portal is present. I think this is another instance of the context being important to have, which the website just simply doesn't give.
Another instance, look at their page on Tor Browser, where they just flat out lie and accuse Tor Browser of "sending telemetry".
I could go through more, but these are a few I notice immediately that I take issue with.
They're very clear that this is their approach (bold text on the home page). Even if you disagree with their definition, that doesn't make the site bad.
Categorizing something as spyware solely based on the number of connections it makes is horribly irresponsible at best and dangerous at worst. Whoever made this couldn't even be bothered to find what data is actually being exchanged for most of these connections. There's a lot more to determine how privacy invasive something is then just sitting and counting the number of connections it makes, and treating them all as malicious and for "tracking".
And there are many valid situations where a threat model should be this strict, consider anti-government activists in any country.
That's why this website is so dangerous. Calling Tor Browser spyware and saying it sends telemetry could trick people who don't know better to use worse alternatives. This even moreso extends to casual users too, who could also be misled into using a less private browser as a result of this website's insane claims.
It says "Not Spyware". https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/tor
They have a separate article up calling it spyware as well, see here. Weird contradiction from them and just shows this site isn't very well designed or thought out.
Thanks for the detailed reply :)
I agree with all your points, it is misleading and potentially harmful to use a strong term like spyware to refer to all of those things, without further context. I guess I'm still used to a couple of tech circles where people would jokingly throw 'spyware' around to describe anything and everything, so I didn't realize how misleading it really is. Especially when it's applied to things like automatic updates, which only the most extreme security models consider more of a risk than a security feature.
Never used it, I saw some twitter comments from it's CEO and this guy isn't trustable.
I go with Firefox and sometimes epiphany. Last one tries to accomplish the level of the well known ones but is mostly years behind. That's sad, because I really like it.
making (presumably) thousands of dollars off their users
I agree with this post completely but for some reason you finishing with this makes me chuckle.
Oh no! Thousands! They might be able to pay rent for a month or two!
I'm just being cheeky, and while its true what they did was scummy, it also feels like a really.... smallish amount of money?
If we're literally just talking thousands, and not tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands.
But yeah, fuck Brave.
Firefox gang and Hardened Firefox gang here to stay.
Mozilla's got its own problems but that's a story for another day.
Well thousands could mean hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands. I kept it small because I can't really give a real number.
That's fair, but in that case you might just say "they likely profited handsomely off this venture" or something similar, because if you reach for dollar amounts like that, it can kind of undermine your point.
Well the issue I linked to said "making a fortune from its users who will likely lose their money." and I didn't want to just copy it word-for-word. I don't think it hurt my point that much, but it definitely could have been worded better.
Oh for sure, it didn't undermine your point excessively, just a little, I was mostly just being cheeky, just how it read to me. As I said, I agree with all the things you're saying. Cheers!
Even if they were amazing, it would still be worth using Firefox instead to suppport an alternative to chromium.
For a lot of people, way too many people, using Brave is a political statement that is paradoxically supposedly against political statements. It's a spite choice that justifies the cryptogrifting, spyware, and the horrid political views of its owner.
I can't really comment on this claim but I posted this under the assumption that most people in this community care about their privacy, not about politics.
most people in this community care about their privacy, not about politics
Whether you want to see them or not, privacy concerns can and do have political implications, especially when what is supposed to be a privacy tool is itself violating privacy because of the whims and wishes of the person that owns the proprietary software.
Just disable the ads, crypto and telemetry and suddenly none of those things are a problem anymore, just like Firefox.
